Landing your next SEO client with the right pitch

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on 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 she who is fabulous, incredible, amazing in all and every way, the Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

That's a very nice introduction, Mordy. Thank you very much. I'm not sure if I'm wonderful and fabulous in every way. I have been known to snore, which is not fabulous.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, really?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

My wife started snoring, it's not fun.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, it's not a new thing for me, but lots of people snore, it's fine. I know people are... Like everybody's got CPAP machines these days. I've not ventured down that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that a thing? That's just trending, CPAP?

Crystal Carter:

Lots of people have them now because apparently it has to do with apnea. You get better sleep if you're not snoring.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, apnea, yeah, yeah. My stepfather had one, sure.

Crystal Carter:

It's like a whole thing, it's a whole thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I didn't know it was the latest trend.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yeah. People, everybody's really prioritizing health and longevity these days.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everyone's got sleep apnea, huh?

Crystal Carter:

It's true. It's mean, it's happened. It's like gluten-free, they're the same thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh wow, wow. Okay, on that note, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by CPAP. No, just kidding. It's brought to you by Wix.

Crystal Carter:

No, it's that, it's that.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, which comes out each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also use Wix Studio to manage all that rev share you get from bringing on new clients onto Wix Studio, with our no hoops rev sharing models linked to learn more in the show note as today, our Wix Studio series continues with the dos and don'ts of pitching to new SEO clients, mistakes your agency should avoid when hunting for new SEO clients. What processes work to keep your agency's pitches within the strike zone and how to take your pitching from warm leads to straight heat. To help us get your pitch over the plate, don't bounce it, they'll boo you. Jellyfish's own Director of SEO, Eric Hoover will join us in just a jiffy.

Plus, like spider tack we'll see how Google's AI overview will change the nature of pitching SEO to potential clients. 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. So, join us as we get a better grip on the seams so your pitching to new clients won't throw you for a curveball. On this, the 96th episode of the SERP's Up podcast.

I threw a lot of deep cut baseball references in there, Crystal, a lot.

Crystal Carter:

Put me in coach, like pass me some peanuts and crackerjacks. Apparently this is the thing to do.

Mordy Oberstein:

So before I revel in it all, welcome to the podcast, Eric Hoover. How are you?

Eric Hoover:

Good. Yeah, I was expecting about as many baseball references as you gave, given that we're talking about pitching.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, see?

Eric Hoover:

So I was not disappointed at all, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you.

Crystal Carter:

And are you-

Mordy Oberstein:

The don't bounce, they'll boo you, is Derek Jeter to President Bush when he came to pitch the first pitch in the World series. He asked-

Eric Hoover:

Deep cuts.

Mordy Oberstein:

... Jeter, should I pitch from the mound? Should I pitch? No, no, no pitch from the mound. Don't pitch in front of the mound, but if you bounce it, they'll boo you.

Eric Hoover:

Apparently they tell celebrities now not to pitch from the mound, and if they do, it's like, okay, we warned you to not pitch from the mound because people don't realize how far and high up it is.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's far, it's really far. 50 Cent threw one, it looked like he was throwing it to, I don't know, Vermont. It was so far off the plate.

Eric Hoover:

But yeah, thanks for having me. This is about the, God, millionth time I'm talking to you Mordy, so I feel like... And the second or third time I'm talking to Crystal too, so I feel like this will be, this is very casual of a podcast experience for me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that's good, and we try to make you feel at home.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. We're glad that you were able to find the time to join us. So yeah, thank you. Are you a baseball fan, by the way?

Eric Hoover:

I'm a baseball fan in the sense that I grew up in New York during the era when the Yankees were not great. So now it's almost like cliche if I like the Yankees, but yeah, I grew up when we had Don Mattingly and that was it. Everyone hated George Steinbrenner.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, right, Roberto Kelly.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, yeah. Everyone was making fun of Steinbrenner on Seinfeld and all that, so, I grew up in the harder era. I don't follow baseball that much anymore. You can ask me anything about standup comedy or Star Trek, those are my two.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, we like Star Trek.

Crystal Carter:

Hey.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, exactly.

Crystal Carter:

We live long and prosper on this show.

Eric Hoover:

I do.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you very much. That's right.

Eric Hoover:

Absolutely, great

Mordy Oberstein:

Trek over Star Wars any day of the week.

Crystal Carter:

All day.

Eric Hoover:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Star Wars is for immature people who like the space thing, just pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, and Star Trek is the thinking person's sci-fi.

Eric Hoover:

It is, it absolutely is.

Mordy Oberstein:

We just lost half the audience, by the way.

Eric Hoover:

Discussion for another type of podcast, for one of the five Star Trek podcasts that I also listen to, aside from all the SEO ones I listen to.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, why are we talking about SEO? Let's just talk about Star Trek.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

And every time anyone says enterprise SEO, all I can think is, beam me. That's literally every time, I'm not going to lie.

Mordy Oberstein:

We've gotten heavy in the Star Trek represented this podcast many, many a times.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, yeah. Awesome. We probably will today as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice, nice. Okay, so number one... Yeah, there we go. I want to say the reason why we're talking about pitching to clients now, it kind of feels like there's a whole new ecosystem out there. It feels like maybe it's the new ecosystem of the web and we'll get into that. Maybe it's just there's a lot of uneasiness or harder economic times, but it just, the more I talk and I think Crystal, I think you'll probably agree with me, the more we talk to agency side folks, it seems like it's getting harder and harder for clients to pull the trigger. And we wanted to dive in and see what the heck is going on and how do we get that pitch across the plate without bouncing it? Sorry to go back to the baseball and not continuing with the Trek.

So first off, I guess, I always feel hesitant. I don't feel hesitant, that's not true. How do I put this nicely? I don't want you to feel uncomfortable that you have to reveal your secret sauce because I know some of your competitors might be listening to this podcast, Eric, but when you're pitching, what goes through your mind? What are you trying to do when you're pitching? Kind of walk us through it a little bit to get started, but again, I understand you have a secret sauce that you may not want to reveal, so I'm being respectful of that.

Eric Hoover:

I don't know if I have anything though that's out of the realm of what you're pitching, whether it's for SEO or anything else. But I think the biggest challenge is that with SEO is that a lot of people still don't fully understand what is involved and how many different sort of capabilities that it could really touch.

So one of the things that I try to do is first and foremost, it's like an education session. It's helping them understand at a higher level what organic search does, what organic visibility does for their brand and what it doesn't do. And when I talk about what it doesn't do, it's more around like, well, it can supplement those things, SEO supplements grow, SEO and page search supplement each other, things like that. But I really try to stick to the education to let them know what visibility needs, not just those traditional results. Like, what are... I'll literally show a screenshot of the SERP with different areas called out. This is all what organic can impact. Everything from featured snippets to a knowledge graph, to local map listings, the traditional results, images, all that sort of stuff. And also the types of information that we look at as well.

So we used to be, oh, here's our keyword research, this is our process. Now it's again, looking at the SERP. This is everything that we can play with and touch in the space of organic. So now it's taking a look at what people are saying about your brand or your product on Reddit. How can we speak to that? What reviews are people leaving on other sites or on Google? How can we speak to that? What can we talk to? What can't we talk to? And then again, align with some of our other capability partners.

I'm pretty lucky both at Jellyfish and several of the other agencies I've worked at over many years, we've had either that all those capabilities together. So for several of my clients, it's paid search and SEO and display and social are all under us, so it's easier to connect. But I've also been lucky, and I think a lot of agencies have learned to play together well, where I've had partner agencies that do the paid search and we do the SEO. We're still trying to come together with our strategy and make sure we're not... Because we're all in it for the brand, we don't want to be competing with each other. And that's how I bring it all together to clients.

And then of course at the end of the day, business goals. What are they looking for? How can organic impact that? That's really where you get their buy-in because you could talk theoretically about SEO, but when it comes down to, we do this plus this equals this business goal that you have, or getting us closer to this KPI. Throwing a lot of jargon out, but that's one of the best ways

Crystal Carter:

I think that's really coherent. To me, that's a great approach and it's one of the real benefits of working with an agency team is that you have people with lots of different disciplines who can, like you said, push what the brand needs, push what aligns with the business, because sometimes you look at it and it might be that, okay, SEO is not going to get us the big push just now. It will do in a few months, but just now that might not get us a big, big push, but PPC will right now or a social will right now, and we can build the SEO building blocks right now so that by in a couple of months time, then we can start to see the ROI and all of that sort of stuff further down. Or maybe it's that SEO is the play and maybe they already have PPC and maybe they need to work on that because they're actually losing money on PPC and maybe that's something they need to work on. And you as an agency can plug in which bits they need, as you said, to help with their overall visibility.

And you talked about that client education piece because sometimes, certainly when I've been working with clients, sometimes they think they know what they want, but when you actually look at what they're doing online when you carry out the audit, it might seem like, actually, guys, I know you want to do this, but this is the thing that you need. So, how do you educate people when they come to you in that space?

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, I mean when it comes to those types of kind of visibility audits, again, throwing jargon around, but it's really about the brand will have their KPI so they'll have their competitors, but we'll also take a look at what the organic space says. So with some of the brands I work on are e-retail brands, they are selling apparel and things like that. So they have their direct brand competitors but one of the bigger challenges, especially for a non-brand, but we're talking to them about currently, is all of the other bigger e-retailers. REI, Amazon, Dicks Sporting Goods, all those kind of fitness and apparel competitors that they have, and having that discussion with them too, because some of those e-retailers they might have partnerships with and they're getting money. They don't care if their apparel is sold on one side or the other, but maybe there's other ones that they want to rank higher for for certain products or certain keywords. That's the way we always frame it is, what are the more non-brand or longer tail things that you're okay with this REI or whatever ranking for. What ones do you feel we should bring into the site?

These are our recommendations and it's all, even with pitching, I feel like it could be very much like a working session. Obviously you need to have your big presentation ready and all of your data to back it up, but I think it's always good to have a discussion. You don't want to be ever talking at the client, you want them to be having a full... it's like always, I say it's like therapy. You want to go and you want to listen to their needs and maybe if they're disgruntled about something and then how you can help do that or ease that for them.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, you also want an hour long pitch to only take 45 minutes, so.

Eric Hoover:

Well, that too. Well, you need time for questions at the end, so. And if there's no questions, you should be nervous because there's no pitch I've ever been on that's been that good where there's been no questions after and then we've won it. It just doesn't happen.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you feel like those questions are getting harder and more, I don't know, aggressive because it just kind of feels like expectations might not be... Clients I've talked to, just like it seems like the clients are just not, the expectations are not aligned, I feel like with reality the same way as they used to be and I don't think they were before either, necessarily.

Eric Hoover:

I was going to say that. Yeah, I don't think when it comes to SEO, again, unless you have someone that already knows a bit about SEO or thinks they know a bit about SEO, which is sometimes worse, you've got a 45-minute pitch to educate them and if they don't get that within the 45 minutes, which I wouldn't expect anyone to understand this in 45 minutes, but that's fine. You still have to step back into some of the insights that you found for that pitch and speak to those how you would, again, can and can't impact. And again, with pitching, it's not, oh, we can't do that. It's, SEO plays this part in it but PPC does this, and then we would loop in our paid search partners and yada yada, all that, making sure it's as cohesive.

I mean and also honestly, if you have 45 minutes for just an SEO pitch, you're really lucky. Typically you have about five minutes in a presentation where you've also got paid media, at home, everyone else's because you're at an agency so you're pitching multiple capabilities at once. But also, I've done some in-house work as well. It's not really, in my experience, very different from pitching to higher ups in-house. Whether I'm doing SEO for an agency client or I'm in-house saying, speaking to the content team or the marketing VPs saying, "Hey, we need to do... Here are our competitors, but here are our organic competitors and here's the data, the backup. We're seeing what we should do." At the end of the day, to me in my experience, maybe this is only specific for SEO, but it all feels very much the same kind of process because a VP of marketing in-house probably knows about as much as a VP of marketing at an agency. It's all education all over the place. So that's sort of the fun and frustration of SEO where it's like it's always a learning experience, but it's also always a learning experience.

Crystal Carter:

I definitely think that certainly when you're trying to pitch to the devs that I need you to do this for me.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, yeah, just do that.

Crystal Carter:

That you need to, and I think that that's a great point because anybody who's not used to pitching for new clients or not used to pitching for new project resources or anything like that, that you're right, you can practice these things internally on some of the internal things that you might need. Being able to make a case very succinctly, being able to provide evidence and things like that.

I think one of the other things that stood out to me from what you were saying, you were saying you've got 45 minutes or even less sometimes. How do you build trust with the client in that time during the pitch? How do you help them to understand that you're somebody that they should trust and that they should listen to?

Eric Hoover:

I think as much as you can, it's all about proof. So it's about data, and if you can swing it, case studies. One of the things that's great about working at an agency is that you have no shortage typically of case studies to show, hey, I don't just say this, my team isn't just saying this. This is actually data that shows this is where you are in your organic space, this is where you should be, this is what you should be talking about based on our research. And also, here's a client X that we worked on last year for, here's the brand diagnostic blanked out brand name case study to show that we've actually done similar work and this is the proof and this is how long it took and all that sort of stuff. So any way you can show that to a potential client is only going to help. It's that evidence in the case, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That might actually be one of the subtle difference between pitching in-house or pitching to an external client. Whereas the internal and they have a lot of that context that you're already aware of, where you don't have to start building a whole narrative and a whole story. They kind of know where the situation is, where the problems fundamentally are, and you don't need to prove like, hey, this is... I'm thinking just the cases internally, even at Wix. You don't always have to prove to the same extent like, here's the problem that we think we have. Generally speaking, the VP of marketing, they kind of know the problems, you just need to make your case that here's my solution, that's why it makes sense for us. With an external client, you really are, it's cold. You're coming in saying we think this is a problem. You might know you want to do X, Y, and Z, want to get more organic traffic, want more organic visibility, but here are your problems and here's the solutions, and you really have to sell the problem sometimes.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, yeah, because they'll be in their own places, just like I said before about direct competitors versus organic competitors. They might not even know they're competing in the organic space for some of these other websites. So it's all about, I'll say it a million times, Mordy's heard me, I said it a million times, it's all about education. It's all about making sure that they have a good grasp within that 45 minutes or less of how we can really benefit them.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, which is super important because if you don't set those expectations right with the education in the beginning, you're just going to hurt yourself later, which you spoke about an earlier episode of this podcast.

Crystal Carter:

One of the other things that is worth thinking about for folks who are within the agency ecosystem looking after clients is that we talk about pitching new clients, and I know that's the core of this idea, but I think sometimes you're pitching to existing clients about new offerings. How is that different from pitching to a completely new client?

Eric Hoover:

I mean, well, for one, we have more data to back up our recommendation, which is always nice. Actual first party, whatever, we have their actual GA4 data and their actual GSE data and so on and so forth, so that's always nice. So it makes the selling in a little easier, but still, that goes back to what I was saying about whether you're pitching to another capability in-house. It's very similar where, okay, they've got that trust, but what other ways can we open their eyes to what new opportunities can bring? My team is having a lot of discussion currently about building out different types of content that not just speaks to, oh, we've got our keyword research and so on and so forth, but there's this whole new world of AI, not just AI overview, I mean just in general, people talking to GPT all the time. My spouse is an architect and she uses GPT all day to help craft quick email replies and project plans and things like that.

But everyone is using AI now, so now we're trying to talk to our clients about how we should be wording certain things and structuring content to rank better within these LLMs and within these AI results. So this is a whole new world where we have these clients that we've had for years and we've done not the same thing, but we've had our strategies laid out over time, and they're pretty used to it now. It's like, okay, but we're seeing a lot of data where we need to, on your product pages, maybe start talking about this, and then we have to bring in a new team. The product team runs those pages so now we have to convince the product team that this is where people are going based on, here's the data showing.

I saw something from Pew research. Almost 30% of Americans interact with AI multiple times a day. It's a large chunk of the population. So how do we get onto there from what we've seen? Here's the data that shows how people are interacting, what they're asking LLMs, things like that. This is the way we have to start talking about stuff.

But also, I always back it up too by saying in the meantime, talking more naturally in your content is going to help your general organic presence overall, let alone this AI space, which is still this wild west area of who knows what's going to happen, aside from it taking all of our jobs. Which I'm fine with, for the record. I would love it if AI took my job, I need some time off. Sorry, Jellyfish, Jellyfish has a great PTO policy, let me say that, but AI can have my job for a bit.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I want to talk more. We're going to talk more about this in our next segment, but just to jump into the system for a second, because you mentioned AI. Okay, I can't resist now the golden topic.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, you can't not mention it now, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, now that you've broken the seal, that's it, it's all coming out. Are clients now changing what they're looking for, what they're expecting or the nature of the conversations that they're having with you because of the great AI in the sky kind of thing?

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, they're all interested in it. And although clients have been interested in it for a while now, even when SGE, as we used to call, the good old days when we called the AI overview SGE, they've been asking about it for a year or so, ever since SGE really came out about what the impact would be. So yeah, it's being brought up a lot. I think it's, we've hit this sort of down to this quiet moment where at least with my clients, because things like AI overview have pulled back so much, no one's really talking about it right now. I'm trying to keep the conversation going because I know one day it's going to come back and it's going to be awful, and we've got AI organized pages coming out, which is going to be really crazy.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think that's interesting, by the way, but okay. Yeah, go ahead, sorry.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, yeah, but it is something that we're trying to keep top of mind because we don't want, oh, the AI overview, it was like two weeks and now it's not really showing up for anything anymore. Don't got to worry about it. No, we still need to worry about it. But yeah, that's my, it's not about the now with that, it's about... I've said this to people, I've said this on LinkedIn too. The AI overview doesn't concern me. Unless you run a healthcare website, it's pretty much like they've pulled back so much on so many different types of results. Granted now they're throwing three featured snippet blocks at the top, but that's a different discussion.

What I'm concerned about for a lot of the clients I work on and a lot of brands in general, is that AI organized SERP that they're touting and apparently testing that's going to supposedly come out later this year, where it reorganizes the entire first page as a personalized experience for you as a searcher, and for organic I think that might be nice, or it might be a nightmare, but I think it's going to change things a lot, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Either is great for you because it's honed in on what you're doing. I feel it's going to be much more sub-topical than what's out there right now, which is what they tested. They had covered on it, it's new. They had a test of, it was a product search, they showed all the buying guides together and then they showed all the product reviews together, then they show all the pages together. I think that's super interesting. I think you're totally right, it's a ton of opportunity or a ton of absolute disaster depending upon what you're doing. Yeah. All right, sorry, I just had to get into that for a second.

Eric Hoover:

No, no worries. I'll talk about AI till AI takes over.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's all I read. I only read AI content, I only talk about AI, I only eat AI food. Yeah, that's all I do is AI.

Eric Hoover:

They say AI content doesn't rank but let me tell you, I've seen some AI content out there that's ranking and it should not be. I think we all have at this point, pizza with glue in it being the best example.

Crystal Carter:

There's LinkedIn articles, those LinkedIn advice articles, that advice for-

Mordy Oberstein:

Those are such crap, by the way. Well, I reply back once a week on one of them just to keep my little badge on LinkedIn, but also because it gives me ideas of what to write about. You know what's a stupid idea? This is a stupid idea, and I get the stupid ideas from the AI articles on LinkedIn.

What were we talking about again, pitching clients, right?

Eric Hoover:

Pitching the clients. We got a little off course there, but no, I mean, to bring it back. Yes, clients are talking about AI, and it's funny too, to educate them again, education, but they've been using AI on so many things already. So many of the tools that we as SEOs and content marketers in the background at least have been powered in some part by AI. I mean, what is PMAX? PMAX is like papered AI.

Crystal Carter:

AI.

Eric Hoover:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, well, and Meta's ads have been powered by AI for years. You'd launch an ad and then you'd sit there while it spent your money and it would say, machine learning is learning. And I'd be like, are you done yet? Because you just spent a bunch of my budget. And so yeah, and also a Google Translate and Google Lens and all of that stuff, it's been AI powered.

Eric Hoover:

Oh yeah, we've been with AI for years, it just wasn't labeled that because it wasn't a thing, and now it's the current, the brand.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yeah, everything is AI.

Eric Hoover:

... for lack of a better term, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

LLMs, machine learning, it's all AI. Just ignore the definition of AI altogether.

Crystal Carter:

So I think here's another question for you, in terms of pitching before we let you go. When you're thinking about pitching, a lot of times you're pitching to solve a problem, right? The client comes to you, they've got low visibility, they want to increase their visibility, they have low sales, they want to increase their sales, they've got low conversions, they want to increase their conversions, etc, etc. How often are you also trying to get them to prospect on future offerings? How often are you also saying, hey, have you considered AI, like this is really important, or something? And how important is that to a pitch?

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, I think it's highly important. We will always, we meaning the royal way of my team and I, always go in with not just the ask, but something extra. And I think that's how you end up winning a lot of pitches. It's not just showing what you can do in the current state, but what the other bigger possibilities are. So we're always going into pitching AI being the big thing right now, talking about that.

For years we've been talking about not just at Jellyfish, but at some of my other agencies, like SEO, video SEO, SEO for YouTube. TikTok as a search engine has been a big topic. There's a couple of great agencies out there that I think really do it well. I won't throw any names out there because I'm on a Wix sponsored one, I don't know if I can say other agencies that aren't Jellyfish, but there's some out there that do really good social and TikTok search engine stuff that I think is really smart and forward-thinking. So yeah, we try to always bring that thought process in as well, because that we want, aside from solving the brand's problem in a pitch and proving that you can at least attempt to solve the problem, if not hopefully solve it, but it's showing that you are forward-thinking. You're not just trying to solve an issue for them for the next couple of months. You want to solve an issue for them for the next year plus because you want them to renew and you want them to go away with something. At the end of this you want them to say, oh, I remember this little thing, this little factoid, this little interesting idea that they had, so that, keep it top of mind.

Crystal Carter:

And show them that you're full of ideas and that the ideas will keep coming and that sort of thing.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

Super valuable.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, we talked about on another episode, we've done so many episodes already. This is like 96, right? I don't know where I'm at, but we talked about when you pitch having multiple phases in your pitch, like, hey, phase one's going to be this, then we're going to do that, and everyone can do that. Kind of showing like, hey, I'm not just thinking about what's happening for you right now, but I got you through the whole end of this whole process, kind of thing.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, yeah. We're not just looking at this quarter, here is the next three quarters after that. Yeah, exactly. Road maps and case studies, road maps and case studies. Sorry, Mordy, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, go ahead, please cut me off. I'm here. That's what I'm here to have done to me. Where can people find you? TikTok?

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, TikTok. Yeah, I'm all over TikTok. You could find me Erichooverdigital.com, it's a very low-maintenance website where you can see some of my work, and Eric Hoover on LinkedIn. There's a few Eric Hoovers on there, but I'm the one with facial hair and glasses if that narrows it down at all.

Crystal Carter:

Well, we hope you boldly go into the next pitch.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice, well done.

Crystal Carter:

And it was a pleasure to have you along today.

Eric Hoover:

Yeah, thanks for having me. Nice talking to you guys as always.

Mordy Oberstein:

Catch you soon.

AI has changed everything. Am I right? Well, not everything. I mean, not a lot. I mean, well, again, I'm not going to say anything salty here, but. But we've talked about how the artist formerly known as SGE has changed the SERP, but has it changed or will it change how we pitch to new prospective SEO clients? New prospective is redundant, because if they're prospective then they're new. But anyway, right? Yeah, that's redundant. Anyway, join us as we now peer into the future with Crystal's Ball.

Crystal Carter:

So the thing is, that I see in the future with SGE is that, and with LLMs, I'm going to throw it wider to LLMs as part of a daily search use, is that I think it's going to change the questions that users ask or that clients ask. So it's already changed the questions that users ask. Google at Google I/O shared that the keywords, or sorry, the words that people are entering into search queries have increased to, I think about 15 words per query or something is what they said, and that's significant.

Similarly, people are starting to ask me, I'm starting to see this and I think that this is only going to become more prominent going forward. People are starting to ask, how do I rank in ChatGPT? How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT and LLMs in Perplexity and Google's Gemini?

Mordy Oberstein:

AI.

Crystal Carter:

And AI Overviews, and also in Bing's Copilot, how can I get myself to show up there? I spoke to someone the other day and they were saying, what if they're not showing in ChatGPT? What can they do? And I think it's also going to change the name of the game.

So speaking at MozCon, or, not when I was speaking at MozCon, but when I was listening to other speakers at MozCon, one of the common threads that was showing up was that people need to be thinking about users and user engagement and not necessarily about clicks, because clicks might be changing. Similarly, I was looking, I checked yesterday, so ChatGPT in the latest reiteration, I asked ChatGPT, I said, can you tell me about yourself? And I said, yes, I can tell you about myself, I'm an LLM and la, la, la, la, la... And I thought, great.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, it's a narcissist just like the rest of us.

Crystal Carter:

It's like, great, and what it was saying, it was like I'm now updating to, I now have data up to 2023, and previously I think it was going up to 2022. So I now have data up to 2023, and I have... or, I think it might've even been up to 2020. And so now it's says I have data up to 2023 and I have this and that and that, etc. And one of the things with that is that if in the future people are asking, how can I rank on ChatGPT? Instead of waiting for algorithm updates, you'll have to wait for GPT updates, for instance.

So I asked ChatGPT, who is Crystal Carter in the first iteration of ChatGPT or the first big drop of ChatGPT? Obviously they had more iterations before that, but the first mainstream, and it was like that Mariah Carey meme, I don't know her. I was like, okay, all right, cool. My little ego can, okay, I'll just put that in a little... Okay, fine. And then I asked it again after it said it had an update, I said, who is Crystal Carter? And they said, Crystal Carter is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, cool. So then that means that you have to wait for that update. You have to wait for ChatGPT to update instead of waiting for an algorithm to update necessarily. So that's interesting, and I think that people will be checking that.

The other thing is that in terms of how clients are going to think about this, is how traffic's going to be effected, how traffic tracking, etc is going to be effective because the free version of ChatGPT is, which is what most people have access to and most people are using, they have links in it now, but if you click on the links, they're direct. I checked this yesterday. I checked it a bunch of times. I checked it on Wix Analytics and they said, direct, I checked in on GA4 and they said direct. And I'm like, this will not do. So I think that as things go forward and we have more actual data from these tools, then I think that that will change the name of the game for how people are responding to it, and it will change what people expect from SEOs.

One of the things I've been saying for years is that omnichannel is extremely important for SEO. I've been quoted a couple of times when I said that we should be optimizing for user discovery, not for search engines, but for user discovery. And as an SEO, this has been my practice the whole time. Basically wherever the users are, that's where we need to be. We need to be visible where they are. We need to know where they are. We need to be visible where they are, to as much as you can. And obviously, we don't all have a million hours in the day, we can't be on every single platform all of the time, it's exhausting. But to some extent, you need to have some presence if your users are there, and that's where you need to invest your time. And I think that people will be expecting in SEO pitches, people will be expecting people to be thinking about that, not just about clicks, not just about organic visibility, not just about one particular channel, but I think they're going to be expecting for SEOs to be optimizing for search generally. Not Google SEO, for people searching wherever in the future.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, yeah, I think if the client is a little bit clued and they're asking something like, how do I get into the ChatGPT, they're going to realize that there's no shortcut to doing this. It's really a momentum issue. You have to be a recognizable entity. You have to have some kind of online cadence, online, digital light, whatever you want to call it. You have to be something and you have to be out there. And I think if the client does realize this, and I think in the beginning they won't. I think there's going to be a lot of people at clients asking for shortcuts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do I hack the system? But I think eventually the narrative will emerge. You have to have an online presence, a significant online presence, and I think that SEOs are going to have to realize that.

As you're saying, if the client comes in and they start asking you about these kinds of things and you give a very siloed kind of SEO answer, it's not going to sound right. We talked about this on our previous podcast about how clients, or I forgot, was it SEOs or clients? For whatever it was, and there's so many episodes we've done, almost 100, where we said, you're going to have to branch out, otherwise you're going to... Oh, that's what it was, in internal organizations. SEOs and internal organizations, if you don't consider wider marketing channels or wider marketing brand tactics, you're going to lose the room.

So now it's the same thing with clients. You're going to lose that room a little bit, and that's why you have SEOs starting to talk about brand marketing and building up brands and how SEOs need to build up brands. I think SEOs run the risk of sounding extremely cliched and or uninformed when they talk about this because brand has been something SEOs have been pooping on, for a lack of a better expression for the last 20 years. Oh, branded keywords, those are so stupid, blah, blah, blah. We have a whole episode about that where it literally cost brands millions of dollars when you poo-poo on branded keywords. So I think it does mean if you want to meet client expectations, you do have to have a deeper knowledge of those other marketing areas, whether it be distribution, whether it be brand itself.

I did a whole those Twitter carousel things about what SEOs should know about brand marketing. For example. Resets are way harder. Resets in SEO are hard. Okay? Yes, if you get hit by an algorithm update, you have to go back and re-evaluate quality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Okay, doing a reset to hit an algorithm is hard. Doing a reset when the consumer has a negative association to you now, is virtually impossible. So you have to get it right the first time.

Crystal Carter:

But also brand pivots take time. I mean, I don't think, one of the things... I don't think we're tooting our own horn if we don't say it, Wix, we have been, and people have talked to us about this, we have been a part of making sure people have a better, more accurate, more clear understanding of SEO on Wix, for instance. And that did not happen overnight. These things are super, super complex and they take a lot of investment and they take a lot of proof and you need to put in the work.

Probably most recent example of this that's happening at the moment or whatever is Beyonce being like, "I do country music, by the way, and I like country music, by the way." And she has the receipts. When she first posted it, people were like, oh my God, this is ridiculous, because her brand is very R&B, it's a little bit hip-hop, that sort of stuff. But actually, if you go back through her catalog, she was at the rodeo in Texas in 2004 or something, riding a horse unaided with one hand, in a dress. That's not easy, and she did a song with the Dixie Chicks who are also country music. But anyway, so she has the receipts, and then on the album she also has Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, other people who are involved with that. And so she also has, she has things that help to help establish that actually she does know what she's talking about. She is invested in this, this is something that she knows how to do. And similarly with a brand, you can't just show up, and if she just showed up in a cowboy hat, people would be like, what are you talking about? That's not enough.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like a separate rant of why I think all of this conversation the SEOs are having about brand and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Y'all, you're killing me here.

But leaving that aside for a moment, I think one of the things that it means for clients is it's a reset of expectations, okay so, and it's problematic because the client at this stage of the evolution or this stage of the ecosystem might be coming in like, get me in there fast. How do I do this fast? And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's take a step back and think, what does it actually mean to do this and is that actually fast? I don't think so. Or, with SGE or AI overviews, it might mean saying you are looking to cast too wide of a net. The way that you're going to get pulled in to the AI overviews is as one of these sub links, there's a subtopic in the AI overview.

Let's say, I always go to this example. I don't know why, I know why, but whatever. How do I deal with kidney stones? And they have the AI overview and now it no longer says drink urine. It has a whole bunch of other things in there. One of them is like diet, and there's a whole subcategory about how to revitalize your diet to avoid kidney stones. You might be the link for that subtopic. So it now might mean that you need to refine your entire approach to content to being a little bit more focused, which means you need to change the way you're thinking as a client, which means the SEO's got to sell you on that, and both of those things are hard

Crystal Carter:

And they take time and I think that people need to, SEOs and their pitches need to be able to set those expectations and need to be able to say, we are not going to get you... in the six months or three months or whatever, we're going to get you green shoots, but you are going to be able to see progress. But in terms of the output, in terms of the ROI, the ROI might take a little longer, it'll be worth it, but it might take a little bit longer. We need to be able to show the proof of that.

So for instance, when I enter in, I'm on Perplexity and I enter like, who is Crystal Carter or whatever. The links that come back, they've got five different links there. It's not just one page. They reference my website twice, they also reference my Wix profile. They also reference my LinkedIn, they also reference an interview that I did with something. That takes time, that's time built up over all of those things. That's not a one-shot deal. And I'm using myself because it's easy for me to do an example of myself, but there are tons of other examples of that as well. And if I go across, if I'm looking on Bing, for instance, if I do the same query, they're also looking at a few different ones there as well. So there's three different links that they're pulling out there as well. And this is something that takes time to build up.

And the way that these AI tools are working, they're going to have to understand not only their web presence, but also the entities that are related to them. And that can be a little bit more complex than keywords, right? It's more complex than keywords. Thinking about the way that you were positioned on the knowledge graph, the way that you were associated with that sort of stuff, that's more complex than keywords. And so we need to be able to educate clients, and I think we're going to have to think about that, about what tools we have to educate clients on the more complex, less instantaneous result, particularly for visibility building, which I think might be way more... The way we're thinking about it is more about visibility and less about search engine optimization because-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, it's visibility and presence and all that good stuff.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and we've talked about this, this is a hot topic, which I'm just going to drop it here and then we're going to pivot.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is SEO dead or is SEO as we've known it, dead? You know who's not dead? Barry's not dead. So, you know how I know? Because he wrote like 500 articles this morning. So since Barry is not dead, thank God, we love Barry and may he live to be 120, as my grandmother would say, here's this week's Snappy News.

Snappy news, Snappy News, Snappy News. Move over Barry Schwartz, here comes Danny Goodwin with two articles this week. First up from Danny on Search Engine Land, OpenAI is going to build a search product. The Atlantic actually confirmed that it granted permission for its content to be used as part of OpenAI's search product. It's not well-defined what exactly the search product is, yada, yada, yada, but it does seem like OpenAI is going to build some sort of competitor to Google, perhaps. I don't know. Personally, if they are, I see this thing being way out from being actually functionable to where people will say, "I'm not going to Google, I'm going to go to ChatGPT." The things that you're going to need for this to happen are incredible. I think we're a good five, maybe 10 years out from something like this saying, hey, wow, OpenAI is a real competitor to Google. That's my personal opinion. That is my personal opinion, but it happens to be the truth.

Also from Danny Goodwin on Search Engine Land, and also about AI, of course. Danny writes, "Google AI overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low." That number is from BrightEdge. Different tool sets like seoClarity and Semrush, whatever, they showed different numbers. The actual percentage I think is highly skeptical, like this is the exact number, 7%, that's the number, because each tool set does show a different number. The trend is what's important, and all of the Bright Edge trends have aligned to other tools, so I'm assuming this one does as well. So it seems that AI overviews are being used even less.

Google has been live since May already, I'm recording this in the middle of July. I think there's been plenty of time to work out the kinks and let's get going with this thing. I just think the product's a dud. I have nothing more to say. I just think it's a dud. I do have more to say. Since when do I have less to say? I don't think from a... think about it from a user point of view. Does the AI overview really give you something different in the current format? I'm not saying that you couldn't have an AI overview that would do this. I think in the current format, it's basically a glorified featured snippet. We already had this thing, I don't need this thing. It's nothing new, it's nothing novel. It doesn't exactly give me what I want anyway, so why would I use the thing and why would Google roll it out? Other than, hey, we have to do the whole AI overview, we said we're going to do it, we're going to do it, here it is.

But they're rolling it back because it's really not differentiated from a product point of view. It doesn't differentiate from a brand point of view, really. I don't think there's anything that's uniquely unique about the AI overview to justify investing millions upon millions of dollars into this thing. If this were anybody else other than Google, you'd be like, yeah, okay, that's nice, but it's not really differentiated enough yet. I do see the possibility of, I talked about it many, many times, including on It's New, our Daily SEO news series with Barry Schwartz, why I do think that it's possible that it can be, but it currently is not. Dud. Moving on.

From Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table. New, it's new. Google's search console lets you add your shipping and return information. So if you are selling products online, but maybe you're not a Merchant Center savant or a Merchant Center maven that's more alliteration for you, a merchant center maven, you can now upload your shipping and return policies directly in Google Search Console. That's great. For example, again, if you're not super into using Merchant Center but you are familiar with Search Console, I guess that makes it a little bit easier, and it democratizes adding in your shipping and return information to or giving it to Google. There is a hierarchy of what Google will listen to, in terms of the return policy information that you add in.

So for example, there are many ways to do it. Google said that it goes in this order according to Barry, product level feed submitted in Merchant Center, return setting in the content API for shopping, settings in Merchant Center or Search Console, organizational level markup, product level merchant listing markups. so markup, essentially in a markup being the lower on the hierarchy of what Google's going to be looking at to determine accurate return policy information. And with that, that is this week's Snappy News.

Boy, the SEO news this week was really alive and kicking, wasn't it Crystal?

Crystal Carter:

It was full of joie de vivre.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, life, drink life. That's what Barry always says to me, drink life. It's good advice. Thanks for that advice, Barry, and thanks for all the news.

Anyway, awkwardly pivoting with from all of that other awkwardly pivoting. Here's this week's follow the week. Joshua George over at _joshuaseo on Twitter, X. Sorry, I can't get that right, and Joshua George on LinkedIn. He's fabulous. Contributor to the Wix SEO Hub on multiple, multiple occasions. Former guests of this podcast himself.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, and one of the reasons why we put him forward as a follow of the week is that he has a fantastic article about pitching to clients. Sorry, he has a fantastic resource on the Wix SEO Hub about pitching to clients, and it's something that he's curated over a good few years and that he has mastered and honed and he's sharing it with you, and it's a great resource, and it's something that you can take and you can adopt, and you can use it to pitch to clients and to talk to them about how they should, why they should get on board.

The other thing that Joshua's really, really great at is showing the value of SEO and showing case studies. He shares case studies on his LinkedIn all the time of, we did this, we got this result. The client came to us with this problem, and we solved it like that. And I think that that is something that if you're able to do that consistently across your digital output, then that can make it really easy when you're pitching to clients. So it can make it so that by the time they come to you, they say, I saw this case study and I want that. I have the same problem, and I would like you to help me with that. I think it's something that Glenn Gabe's really good at as well. Glenn is constantly saying, I had this client and then we did this, or I had this client that's struggling with that and I'm helping them with this. And I think that that's really, really useful.

So I think that not only should you be thinking about how to pitch on the day, but how to sow the seeds, how to warm them up before they even get to you. Because anybody who's coming to you and you're doing a pitch for them, they're going to Google you, they're going to go to your LinkedIn, they're going to see what you're about before you walk in the door. And so if you've already got stuff on there that's going to get the conversation started, that's going to show them what you're about before you get there, that's going to help you land the pitch.

Mordy Oberstein:

Land the pitch. In baseball, we want to hit the pitch, but in SEO you want to land the pitch.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. I have to full circle. I have to always come back with pitching and baseball. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into stories of success and failure from a digital marketing agency owner. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO.