Being indispensable to your SEO clients

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm already overseeing the head of SEO brand at Wix. And I'm joined by the fabulously amazing, the incredible, the always differentiated and always essential head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

I try to keep it... You can stand up from the crowd. There was years ago that I used to worry when I was a kid, when I was like high school or whatever. "Oh, people are staring at me." And I was like, you know what? What's it Bonnie Raitt says, "Let's give them something to talk about." It was like, yeah, I'm going to wear a stupid ridiculous shirt or ridiculous whatever. Because if you're looking, feast your eyes. I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Something like that makes you sound like a total idiot. It took me a long time to realize that was Bonnie Raitt, even though I love 80s music.

Crystal Carter:

Bonnie Raitt singing about something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I didn't realize that was her other stuff-

Crystal Carter:

No, that's 90s.

Mordy Oberstein:

... was other stuff. No, it's a 90s, right. It's a 90s song.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yeah, yeah. Bonnie Raitt's great. But it's 90s. It's 90s, because it was on a Julia Roberts movie.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pretty Woman, no? No.

Crystal Carter:

No. It wasn't Pretty Women.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

It was one of her other rom-coms. I'm sure. I'm going to have to Google it now. Please, talk amongst yourselves.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Julia Roberts movies. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also show your clients how much they really need you with inbuilt reporting found in Wix Studio. And in addition to all of the analytics available to you in Wix Analytics. As today, we continue our Wix Studio series as we talk how SEOs and marketers can show how indispensable they are to their clients. Why in today's environment, you need to show your value across the board, not just in one marketing discipline. Do you hear that SEO folks? Proving your value as an SEO or marketing agency versus a consultancy, is there a difference? And yes, we'll get into AI and how to deal with clients who feel they don't need you because they have an LLM that tells them to drink urine to prevent kidney stones.

Ignite Visibility's, own VP of SEO, Jennifer Cornwell will be here in just a few minutes as she helps us show you why you're indispensable to your clients, why you are your client's very own air supply, and why they be so lost without you. Plus, we take a hard look at how the Google leaks are starting to broaden SEO. Again, you hear that SEO, folks? Plus we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So stick with us as we show you how to become like a band-Aid, too painful for your clients to pull off on this, the 98th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. By the way, not an actual strategy you should use. Bad strategy. Don't be too painful. I was just taking poetic license. Yes, I am a poet. You wouldn't know a first glance, but I am quite the poet. I'm a wordsmith.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. One of my favorite Mordy Oberstein things is when you drop a $5 word. Every now and then, Mordy's like, "Oh, I have the vocabulary just in case you're wondering."

Mordy Oberstein:

For my birthday one year... Again, I terrible with time. You put out tweets of things I've said I didn't realize I said. And one of them was, "If talk is cheap, I'm fine to talk a lot," or something like that.

Crystal Carter:

Something like that. This is true. This is true. This is true. They weren't hard to find them, you got a lot of tweets. You are prolific, as it were. By the way, just for people who were wondering or who were in suspense. This Something to Talk About song was from a Julia Roberts movie called Something to Talk About.

Mordy Oberstein:

We just completely... Just ignorance built upon ignorance, built upon ignorance.

Crystal Carter:

That's such an SEO thing to do though.

Mordy Oberstein:

Near me. Something to talk about near me.

Crystal Carter:

Right. What's the song? It's Something to Talk About. What's the movie? Something to Talk About. What are we going to talk about?

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we bring our guest on, I will tell you the truth, as opposed to when I lie to you. Which is such a weird idiom, by the way. Like, "Oh, tell you the truth." Because before I was lying.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, what was going on before? I thought we were in a circle of trust.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Honestly, like before you weren't being? Anyway, but it's an idiom. Anywho. There are times where I, as a marketer and as someone who's self-deprecating, feel like, come on, what do I know about marketing and SEO? It's like, what I'm saying is so obvious. Do I actually provide any unique value? But I do then meet folks who maybe don't have a marketing background that are maybe just marketing enthusiasts who are talking to me about marketing, or maybe they're just new to market... They are marketers or SEOs, and they're just new to the industry and they're still learning.

And I do then realize that I do have actual experience and a unique outlook on marketing, and a unique outlook on SEO that I've built up through the years. That no, I of course didn't have when I first started, or was even in SEO marketing altogether, but that I have built up over the many years that I have been in marketing. And that does actually provide something that's unique and invaluable to the people that I work with. I think. I hope. Right? And with that, please welcome to the show Ignite Visibility's VP of SEO, Jennifer Cornwell. How are you?

Jen Cornwell:

Hi. I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're indispensable to this podcast now.

Jen Cornwell:

Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. That's a big title. Big title for a one-time guest.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, that means you can't leave. It's like Hotel California. Yeah, you're stuck. That's it.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it's really interesting you said seasoned. Because I think that one of the things that makes people indispensable is the special sauce that you bring as an SEO, really. I think that's something, Would you say that you and your team have cultivated a little bit of a special sauce that you bring to new clients or new projects?

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah. I think that the reason clients really like working with us a lot of the time is we are... A lot of businesses, I think they're going to say, "We're the startup mentality." But I do actually feel like we work that way, and we work that way with our clients because we worked that way for such a long time. We just hit our 11-year anniversary in this last year. I've been there for six, and the team has grown. I was like, 65 people when we got hired, and now we're 220 or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, my goodness. Wow.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah, grown a lot as a company. But I think even though we've done that, it's still coming to the table for our clients, for these relationships that we've built ultimately. We talk about the seasoning, that's important. But there's also this, your clients have gotten in this rhythm of talking to you all the time, and you are their marketing person now. And the reasons why, as an SEO, yes, you need to talk about SEO, but there's all this opportunity to talk about these other things they aren't thinking about.

We try to keep our team really well-rounded and well-versed in a lot of what's going on. They're not paid media experts, but have enough of an understanding to be able to talk to it. And that kind of thing, it's part of it, the indispensableness.

Mordy Oberstein:

When we're deciding what should we discuss for the podcast, and we were saying how there's just so much more going on in marketing in general, there's just not one facet of marketing. And to be indispensable in today's environment means being a little bit more, I don't know, broad about what you cover and how you cover. Or what you're thinking about or what you're discussing with clients. How has that factored into what you feel makes y'all indispensable to your clients?

Jen Cornwell:

Part of it is making a better SEO, I think understanding all their marketing channels, because so much of what we do funnels down to us. Even not digital space, stuff we don't do as an agency. I've had a client where we saw an impression decrease for their brand and they're like, "Oh yeah, we stopped running our commercial." And so knowing that and being able to go into conversations with clients when they see something similar and be able to at least ask those questions, I think what's really important. But yeah, I think that's really where it comes from. It's baking it into the experience of the special sauce of situational things we've been in to open up those doors to ask the right questions at the right time.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's a great example. I've had clients where they've run print advertising or they've run television advertising. And if you're talking to them regularly, then you can bring that all together with the SEO, you can really unlock the real value of some of that. And if you are in an agency situation, all the better. Because you'll have people, you can be like, right, if you're running a television ad on, I don't know, ESPN or something. We can bring in our social team to target people who follow ESPN, we can link everything together. And even if it's on a project basis, even if it's just, you're doing this campaign on ESPN this week, and we'll bring in somebody to help with that, with the social shares or whatever this week or whatever, that sort of thing. But I think that having those conversations, keeping those conversations and really reading the data. Like you were saying, how we saw the impressions, what's going on? Really, really valuable.

Jen Cornwell:

The client piece that you mentioned is really important, because we talk about that a lot with our clients. I have prospects who come to me and they're like, "What makes a good client?" And I'm like, "When you talk to us." We want you to actually see this as a partnership where we want to help you. And yeah, sometimes they don't even tell you about new pages they add. Or, "Oh yeah, we did change the entire URL structure of the site segment." And you find out in your reporting that everything is way different than the last time you looked at it. But yeah, the clients who tell us about the little stuff, the small things going on, that's where we can actually come in and ask the right questions and be helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you notice a change with your clients? We're going to talk later in the podcast about how SEO might be broadening, and the Google leaks and how now there's a whole idea of branding factoring into SEO, and yada, yada, yada. But do you find, I don't know, over the years that the clients themselves have changed? Are they less focused just an SEO or just PPC? Are they starting to broaden a bit?

Jen Cornwell:

A little bit, I think. We still get a handful of clients who read one SEO blog. They come in and they say, "I do SEO." And they did SEO in 2012. And you're like, "Okay, so you kind of know what it is, but also it's been 10 years." That happens a lot still. But we do have clients who are, they understand that SEO... Their understanding of it is keyword stuffing. They're like, "Oh, yeah, well, I don't want my content to look all weird. I want my content to read weird." And so having to hurdle that. But even that's new, because that's like they understand that there's keywords that need to be implemented in a certain way. And they know it needs to happen for SEO, but they just want to figure out what the middle ground is for user experience.

I think that we're having more of those conversations and less of, "How many keywords are on this page, and why aren't there more of them?" conversations. I guess a little bit. There's also some... It depends. It really just depends on the most common SEO answer of all.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, the graph. It depends. It depends in orange.

Jen Cornwell:

Yes. Yeah. No, it depends on the marketer that's coming in and what their background is. But it's gotten better. I think the understanding of SEO has gotten better.

Crystal Carter:

And I think a lot of people are starting to say that... And I don't know if you're seeing this trend, is that they're starting to see clients come to them less for implementation support and more for strategic support. Are you seeing that trend as well?

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah. Yeah. Especially more recently, I think it's a little bit of economic and bandwidth availability resources within their own team in the conversations that we're having. But definitely they're like, "Oh, okay, this is stuff a developer can do," and you can just pass it over to somebody who's in-house who has some SEO experience so we're not doing as much explaining as we have to do. But yeah, it's definitely more on the strategic side. And I think that's where they know enough to know that SEO is different than it was 10 years ago, where they know there needs to be more strategy involved and less "keyword stuffing", as an example.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or they could have the AI to implement all of it, right?

Jen Cornwell:

Right. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a smooth transition into the other elephant in the room that I wanted to discuss, which is, how does AI affect you being indispensable? Both in reality, and I think more importantly... Because I think in reality not much has changed, but that's just me. But the perception of that reality with clients. Are they coming in, "Well, I could just LLM this thing."?

Jen Cornwell:

As soon as ChatGPT was announced and a thing, we had a client who said, "Okay, send me pricing for how to write more content for less money, with AI." And I was like, "Oh, my God." So we go through all that, and it turns out, actually, especially at the time when it was first rolling out, there was no cost savings. The hard costs of a writer were actually implemented in time and trying to get the LLM to get what we needed on the other side, that was not going to work out for that client. But yeah, we had a lot of those conversations.

The way we've positioned it with our clients now is, we use AI in our processes for analysis, we use it for blind spots. It's like, as SEOs you get very situational sometimes with your own references. So having something that can double check some other things for you just in case you forget. Stuff that it's more appropriate use. But yeah, we still have clients. I had a client last wee, this week I was on the phone with. And they're like, "Yeah, we're going to hook Jasper up so we can put a bunch of content up on the site." And so I screen shared this screenshot of this client we had that just did AI content. You can see every single algorithm update where it just fell off September, January, then again in March, just stair steps down. I've used that a lot actually as reference point.

Crystal Carter:

That's one of the things that I think is so valuable about an agency relationship is that as somebody who's working in an agency, and as you said, you have eyes... You've grown from a team of 60 to team of over 100. Across your team you will be having conversations about different trends that you're seeing from clients, and things like that. When a client comes to you and they say, "I want to do this," it won't be your first time doing this. You can say to the wider team, "If you have any examples, have you seen anything?" And they'll go, "Yeah, actually, I do. Watch this drop."

And I think that visibility is something that a lot of in-house teams really struggle with a little bit, because you might just have your blinders on and you might not see what's happening in different verticals. Mordy's done so much algorithm research and stuff, and sometimes the algorithms, if you think about the reviews algorithm, the product reviews update. That was initially working in a certain space. And now, I'm pontificating here, but I think that some of the stuff that we saw with that is kind of what we're seeing with the helpful content update rolled out wider. And I think that the knowledge that you get from working across different clients that have been affected by different algorithms, different approaches, different techniques can be super, super valuable. And it's something that you can't get if somebody's working on one client at a time, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that something you feel differentiates you as an agency versus a consultancy? Where you have so much experience and so many different verticals and so many different areas of marketing. If you're going to get consultants it's like, all right, they have your SEO handled, but the second you have a PPC problem come up, or a content issue come up, or whatever it has come up, now you have to go find somebody else.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah, we've never been vertical specific, we've always done the variety. We probably lean more toward lead gen, maybe a little bit B2B versus e-comm. But I think what happens, we have clients who come on and they're like, "Oh, do you have experience in our industry?" And that matters for writers and that kind of thing, getting the context of their business together. But I think there's a lot of things that are applicable across verticals. The way Google indexes content for a storage facility site is not any different than the skincare brand that we work on. And the things it's looking for are not intrinsically different, but it is two different audiences. And that's where I think you start to get into the indispensable marketing mindset of, I'm not just an SEO, I'm thinking about user journey, I'm thinking about conversion points. I'm thinking about the user journey for a storage site versus a skin care brand, that's two different things that can be important in your strategy. But yeah, the variety I think is really critical, really helps.

Crystal Carter:

And when I was working agency side, I really liked this. I was working with clients similarly, skincare, storage, people that different, some of the clients that I was working with. And I thought that was really interesting. Because particularly on the local side, for instance, there will be features that are available within local SEO, for instance, that are applicable to certain verticals that are not applicable to other verticals. And if you're working on product stuff, then there will be different things that you'll use for that, like Google Merchant Center and stuff. But what you find when you're working across all of them is you get more of a sense of how these things work. Because very often maybe they'll have lots of product schema on... Maybe they'll have one vertical that's got lots of schema, and so then you learn how to do schema. So then when they add schema to a different vertical, then you're completely ready for that because you've already done it on this other one. Whereas, everybody who's just been working on the other vertical and has never seen rich results for that particular vertical might be very surprised.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah. No, I think SEO is so situational anyway, that having that diverse experience... Or being able to have it, I guess, within our team and not being necessarily... I joke that I want to retire to in-house, that's my retirement plan day. I'm going to leave agency life and I'm going to go to in-house and have a nice little in-house job. But not to disregard the in-house people, I'm sure that is hard in its own way. But I do think, yeah, when you're in-house you're dialed in on maybe one site or a few sites, or one specific vertical. And it's great, maybe it makes you a specialist there, but doesn't exactly open up the experience. And I think the time too, over five years, over six years. What I was doing five or six years ago is very different than now, and the experience over that time.

Yeah, your in-house person who's been there for three years maybe hasn't stepped out of the SEO bubble or SEO world in a different way, just because they're only looking at certain things and trying to solve the one problem. This is what I hear about in-house, trying to solve the one problem that you've been trying to push across the line for two years, or whatever it is. And it's always adding site maps to the robots.txt file, and it's going to take seven months to implement. Yeah, I think it's easy to get lost in some of that and maybe lose sight of some of the other stuff that you would get to see agency side.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you think that... Because you mentioned this a few times already, the marketing mindset and the marketing mindset. Do you think that maybe that's one of the reasons why maybe SEOs don't necessarily have that marketing mindset that seems to be indispensable to clients?

Jen Cornwell:

It's probably a little bit of experience, for sure. I think it's really, I refer to it a lot as our SEO vacuum. I go and I can propose all kinds of things to clients like, "Oh yeah, I work on these keywords and these pages," but it doesn't really matter if their audience doesn't care about it or if they don't care about it as a business either. And ultimately, being able to prioritize your recommendations, I think that comes from marketing mindset as well. I'm not just passing over an audit checklist of "here's all the stuff that's wrong and here's some recommendations to fix it". But I'm not necessarily going to tell you what's going to impact your business the most or what you should prioritize first based on your resources. And so I think navigating... That's one example, but being able to navigate their entire marketing plan in the same way. My favorite example, I had a pediatric dentist client, he's got five or six locations in San Diego. And I've worked at a lot of dentists, they love marketing.

Mordy Oberstein:

They got to figure out how to get you in that chair and pull out your teeth.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah, yeah. No, he loved it. And I used to go into the meetings and I would suggest things that I knew I was never going to touch. I would build the landing page. I'll write some content, we'll make the landing page, but there's 5 million other steps to this idea. And those conversations were always really fun for me because I got to talk about stuff other than keywords. But also made us really valuable to him because he's like, "Oh, here's another brain, basically, that can be in this room with me and has the marketing perspective to be able to talk about what we could potentially do." Yeah, I think navigating those situations, the small conversation that turns into a big idea just because you came in with a little bit of extra experience goes a long way.

Crystal Carter:

That's great. It sounds like a great partnership. The kind of partnership you were talking about before, where everything is back and forth.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Was like the name of the dentist, like, Bright Smiles?

Jen Cornwell:

No. Actually, they have a really strong brand. They were one of the biggest pediatric dentists in San Diego. And one of my favorite idea that I suggested them that they did was try to set a world record at a baseball game. They were trying to get as many people to floss at once, or something.

Crystal Carter:

Were they into that?

Jen Cornwell:

Oh, my God, yeah. They thought that was awesome.

Crystal Carter:

I love it.

Jen Cornwell:

... ever. Well, and it was something that John Lincoln, our CEO, suggested for a night. He's like, "Maybe we could try to get in the world record book." And so I came into this meeting and I was like, "What if they …?”

Mordy Oberstein:

Could you imagine? They did it?

Jen Cornwell:

They did it, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

At a baseball game?

Jen Cornwell:

I don't think they set the record, but they did do it at Padres. At Petco Stadium.

Mordy Oberstein:

They were all flossing. That sounds, first off, brilliant, but also disgusting.

Jen Cornwell:

I know. But it was like, they do kids games, so it was like the kids were there and it was like a whole thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

That just makes it grosser. The kids, I don't know. Oh, my gosh. I'm not a germophobe, but I'm freaking out on the other side of the screen.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah. No, it was questionable. But people participated and they did it and got some exposure.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's awesome.

Jen Cornwell:

I wrote the blog. That's a...

Mordy Oberstein:

That is a great idea, by the way. That would make me feel like you're indispensable.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Unique, showing up with unique ideas.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Totally.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. I'm going to go Google this now. Got to find people flossing at Petco Park.

Jen Cornwell:

I give enough details. I give enough details. I think those are more fun conversations to have anyway, honestly. So it's a little bit of my own personal amusement of... And we don't get those opportunities with a lot of our clients. And clients really just look at us as, "You are the SEO partner, so your suggestions about CRO for this form, we don't actually care that much. Just get us the keywords and get us the content." And that works in some relationships. But really strong partnerships you get to have those fun conversations.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that's also important to being a good partner for your clients is understanding who's like, "I just want this one thing." And you're like, "Cool, here you go." And the people who are like, "Yeah, let's get in. Let's brainstorm." There's going to be some people who really want to be all about it. And I used to have some clients who were just like, "Did you do the internet?" And I'd be like, "Yeah, I did it." They'd be like, "Great." And they don't want anything to do... They don't want to be involved. You're just working with... They're happy, they trust you to handle whatever you need to do.

Jen Cornwell:

Sometimes that's indispensable too. You're right-

Crystal Carter:

Exactly.

Jen Cornwell:

... it's relative.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, I feel like I have to go floss my teeth now. So, if people want to brainstorm with you or brainstorm with Ignite, how could they find you and your company?

Jen Cornwell:

I'm on LinkedIn. Ignite is also on LinkedIn. And then, I'm also on Twitter. I think it's JenCornwell_.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, don't worry, I'll find it. I'll link to it in the profile. In the profile, in the show notes.

Jen Cornwell:

Sweet. But yeah, those are two good places. I'm sometimes on Twitter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Twitter these days is not indispensable.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah. And LinkedIn, I don't know, it's a weird mix over there sometimes.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's nothing great. I'll be honest with you, we can go on a whole different tangent about there's nothing great on social media anymore. I don't TikTok, but Crystal TikToks now.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, sometimes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. You were at Moscon. I did tons of Moscon TikToks.

Jen Cornwell:

Oh, did you? I've not done any work TikToks.

Crystal Carter:

You could call it working. No, I'm kidding.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe another podcast. I did make a TikTok where I built a house out of Taco Bell. And got a lot of views and Taco Bell saw it and sent me a whole box full of swag.

Crystal Carter:

Yo, these are the kind of ideas we need, Jen.

Jen Cornwell:

My claim to fame.

Mordy Oberstein:

Floss and the taco. This is-

Crystal Carter:

Tacos. You need to find a taco client.

Jen Cornwell:

Oh yeah, I know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like Taco Bell.

Jen Cornwell:

Taco Bell, maybe. Yeah. Del Taco will take. I had El Pollo Loco.

Crystal Carter:

I used to go to Alberto's in San Diego.

Jen Cornwell:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

It has taquitos.

Jen Cornwell:

Rigoberto's, hit all the Berto's.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, there's the Filiberto's is also very good. They have a gigantic burrito that's amazing. But also I'm thinking, let's brainstorm right now taquitos, they're very much like Lincoln Logs.

Jen Cornwell:

Oh, Lincoln Logs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Could build a whole to taquito fort.

Jen Cornwell:

Taquito. And you got to come up with a fun name. Mine was from Taco Bell Townhouse was because I saw a charcuterie chalet. This was during COVID, people were making little houses out of charcuterie. So yeah, did one out of french fries.

Crystal Carter:

Why didn't we make the podcast about-

Jen Cornwell:

We could have started with that.

Crystal Carter:

About literal food pyramids. Just saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

You make Lincoln Log, you can make out of asparagus.

Crystal Carter:

This is true.

Jen Cornwell:

We had somebody do hot dogs.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hot dogs.

Jen Cornwell:

This was all over a work competition.

Mordy Oberstein:

Work shopping this year.

Jen Cornwell:

Yeah, the gingerbread house kits. So it was just make anything out of food. And so, yeah, people showed up with some interesting pickles.

Crystal Carter:

I feel like the easiest thing is going to be carrot sticks because they're already made into things, whatever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. Yeah, that's cheap.

Crystal Carter:

Tater Tots though, I feel like you could brick those. Pickles are good. They're kind of juicy. Tater Tots, you could use hummus or something sticky as the mortar to keep it put together.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. It could be like a stone cottage thing.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Or like a slightly melted cheese, which will then congeal and then go... You see what I'm saying? Do you see?

Mordy Oberstein:

I think we've gone completely off the rails.

Jen Cornwell:

Best bet.

Mordy Oberstein:

... so much for coming on the show, and we'll see you out there on TikTok building asparagus, Tater Tot houses.

Jen Cornwell:

Thank you. Bye.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anywho, you may have heard this whole thing a little while back that there was a Google leak. Google's algorithm leaked. There was a nut that needed to be tightened, and it was dripping water. There was a Google leak, which everyone I'm assuming heard something about that. And one of the offshoots of that is a lot of SEOs are now talking about, "Oh, we need to be thinking about wider digital presence and brand marketing because of things in the leaks." Such as, oh, Google might be, emphasis on might be, looking at user behavior metrics or Chrome data. Or might be looking at mentions across the web, yada, yada, yada. Again, Amazon might be, we don't know how they're actually doing it, even with the leaks. So SEO is talking about a lot of these wider marketing topics all of a sudden. Which brings up the question that we alluded to earlier, is SEO starting to broaden? Join us now as we explore this fascinating and intriguing question with a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy.

I guess another way to phrase this question, is SEO starting to die? Is that too spicy?

Crystal Carter:

I think SEO is trying to use different tools, and also to utilize the tools that we have in different ways. I recently shared a post on LinkedIn, because I recently rewrote, remixed an article on long tail keywords. And historically speaking, the ways that SEOs have talked about long tail keywords is that we have long tail keywords and they've got good search volume accumulatively, and they allow you to connect with different parts of search, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. All the things that great SEOs do, right? This is perfectly good SEO practice.

But, and this is what I think SEOs need to do. We need to look at what we've got, the resources that we've got in a different way. The long tail keywords are not just about the search volume, the long tail keywords, an example that I use, was vegan pizza and pizza delivery in Brooklyn after midnight. This article's on the Wix SEO learning hub. And the thing that long tail keyword gives you is a full campaign. That gives you a full marketing campaign. Vegan tells you that you should be talking to vegan influencers or vegan magazines or vegan YouTube channels, or whatever. Pizza delivery tells you people want pizza, people want it delivered. They tell you that you need to have a Google business profile. They tell you that you need to have the location, your name, address, phone number on your website, et cetera, et cetera.

And the after midnight tells you that it's late night. So if you have ads, you only want to show them late at night. You're not going to show people who are looking for pizza delivery at two o'clock in the afternoon those ads, you want to show them at 12 o'clock at night so that they can see those ads and get that pizza straight away. You also might want to take out... You know the quiet storm that goes on the radio at midnight or something, or the late night show on the radio. If you sell pizza after midnight and there's a late night radio show in your area. Guess what, the ad spot for that's probably not going to be that expensive because most people are not looking to buy stuff in middle of the night. However, if somebody's listening to the radio at 12:30 and you're like, "Hey, you want a tasty slice," they might call you.

Mordy Oberstein:

... how you phrase that on a late night radio show.

Crystal Carter:

I mean-

Mordy Oberstein:

Remembering my youth of what's on the radio at 12 o'clock at night.

Crystal Carter:

It's a good thing. After midnight in Brooklyn, obviously geolocates you. You might want to sponsor the local basketball team, the local fantasy football team, whatever it may be. But that long tail keyword is data, it's search data. There's somebody who recently shared, they're looking at how search is growing, and the way that they're talking about SEO is slightly different. He was talking about how we can drive search demand. He was talking about how search demand gives you an insight into consumer demand. And that's different from going like, oh, these keywords, oh, blah, blah, blah. We just need to use the tools we have in a new way.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't think anything's actually changed, everything that you're saying are things we should have been doing anyway. I think the only thing that's actually changed... And it will change the industry, by the way, because perception is everything. Is that SEOs are now starting to think about this because they're realizing that the wider, I'll call it holistic or whatever kind of marketing, brand marketing. Could, should, probably does, definitely does in some way, shape, or form, impact performance marketing. And they're like, "Oh, snap. Now we have to think about this." But you should be thinking about this the whole time. Growing your digital presence, I like to call it grow your digital light, has a tremendous impact on your SEO efforts and what you're able to do and not able to do. Whether it's SEO super directly, like we're saying now with the leaks are indirectly. So nothing is actually true, but the mindset has changed.

And I think that... I can't find it, I was searching for this. And I post too much on social media, this is my problem. And I was in a Slack group and I put it on a LinkedIn. I have no clue. Look, I can't find it. It's one of the things you're going hear more about, or a segment of SEO, is brand SEO. I don't mean getting your branded keywords, I mean looking at brand as a way to summon your SEO effort. And then, lo and behold, a month later the leaks come out and now all of a sudden we're talking... But none of this is new. None of it's new.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. One of the reasons why you didn't find that tweet, Mordy, is because you've been saying that for years. Because, Mordy, if you were trying to find that tweet, that's like trying to find-

Mordy Oberstein:

A lot of people have. The Kevin Indigs of the world come to mind, Lily Ray comes to mind.

Crystal Carter:

Have you ever found something out, or learned a new word or something like that, and then all of a sudden you see it everywhere? And it's always been there, but you didn't know necessarily what that word was, or didn't necessarily know what that idea was, or something like that. And you find that it's like, "Oh, this has unlocked a whole new perspective for me." And I think that's kind of what some people are coming to. But yeah, it has always been there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's like Taylor Swift for me. She started dating Travis Kelce, Taylor who? Oh, there's this whole Swift-y thing. I had no clue. But now that I’ve heard of football, now I know.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

My world has changed.

Crystal Carter:

And if you learn a new tool, it can really open things up. Or also, I think when we think about the skills that we had and the resources that we had, sometimes it's a case of taking stuff that you already know and looking at it differently. There's some people like avocados. Let's talk about avocados.

Mordy Oberstein:

Love avocados.

Crystal Carter:

You like avocados. Avocados are delicious. I love avocados. You can literally just... I could literally eat it with a spoon.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

Perfectly happy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't even use a spoon, just take your fingers.

Crystal Carter:

Just-

Mordy Oberstein:

Just dive in.

Crystal Carter:

Just get involved. You don't have to do anything to an avocado. Vegans looked at that and they were like, "I'm going to make that chocolate mousse." And people were like, "What?" And vegans were like, "I'm going to make a chocolate mousse." It's the same avocado everybody's been looking at, but they were like, "I'm going to make a chocolate mousse." Completely different vibe. Yeah, it's a completely different vibe. It's a completely different thing. It's the same avocado that you always liked, completely different vibe.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think the only problem or issue I take is that it's possibly happening in SEO for the wrong reasons. We're like, we're taking the avocado, we're making it into chocolate mousse because I want to shake chocolate mousse and I want to throw it at people on the street. That's fun for me.

Crystal Carter:

I did a webinar the other day and the audience was super engaged, but I was talking about internal linking. And I was like, "You should have internal links. Make sure you use line links. Line links, they're high priority in the crawl, and they're really useful and they're really helpful, and they add context and they have words before them and words after them," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And somebody was like, "Oh, but if I do use the links, will Google penalize me? And what about this one?"

And I was like, "Yo, put the links on your page because they're helpful. They're helpful, they're useful." I cannot stand it if I'm reading an article that's like, "Oh my God, avocado mousse is so delicious. It's the best thing I've ever tried. And gosh, I tried this brand of avocado mousse and it just really blew my mind." And I'm like, "Link me, bro." I'm like, "Where's the link?" And there's no link, I'm mad. I'm big mad. I'm mad, I want to go somewhere else. So link me. Link me to the recipe, link me to the picture, link me to... Pixlr didn't happen. I want to see the stuff. Why? Because it's helpful. That's helpful. It's helpful to Google, it's helpful to users. So the things that we need to do in terms of brand should be helpful. You want to pull your brand forward, you want to use your data wisely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, momentum and cadence and presence, all that good stuff. Oh, no, more it's going to happen is what happens now on LinkedIn. I connect with somebody, "Hi, how are you?" Oh, here it comes. "Would you like to buy links?" But in a year from now it's going to be, would you like to buy mentions? Because what guest? He was like, "Oh, the leaks talk about mentions, and now we need to be concerned about mentions. I have a good idea, I'll sell mentions." Who needs to get the lie to sell mentions? And you should be worrying about mentions. You don't mentions do? I'm reading an article, they say, "You know what's a really great thing? Avocados. Avocados from whatever company, from Bob's Avocados," and there's no link.

But you know what I might do if I want an avocado? I might type in Bob's Avocado into Google. And do you think for a second Google's not looking at the fact that lots of people looking for avocados and Bob at the same time? Did a link do that? No, a mentioned did that. Did a mention do that only after the leaks happened? No, a mention did that many, many years before the leaks came out. But now SEOs are going to try selling mentions.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think that really, generally speaking, and I've heard this from good SEOs. People say, "How do you weather the algorithm updates and things like that?" Nine times out of 10, it's just keeping your nose clean. But nine times out of 10, it's like keeping your nose clean doing solid SEO, doing stuff that helps your users, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that it seems really... Okay, so I learned to snowboard, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, you know how to snowboard?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I'm a mediocre snowboarder, but I've been on a few mountains in my time. And I don't fall over. Last time I was in Switzerland, I didn't fall over. I did all right. And I was riding Switch. So people who know that, your girl has to moves. Anyway, when I was learning to snowboard, my instructor told me, he was like, "You just look where you want to go." And I was like, "No, because it's got to be this and you have to do that, and you have to go over here, and got to..." And I was doing the most, I was doing too much. But literally, I will tell you, if you want to snowboard, and I tell this to people now. Literally, look where you want to go. It's literally that simple. It's that simple. You're on the board, your feet are planted, you turn your head and your body will go where it needs to go. And that's all it is.

So we like, oh, what if I do this, and what if I do that? And da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And don't get me wrong, there are absolutely technical things you need to consider. You need to make sure your website's crawlable. You need to have lots of things that are in there. You need to coordinate your digital PR, et cetera, so that it makes sense for your brand. You need to have a coherent strategy. But essentially, if your goal is to add value for your users, for your audience, then you will be fine. And if your goal is to add value consistently for them, then that will support your brand, as long as you know what your brand is. That's not rocket science. We try to make it so it's super complicated, but it's not. It's not.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's just tuning out that noise, that's the hard part.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know who tunes out a lot of noise, keeps his nose clean, and always provides value?

Crystal Carter:

Who's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

Barry Schwartz.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the cleanest nose I've ever seen. Really, it's sparkling.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, sometimes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which means, as we pay homage to Barry, that it's time for this week's snappy news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Got a whole bunch of stuff for you, it's all a AI related. Or actually, AI adjacent. Let's start with Search Engine Roundtables, Barry Schwartz. Well, I don't know why I said Search Engine Roundtables, Barry Schwartz. There only is Barry Schwartz as Search Engine Roundtable, which is an existential feeling. There only is Barry Schwartz. Anyway, Reddit blocked Bing search and others, but not Google. So, Reddit has blocked basically all other search engine, I'm pretty sure, from crawling them via the robot.txt file. I don't know if that applies to Perplexity actually. I thought somewhere I saw Perplexity was fine. Anyway, I'm definitely Bing. Bing is definitely out. Reddit is no longer allowing other search engines to crawl them. That's interesting, right? I never know.

What do you say about that? It's an interesting look. What's basically happening is that Reddit is basically saying, "Hey, if you want our content, be like Google and pay for it." I personally don't like Reddit, so I don't know why anybody would pay for it. But, okay. It's really interesting. It's a new paradigm on the web, I guess. I don't know if this deal will work out well for Reddit. I'm highly suspect that making this kind of deal is in their long-term benefit. It's weird, by the way. I'll just say it's weird because, yeah, Bing's not the biggest search engine, it's only got whatever percent of market share. Let's say it's got 5% of market share. I don't remember the exact numbers, nor do I particularly care. 5% of that market share is saying, yeah, I have 5% market share of the entire world. That's a lot of people.

I guess Reddit doesn't care about your grandmother going to Reddit anymore. I guess the lesson to take from that. That's a little snarky for this podcast. Anyway, just weird. Let's head over to Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Land, where Google will soon test search shopping ads in AI overviews. So Google has talked about having an ad experience in the AI overviews for a while. Now they're saying you're going to see the tests coming up soon. The quote was, "And as you've probably noticed at GML, Google Marketing Live, we announced that soon we'll actually start testing search and shopping ads in AI overviews for users in the US," yada, yada, yada. So they're going to be testing them soon. Interesting. Let's see how that goes. Obviously, the ability to earn ad revenue is what will indicate if the AI overviews are going to work or not from a business point of view.

All this is just interesting to me. Anyway. Now back to Search Engine Roundtable, Google Gemini adds related content and verification links. So the LLM formerly known as Bard, now known as Gemini, now contains links again. This is a weird week. I'm finding the news weird this week. Bard, now known as Gemini, used to show links to the content that the summary was based on. Much the way an AI overview does. But then stopped doing that. Well, now links are back inside of Gemini. Which is interesting, because now covering again from Search Engine Roundtable, SearchGPT, OpenAI search tool is out. It's announced. Like ChatGPT, you can now use SearchGPT to get answers to your questions. But here, with SearchGPT, you'll get citations that the content is based on. So it's basically Gemini. So it's basically the same thing. It's now you can search using OpenAI's platform much the way you would use Gemini. Again, get the summary and now get citations and links to content and so forth within the ecosystem.

Will this disrupt the search engine market? Probably not. Because it's basically the same thing as Gemini, and kind of the same thing as the AI overview. So carry on as usual, I guess. I don't know. It's a weird week. It's a weird week. By the way, that article is brought to you by Barry Schwartz. Because, again, who else is writing at SE Roundtable? Actually, not true. Not true. I take that back. Sometimes Glenn Gabe actually writes an article over at SE Roundtable. You can always tell by the headline. Anyway, that's this week's weird and snappy news.

It is hard to keep the noise out with the news sometimes. There's a lot of noise in the news.

Crystal Carter:

I'll be completely honest, I used to get a lot of my news from Twitter, and that is not a use a useful-

Mordy Oberstein:

Not a good place.

Crystal Carter:

... source to get news from anymore. Barry's a great source. And I think a lot of times... There's certain people that I follow to keep on top of things like that as well. Lily Ray's a great person to follow for that, she's really on top of the news, and particularly for stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Glenn.

Crystal Carter:

Glenn is great as well, and Mike is great as well. Mike King is also a good one who jumps in. And Mike covers a lot of topics as well. So a lot of search, but also a few other topics as well, which is cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep. That's why I like, by the way, I mentioned Glenn Gabe before, because he covers all tech news. I saw yesterday he posted about... This is insane. By the time this comes out, this will be old news. It's basically a social media thing where you can create an AI persona and then have all the AIs talking to each other.

Crystal Carter:

I heard the story about a comedian. Opinions on him aside, it was an interesting story. Dave Chappelle apparently had a Twitter account that was not his Twitter account, but this person was posting stuff. Kat Williams, and again, another controversial comedian or whatever. But he also had-

Mordy Oberstein:

All comedians are kind of controversial, it's what they do.

Crystal Carter:

He also had a... These two Twitter accounts were arguing with each other. The two of them actually met, these two comedians actually met, and they were like, "I'm sorry." Or, no. And Dave Chappelle apparently said to this other comedian, "I'm so sorry, that's not actually me that's been arguing with you." And Kat Williams was like, "I don't have a Twitter account either." And basically-

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that was my comment back to Glenn when he posted about this. I'm like, yeah, AI, but people aren't so great either. So, there you go. You know who is a great person with the perfect pivot possible? Our follow of the week, Sam Rush's own head of influencer marketing, Nicole Ponce. Nicole is amazing. I work with Nicole. I still work with Nicole. Absolutely one of the greatest people you'll ever meet. Super incredible, super smart, super nice, helpful, everything. Give her a follow across all social media platforms.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely do. Not only is she super awesome, super smart, she also has all of the latest info and all the cool stuff that Sam Rush gets up to. They've got some cool events going on, they've got some interesting projects going on, and she's very much a part of that. She's really supportive of the SEO community as well. She supported stuff that Aletis put on. They've also supported things, different events. And they supported Search 'n Stuff, which is another great event as well. And I've worked with Nicole as well, and cannot speak highly enough of her. Big hearts to Nicole.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're all making heart signs.

Crystal Carter:

We're making those little hearts.

Mordy Oberstein:

... the two of us here.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's just us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. What an interesting selection of people today. We talked about Barry, Cole…

Crystal Carter:

... all the other folks we were just mentioning as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

We've talked a lot of people on today's show, mentions of people. Mentions, you know what? No one even asked to buy them. We should sell them. We should sell mentions on the podcast. I found a new niche for us.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay, cool. Can we start a fun agency? Just, Mention.

Mordy Oberstein:

Mentions.

Crystal Carter:

Got to have a good name.

Mordy Oberstein:

With dollar signs. The brand, you be like dollar signs everywhere.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Good idea. This is the thing, by the way, that we're joking. Obviously. And before we continue and go down this rabbit hole forever, because I will, because I'm salty about this topic. 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 the wonderful world of podcasting, on a podcast with podcasters who do marketing and marketing podcasts. So many fourth walls. So many fourth walls. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check all of the great content and webinars and whatnot over on the Wix SEO learning at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Please don't forget to give us a review on iTunes, or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.