Building the processes for marketing agency efficiency

Mordy Oberstein:

Its the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy overseeing the SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is a smooth operator, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. I am not sure if I could possibly claim that title, because I never figured out how to do that thing from that music video with the leaning, where they lean all the way over. But apparently after spending much of my childhood trying desperately to do that and falling on my face, I realized that actually what they had was nails in their shoes. There was nail on the floor.

Mordy Oberstein:

Really, that's how they do that?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, there was a nail on the floor, and he had a thing in the shoe and basically they latched into it and then they did the lean and that's how they didn't fall.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like I've been lied to my entire life.

Crystal Carter:

Basically. Basically.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like when they pull the cheese on a pizza in the commercials and it's glue.

Crystal Carter:

No, no, no. They're not allowed to use glue. They basically, they use some special kind of cheese. Well, at least in the UK at least.

Mordy Oberstein:

Whatever, it's not real. I've eaten plenty of pizzas, has your pizza ever done that? No. Ridiculous.

Crystal Carter:

Never done that.

Mordy Oberstein:

We fall for it though, because you watch the TV, you're like, "Oh, that pizza looks so good." And you know when you go there, it's not going to be anything like that whatsoever, but we do it anyway.

Crystal Carter:

No, no.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's how marketing works.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. Exactly. And that's the world we're living in.

Mordy Oberstein:

Lies. You know what's not a lie? The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight, each and every month over at wix.com/SEO/newsletter. Got all those slashes, but where you can also collaborate on websites uniquely with Wix Studio, make your agency's processes more efficient with collaboration freedom that Wix Studio offers you. Check it out wix.com/studio. Because today we're talking about building the operations for content and SEO to increase team effectiveness. That's right. At the backbone of any good SEO and content game is a set of mundane operations that pushes your boat to shore. And to help us, we will be welcoming the entire crew of The Long Game podcast over at Omniscient Digital. Plus, we'll get a thorough and explore what fundamentally makes for good operations. 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 jump in your shell, place your oars into your oar locks and get ready to roam perfect harmony as the Wix and Long Game crew help your crew power through to an efficient SEO and operations game in one seamless glide of grace on episode 81 of the SERP's podcast.

In case you can't tell, I just watched that movie with the people on the boats, the crew movie with the boats.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, there's lots of movies like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a new one in the Olympics.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, an actual crew?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, an actual crew.

Crystal Carter:

Not the crew, actual people doing crew?

Mordy Oberstein:

No crew, the boat, you're rowing the boat with all the people.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm aware of crew. I have never done that. I don't have the core strength for that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like rowing boats, but I can never do that.

Crystal Carter:

Can you do it in the round? You start rowing and then I'll row row the boat. No?

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to be the guy who just screams at people while the people row.

Crystal Carter:

The drums, the drums are good as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. That guy's gotten the best job, to be honest with you. Row faster. Anyway, so fun fact, about three or four years, I'm going to mention this later again in the podcast, I was a COO of a mid-sized property management company in New York City, which people don't know. And it's a weird Mordy, fun fact. So when I say operations are nitty-gritty and boring and mundane processes, I speak from experience and that's what they are. But they're also the core of everything you do when you're working as part of a huge team and a huge content team and a huge SEO team, it all in my mind comes down to operations. So it's not a little bit weird that we're talking about SEO and content and operations because fundamentally, if you're working on a team, it is the backbone of everything you do. Everything needs to work methodically towards one goal. And that's all based on good-strong operations, which is why I am so very happy to introduce the crew of the Long Game podcasts. Welcome to SERP's Up, David Khim, Allie Decker, and Alex Birkett. Welcome.

Alex Birkett:

Thank you. Thank you.

Allie Decker:

Thanks, Mordy.

David Khim:

Hello. Hello.

Alex Birkett:

Good to be here.

Mordy Oberstein:

So first things first, markers going to market. Plug away. What do you got?

Alex Birkett:

Well, we have a podcast too called The Long Game that you mentioned, and we run an SEO and content marketing agency called, Omniscient Digital. It's beomniscient.com. I think that's all we've got, right? Are we selling anything else?

David Khim:

So we work primarily with B2B SaaS companies. We've worked with companies like SAP, Adobe, Loom, Jasper, Vendor, Order, I can keep going, but I think that gives an idea of the type of companies. They're typically quite ambitious, growing quickly or want to grow faster. And we typically are the team that they go to either build their content SEO engine from zero to one, or in some cases even scale it from one to 10 or even a hundred and just work with us instead of hiring an in-house team.

Alex Birkett:

Well, and that's an interesting angle too, because we've seen the backsides of both sides of the spectrum in terms of precedes startups all the way up through the biggest companies in the world and everybody struggles with operations. It's just in different ways.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also, I think people forget how much it can, particularly when you're thinking about SEO projects and stuff. How much you can have the best campaign in the world, but if somebody hasn't remembered to have somebody answer the phone or have somebody pick up all those leads or have enough capacity or make sure that the servers can take all of the traffic. Maybe we need to upgrade our site at the back end so that it can take all the traffic, those kinds of things can make your best campaign fall completely flat.

David Khim:

What I've found is I think of operations very simply. It's what needs to be done, who's going to do it, when is it going to be done and how is it going to be done? And typically when we meet with prospects or start work with clients, one or more of those things are not defined. A lot of the case, what needs to be done is never defined. Sometimes we'll even ask, well, who do we talk to if we have any questions? That's also not defined, which we in some cases don't realize until down the line that we've been talking to the wrong person.

And we also help them define, here's how things are going to happen. Here's when we'll do it by, here's what we can do, here's what we need from you and so on. And once those things are defined, things start rolling and things are smooth like butter. And we find that a lot of clients, because those things aren't defined internally, a lot of times they know what to do, but they're like, "We don't know how to actually get this done," because they bought our likes internally or we don't have resources and things like that.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it can happen a lot in large organizations and I think that one of the things that's tricky, it's like when someone says in first aid they tell you if somebody is bleeding, if there's an emergency, you don't say someone call an ambulance. You say, "You call an ambulance and then that one person will call the ambulance," because otherwise everyone will assume that somebody else did it. I mean, do you find that a lot of the times somebody assumes that someone else has done or handled whatever it is that needs to be handled?

Allie Decker:

Yeah, absolutely. It's even more prevalent in a fully distributed team like ours, because not together day to day. Even more so, because our clients are all over the world. So having set responsibilities and ownership designated out the gate really helps the projects once the emergencies arise as they always do. There's a lot of our work that is unpredictable or things change in the middle of the projects and having the infrastructure set up, the operational infrastructure helps, whatever happens, it continues smoothly.

Alex Birkett:

I would say that's a bigger problem in larger enterprises too, especially with multiple business units. As you sort of absolve responsibility or certain steps in the process to, say, getting a piece of content published. If you can describe how does a piece of content get published, you realize there's so many different stakeholders at each step and sometimes it's unclear who's responsible for each phase in that process and what their incentives are. So in the early stages it's you have one person or maybe one person in a freelancer or an agency. Things are simpler at that stage. As you scale operations, it becomes much less clear who's doing what, when and why, what their incentive structure is.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I find that either means in best case scenario, a bottleneck until you figure it out or absolute total communication breakdown, which is your probably worst case scenario.

David Khim:

You touched on an important thing there that I kind of jokingly say to a lot of people that it's communication. As a personal belief, I think if we all as individuals and humans worked on our communication skills, the world would be a better. And if we just zoom in on the workplace, there would probably be less headbutting and more collaboration going on in workspace. But even being able to define a communication cadence of we're going to check in on this once a week, or let's aim to have these things done by a certain deadline and check in at these checkpoints. Having that laid out explicitly is also very helpful, because then you have regular checkpoints to make sure that things don't fall through the cracks.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I've been on the other side where I've hired agencies and that hasn't been in place, and what inevitably happens is the whole thing kind of falls apart and you as the consumer feel like, "What is going on here? Why are they not doing this? I'm paying all this money and nothing's happening." Whereas you've built in that operations, those processes from the outset and the expectations are there. And there's checks and balances to the system to make sure that if something falls through the cracks, it'll eventually get picked up again or there's opportunity for it to come up in discussion again. Then that solves a lot of the problems that you really as an agency, I feel like if you don't have that in place, you're basically just setting yourself up to have a lot of angry, resentful customers.

Alex Birkett:

I think a nightmare scenario for us, one that we actively try to avoid and are constantly iterating on is having a whole list of actions and having it just sit in draft mode or feedback mode or a backlog. Whether that's, we produce content for clients and that's probably the most palpable example. Where it's like you could produce 50 pieces of content and they just sit there in draft mode without being published. Our best case scenario, outcome wise is a great case study for a client, a great outcome for a client. That's a flywheel. That's how we build a reputation and it's not possible unless things get done. Same is true in technical SEO, if you've got a bunch of issues. My background is in experimentation, you could have all the ideas in the world, but if there's no throughput, nothing happens on the outcome side. So that's something we actively try to avoid.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also with that, you can't grow unless you, you talked about experimentation, you have to publish otherwise, you can't see what the market thinks of what you've done. You can't get customer feedback, user feedback off... David, David's nodding. And those bottlenecks aren't just bottlenecks for you getting your case study, they're bottlenecks for us doing better the next time, because there is no next time if there isn't a first time. I don't know if you have any top tips for being able to push through those bottlenecks that are so frustrating, because I've definitely been in the place where we've had a stack of content. We were commissioned for content, we got all the content through to the client, and then it sat there until it was no longer relevant and then you're going to have to start again.

Allie Decker:

Yeah, oftentimes I've learned setting those operational expectations of the client. We're a partnership, we're working on this together, really having them understand what their responsibilities would be, which we would do our best to ease those responsibilities. But if we don't have CMS access or if there is a certain point where we need them to review content for accuracy or their brand perspective or point of view, they're going to be inherently involved. So setting the expectation out the gate, even as early as the sales process, was like, "This is what we would need from you. How does this sound? Is this a commitment you can make? Who would be the main point of contact for this?" I think it helps then when it does become an active action for them to own, they know it's coming. They've set this time aside and it's our job to hold them accountable, so it doesn't come as a surprise. We found that that really helps starting the conversation early.

Alex Birkett:

With any sort of behavioral change. I always go back to this model, I think it's called B=MAP, it's BJ Fogg's behavior model. And it's, you have two axes, one is motivation, so how excited somebody is to do something. And then you have ease or effort and it's like how hard it is to do that thing. So if somebody needs a new driver's license, their motivation is extremely high, so they'll put up with all the BS at the DMV, whatever to get that done. And there's varying levels of motivation in terms of clients, but we try to pick the ones like David said earlier, who are ambitious and have high motivation levels to get content out there to do SEO.

So then our job is to make it as easy as possible for those things to go through, and we learn different ways to do that. If we're doing high velocity, sometimes that involves bashing content feedback cycles. So instead of giving somebody 200 things to review and saying, "Get after it." We'll do 10, 20, 30 at a time and be very specific about what we need. Do we need legal approval? Do we need actual structural subject matter expert feedback? We'll be very specific about those things. So it's not this overwhelming cognitive burden that it just sits there on somebody's desk, because it's, "Where do I even start?"

Mordy Oberstein:

That sounds really interesting, because it sounds almost like you're very agile in how you're approaching the client and the scenario and the ask. How do you set yourselves up your own processes to be set up where it's not overly rigid so that when you have a client, when you have a situation, when you have an ask or a need or a scenario, that you're able to set up the processes that align to that particular given scenario? And not, "Hey, this is how we do things, here's our process." And just blinders on, "Here's how we usually go with it. So that's what we're going to do," and not be agile enough to adapt to the current situation?

Allie Decker:

Yeah, we're really lucky to have a brilliant editorial team. Our managing editor is Lean Six Sigma certified, so he's brought a lot of those inputs into how he structured the team and our editorial process. A lot of our editorial process is 'rigid'. We have a default set up and we'll iterate on that if necessary. But for the most part, again, it's all about setting expectations right out the gate. We communicate this as early as the first or second sales calls, "Here's what our editorial process looks like," so we can leave a lot of wiggle room for input. SME interviews, SME editors coming in and contributing to really technical pieces.

I think ultimately having the tooling in place is really helpful. So we use tools like Airtable. We have a multi-step editorial process. We have a lot of shared communication. So plus one to what David said about just staying as in touch as possible. So we share a Slack channel with our clients and we have really repeatable communication connections, so bi-weekly calls. All of this infrastructure, which is rigid per se, allows for the time in between those calls, the time in between those assignments and the content creation process to take shape as it might.

And a lot of what we do is equal parts arts and science, so some of it needs that artistic space to come together. Other times it's a little bit more scientific, so a little bit more repeatable, collecting the data, iterating on the data, using it to inform our next strategy. But I think actually having some of the infrastructure remain rigid, setting the expectation out the gate. And then if push comes to shove and something happens with the client or after a couple times we're like, "Actually, this isn't the best fit for this specific project," then we're able to tweak. So I'd actually argue that maybe having a repeatable process to begin is the best, and then picking and choosing those puzzle pieces as you get to know the project.

Crystal Carter:

I think there's definitely a case of managing yourself. If your team, the client or the project, folks that you're working with are the variable, you want to control as much on your side as you possibly can.

Allie Decker:

Yeah. I think one good thing we did last year was build a lot of our process, build a really strong foundation. And as every agency does, we have projects that don't go according to plan. And we were able to, because our process was so clear, we were able to clearly see where the problem was, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But having a really clear foundation infrastructure, I'll just use that word again, allowed us to within days pinpoint what was breaking. And that was why it was so valuable to have that rigid, repeatable process to begin with. And we were able to have a postmortem of sorts and iterate as we needed on specific projects.

David Khim:

I'd love to get a little bit more into weeds too, just like tactily, what that means, not just for us, but even for folks in-house. Because whether it's Sam or managing editor's Lean Six Sigma certified. I come from a growth background. Alex comes from experimentation. We have a mix of what some people have called, this is the mathy side of things, and then there's also the creative and that form of thinking.

Mordy Oberstein:

I just want to say you read my mind, because I was going to talk about our in-house and how we do that.So you go ahead, take it.

David Khim:

Yeah. But one of the things that the team did really well was build out a mirror board of every single step of our workflows, from the first sales call with a prospect all the way down to delivery. And we did that for our hiring process too, and then that allowed us to be able to say, "Hey, this client engagement broke down. Where in this workflow did it break down? Okay, we identified it. Now let's figure out how to actually... What do we need to do to adapt?" Without that, we wouldn't be able to do that sort of diagnostic and actually adapt.

And then I think part of it's the culture of, hey, we use a lot of automations, we use ClickUp and a lot of checklists, even if it's a silly thing like, "Send a follow-up to the client after the meeting." Those things help me, because sometimes I forget, I'm like, "Oh, wait, I forgot to do this." So we're just very regimented in how we approach a lot of our work, and that lets us think about more of the strategic and creative things and not have to worry about the more administrative, straightforward things like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

We literally have that on our SEO Hub. I mean, we have a great head of SEO editorial, George Winn, he has some really strong processes in place. He's very methodical about it. He's very regimented about it. And I find personally, I don't want to speak for Crystal, but I find that because of those processes, I know that when we want to get a little bit creative with it. I know that sometimes I worry about, if we get a little bit too creative, will the quality still be there, will the targeting still be there?

But because we have the processes in place, I know that no matter how wild and crazy I get with it, it'll all come back to a place where there's a check and control of how well-targeted and how well-produced the content actually is. I don't need to worry. Hey, I'm being a little bit maybe too off the deep end here, and the quality of the content and the targeting of the content won't come out the way I want it to, but because I know I'm going to be checked in place by the processes our editorial has put in place, I'm good to go. I can do what I want.

Crystal Carter:

I think that those processes are so important. I think one of the other thing I wanted to pick up on, because I think David and Allie, you both mentioned this was as part of your sales process. Certainly in my experience of speaking with clients, one of the first things I ask, particularly if I'm giving an SEO audit or something is, and I think Alex, I think you also mentioned the who in the team as well. If you're working with someone and you're trying to figure out your process with someone, the first thing I'm doing is, who's on your team? What resources do you have? So that if I give you 45 articles, if there's one person there, then I can expect that that's going to take this long. Or they might say, "I want 400 articles," but they have one person reviewing and you're just like, "No, that's too many. That's too many for you." How does vetting clients and matching clients to your process, how do you match clients to your process and how do you identify whether or not they're going to work well in your framework that you've got?

Alex Birkett:

I think what you said there around having a DRI basically is the main issue. It's not always that simple. Earlier stage companies may have one person, typically if it's a founder, that's a little tough because they're going to have so many other competing priorities that it's hard to get their time. But as you scale, one thing that I've realized working with much larger clients is that you'll have a DRI, but then there'll be other stakeholders. And finding how to partition those different roles for the different parts of the feedback cycles is important.

So one client that I'm thinking about that I talked to earlier today, they've got a strategic editorial person thinking about things from the content side. But then there's legal too, they're decently regulated and there's a heavy legal presence. And then there's product marketing, and that's how they're speaking about the products in the content that we're producing. So how we delineate those stages of feedback instead of just giving it all at once, giving it to our single point of contact and saying, "Do all of this." We can go in phases with each of these, and it is just, I think, important to me to identify and to find who each person is and which part of the process they're taking.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think that's a really important part.

Mordy Oberstein:

David, I wanted to get back to, you weren't about to ask a question? I don't want to gloss over it.

David Khim:

Okay. I'm very curious. I can share the context on our end, but I'm very curious how you all think about it. Not even just with the pod, but maybe your editorial team too. But one of the things around process and breaking bottlenecks is, I found that we run into bottlenecks when someone doesn't know what they're supposed to do, they don't have the bandwidth, or I'll bucket the rest in fear, uncertainty, doubt. And in that bucket, it's, what if it doesn't work? What if it's not the right content? Or I think the one that is my favorite is, I'm worried about the quality.

And quality tends to be a big thing that comes up, and there can be a discussion of, "Hey, maybe we'll get to 90% of what you're expecting, but we need to get it published to get data and iterate." But then I know, and I think this comes a lot from Alex and Allie mainly, but the idea that quality can be made objective, and a lot of folks kind of say it's subjective and move on. But that doesn't enable things to move forward sometimes, because if you can't agree on what quality is. So I'll let Allie and Alex add anything to that, but I'm curious how you all handle that at Wix.

Crystal Carter:

I think that certainly within our teams, we have various different objectives for different audiences. So at the SEO Hub, we have different objectives for what we want to do with our content and how we want educational value and brand value and things like that. There are other parts of the team that have other parts of, it's a very big company, working in 17 different languages and globally, et cetera. So there's different parts of the company that have different objectives. And I think that we, as a company overall, I think we try to make sure that it's very clear what the objectives are for each piece of content that somebody or each channel that someone's engaging with, for instance.

So if they're on, we have our Wix Studio blog, for instance, which has one type of focus, and we have our Wix SEO blog, which has a different focus, for instance, I think there's things like that. And I think that when people think about working with a big company like Adobe or Wix or something like that, I think what people forget is that very often you're working on a project within that. There'll be a project within that specific thing, and that project will be dedicated to a certain thing. If you were think about, if you, "Oh, you work at McDonald's." Well, there's going to be a team that's dedicated just to Happy Meals, just to Happy Meals, and even within that team there'll be somebody who's just dedicated to the toys that go in the Happy Meals, for instance. They're going to be in subsections as well. So I think that we try to focus on the audiences that it's going for and the intent of the audience.

Mordy Oberstein:

For your quality point, I think what inevitably happens is that, first of all, I personally think there is an objective ideal of quality, and I think it's on a spectrum, but there is an ideal, there's an objective ideal of something that is or is not quality. Either something is or is not soda. There's a definition of what it is, and if there's no definition of what it is and it's completely arbitrary, we might as well not talk about it.

But I think though that quality is contextualized. For example, the Wix Studio blog is very much geared towards trends, thought leadership and what quality means in that context is different than let's say our SEO Hub, which is more we want to just educate you about how to do SEO and how to do marketing kind of thing. So it's much more straightforward, informational, and less on the thought leadership side sometimes, or sometimes it is very thought leadershippy. But the quality is in context of what is the nature of the content, because what's quality for a straight-up informational piece and what's quality for an acquisition piece or what's quality for a thought leadership piece are just very, very different things.

Alex Birkett:

Yeah, I look at it as this bi-directional thing. The word quality is so nebulous that if you get bogged down on definitions, I think it just, to your point, it is a little bit of a waste of time. But there's a quality in the reader of the content, and you can't ever truly control that. I post on LinkedIn quite a bit and things that I think are the best posts in the world get crickets, and then some pithy little fortune cookie thing goes viral, and I'm like, "I guess I can't predict quality."

But that doesn't mean, I think conflating that outcome quality with the input quality is where people get bogged down with the definitions. So in pursuit of the goal, like you had mentioned Crystal, it's like you want to define that to the best of your ability, objectively speaking. It's more specs, it's more thinking, does this hit specs, giving the outcome that we want? And then after you see the outcome, you get more data and you can iterate. That can inform those specs too. So to me, it's very bi-directional and both inform the other, but I don't want to confuse the two. I think they're two different things.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also, I think David also touched on people getting bogged down with quality this or quality that and not publishing because of that, and what did they say is done is better than perfect. Sometimes the-

Mordy Oberstein:

The enemy of good is great, something like that,

Crystal Carter:

Right. Exactly. That sort of thing. And I think that sometimes they say delivering customer value. So something that is good is something that is valuable to the customer and if that's valuable to the customer, there's lots of things that people find valuable. And I think that I was interested in the idea of making it objective, making quality objective. You'll have a baseline of this must do this. A table must have legs and it must be level and it must not be sharp. There's a baseline of what a table must do, and you have to absolutely hit all of those things. And once you can absolutely hit all of those things, if you can't make your table level, then we're not doing anything for instance.

Whereas after that you can go, "Oh, we're going to make this heirloom this, we're going to make it hand, et cetera, et cetera. You can get all of the extra lovely stuff on top of that, but you need to be able to do the very, very baseline thing in the first place, whatever it is that is. And I think that part of operations is making things that are very qualitative, very subjective more regimented and more quantitative I guess you would say.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I think what the issue though is, so with something like a table, it's very easy to define what is a table. It's a flat service that has... But when you deal with quality, it's very thorough. You're starting to deal with very, I'm going to get philosophical, existential concepts. What is valid? What does it mean for a thing to exist in a certain context? And it's, define value and importance. I can define words somewhere really easily. When you try to define other concepts, it gets very lofty very quickly. And quality, for something we talk about all the time happens to be one of those very thorough kind concepts. So I think there's a danger in trying to define it, and I would go on a limb and say, you know it, when you see it, you can try to describe it and describe certain attributes of it. But you can never really define it per se. So I think it's all of it equals a very layered and complex equation of what is quality, how do you produce quality content? And we're not going to answer in this podcast, unfortunately.

David Khim:

But we can do it.

Alex Birkett:

Something I've been thinking about is that maybe quality, we want to make it as objective as possible in terms of our processes and inputs, but there's no universal quality. So you mentioned McDonald's before. Something I think about a lot is McDonald's quality versus say Michelin Star chefs. Both of those actually hit quality specs with what they're aiming to do. And people will smack talk McDonald's and be like, "You don't want to be the McDonald's of this." But I'm reading that book that, 'Grinded out' by Ray Kroc, and the amount of attention to detail that he put into the potatoes, that oil, every piece of it is remarkable. It's like this guy really had an eye for quality, it's just a different shape. It's not the same universal definition that your Michelin Star restaurant in New York City has.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a different purpose.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that's what I mean by customer value. So a Michelin Star restaurant, what somebody values about that is part of the whole experience, the whole sensory thing, the quality of all the ingredients, all of the other things. What someone values at a McDonald's is that they can get food within five minutes and they can have a certain number of calories and they can have all of it. They can feed their whole family very, very, very quickly and at a reasonable affordable price. That is something that sometimes that is high value, sometimes in some cases that is extremely high value. And sometimes the Michelin Star thing is a high value in different contexts, they will be more or less important. But in both of those cases, what the person ultimately wants to do is to eat edible food. So if that is the baseline.

Mordy Oberstein:

So abstract question for the crowd. Abstract question for the crowd and we can end on this point. Is usefulness part of quality or is it a layer that quality has to depend on? In other words, something could be quality. I have a Michelin Star burger, it's a hundred dollars for the burger, it's definitely quality. If I have $5, I'm in a huge rush, it's not useful. So is usefulness a separate concept than quality, or is it really part of the same thing? We just went way too deep.

Every time we do a conversation, this happens. We always go into the abstract, philosophical.

Crystal Carter:

It always does.

Allie Decker:

I don't think usefulness applies to food Mordy, but I would say for content it does. So I would definitely have it as a quality input for the specific work that we do.

Alex Birkett:

But utility does factor into food too. If everything in the world was a Michelin Star expensive meal, I mean that wouldn't be a great world.

Crystal Carter:

Equally, I love cotton candy, but I couldn't eat cotton candy every day all the time. I would enjoy it, but it's not useful to my health. If I just ate cotton candy.

Allie Decker:

I think there's probably someone out there, Crystal, that would disagree with you.

Mordy Oberstein:

I can eat a Michelin Star hamburger every meal, every day. I'd be fine. I mean, I'd probably die relatively soon, but I'd be fine.

Allie Decker:

Yeah. Skewed utility, tastes very bad for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Who defines what's actually utility?

Alex Birkett:

It's us, we're doomed.

Allie Decker:

Doomed.

Mordy Oberstein:

Doomed. You know what's not doomed? You are not doomed if you follow these great people out there on the ether that is social media. Where can we find all of you?

Allie Decker:

Mordy, you're so smooth. We're all on LinkedIn, as Alex and David mentioned. We have a lot of fun on there. And check us out on beomniscient.com. You can find all of our work, all of our team. We have some great podcast episodes of our own, blog post resources on there. Yeah, The Long Game.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll put links in the show notes, but you can just Google The Long Game podcast and you'll find it. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun.

Allie Decker:

Thank you.

Alex Birkett:

Thank you.

David Khim:

Thanks for having us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, well, since we're talking about operations, not the game, not the game operation, which confounded me as a child, I do not have surgeon's hands. I killed that poor fellow many a times.

Crystal Carter:

I think he was smiling the whole time, the poor guy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I just jabbed you in the ribs, he's still smiling.

Crystal Carter:

Just trying to put your spleen in your elbow, "Sir, I don't think this is going to work out for you."

Mordy Oberstein:

We might be dating ourselves. I don't know if that game still exists, so just for-

Crystal Carter:

It does. I saw one for Grogu from the Mandalorian, actually.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, okay, fine. So in that case, you understand what the game operation is, and we're not dating ourselves. I'm dating myself by not being sure if I'm dating myself or not. Got it.

Okay, since we're talking about operations. I have a ton to say about operations, mainly because no one talks to me, no one asks about operations because no one thinks I have any experience around operations. But I actually used to be a COO of a company with 300 people for four years. Little fun fact about Mordy, a long time ago. And again, dating myself that I could say that and it being a long time ago. By the way, I'm channeling my inner saltiness with that.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I would like to, so salty, like Dead Sea salty. I would like to talk about operations in a deeper way, because I have al to say about operations. So Crystal and I are going to take a very deep thought into what makes a good operator with a deep thought from Crystal and a Mordy.

So I think there's a universal concept around being good at operations that exist across the board, that sometimes when we get stuck in the marketing or SEO conversation, operations in that context we don't talk about, because we're talking about operations from an SEO team point of view or operations from a digital marketing team point of view. But let's perhaps zoom out and talk about just what does it mean to be good at operations.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah. I think that this is something, particularly within an SEO team, within an SEO agency, it's hard. It's hard.

Mordy Oberstein:

Operations is the hardest thing in my opinion.

Crystal Carter:

It's really difficult. It's really hard. And I know folks who said, I was in a conversation and someone was saying, "I admire this agency owner, because it's really hard running an agency." It's really hard. You've got to think about making sure you can keep the lights on. You have to make sure that everybody's learning stuff. You have to make sure that you're keeping your clients happy. You have to think about all of those sorts of things. And essentially with an agency, what you have is a knowledge-based business. You have something where the knowledge that you have as a team is your bread and butter, that is what people are paying for is what you know. And so you have to make sure that you're keeping those folks happy and that you're keeping everybody clever and all of that sort of stuff, and that they have all the tools that they need and all of that.

And so you spend a lot of time deciding, do we need this tool? Is this training module that we're investing in really useful? Is this particular operational tool going to help us make the difference? Because for instance, when people get those team management tools, there's a learning curve. You have to invest months in training your entire team to learn this new operational tool like a Monday or that sort of thing or Asana or whatever. So you have to spend all the time investing and you're like, "Is this going to be worth it, going to be worth it down the line? Are we going to be able to make the money back on this?" All of those sorts of things.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think you can even zoom out from there, because there's a part of operations where you're trying to make it all go and make it all work. And then I think there's a part of operations where you're basically a gatekeeper. And I think this is the part of operations that no one likes to talk about because it's not very fun. It's super complicated and it has less to do with the sexy part of growth, and more to do with the things that are really super annoying.

Which is, so you have a new tool, let's say. You're going to use a new tool. So one part of the operator is like, "Okay, do they have the new tool? Do they have the onboarding to understand the new tool? Are they able to succeed?" And that's the part of operating where you feel good about yourself, I'm helping people succeed. Then this is the part of operating where you feel bad about yourself, and that's the part of making sure they're actually doing the things that you ask them to do. Or making sure that the vendor did all the things that you ask them to do. And making sure that the vendor and the people who are on your team are both doing the things together that you ask them to do. And that part's not as fun. And that part is just, it's just following. It's an insane level of detail.

I'll tell you. So when I used to do operations, it was for a property manager company. They had like 3000 apartment units in New York City, and they had all sorts of legal cases going on. Which is, well, the worst part of my job actually. And I, every month would audit out of hundreds of legal cases every month to make sure that the attorneys were doing what they were supposed to do. And it was super tedious and super annoying, and it wasn't the kind of thing you would expect a COO to do. That doesn't seem important. Because all the things that you don't see a COO do are the things that are super minute, super detailed that they have to do that they don't really want to talk about, and that are not really fun to talk about.

There's an insane level of detail, and I'll tell you that being a mild control freak helps. And that's the hard part, because you have to be a control freak, but you can't let that freakiness show at all. Because then your team's going to be really annoyed that you're being a control freak or you're micromanaging them. So you need to report back to either the board or the CEO or whoever it is that's running the company and know all of the answers. Which means following up on all of the insane level of detail without making your team feel like you're micromanaging them. And that's the hard part of operations, is being a good operator means balancing every stupid little thing, knowing every stupid little thing. But not passing on that level of micromanagement to the people who are working under you. You have to keep that to yourself.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that team cohesion point is super important. So I've been, it's award season. I've been judging a lot of SEO awards and including like SEO agency over the year kind of things. And one of the things people always put in the criteria, or one of the things that comes in as a criteria is, what about your team? How are you managing your team? And if you're a good operations manager, then you're doing all that nuts and bolts stuff. You're doing all of the things that keep everything ticking over, even if it's boring, even if it's not glamorous. You're doing all of those things to keep everyone ticking over and you're making sure that your team are in a good state of mind to be able to do good work. And that is something that is, that's gold dust. That's gold dust. I've worked with good operations managers who were able to do that and seen incredible results, because when people feel good job satisfaction and they feel they're in a safe and stable place.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's the hard balance, is that you have to be able to do that while also being all up in their business at the same time and knowing everything that's going on. It's super hard. I think one thing that you can try, it just really is having good relationships. It's knowing how to ask for things. It's knowing how to follow up for things. It's knowing when to follow up with things and letting things go.

The person, for whatever reason, the company structure where I used to work, this is almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Wow, I'm old. The CFO worked under the COO, which is a weird way of running it, but that's for whatever reason, CEO, a lot of Cs going on. That's how they wanted to do it. Which I always felt was awkward, because normally the CFO would not be under the COO, it would kind of be a co-relationship, at the same level. How the heck do I navigate this?

And my last day there, the CFO came in and said, "Whoever you bring in, you need to make sure that they know they're not my boss, because Mordy wasn't my boss. Mordy and I just worked together." And she walked out of the room and she was like, "How the hell did you pull that off? She didn't think you were her boss this whole time, it's four years? I'm like, "No, I just made it seem like everything we're doing is part of our cooperation together. I knew when to push, when not to push, when to follow up, when not to follow up and when to let things that were going wrong, just let them go for the sake of the team environment kind of thing."

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that's super important. I think nowadays there's a lot of tools that allow you to do that with fewer touch points. So particularly there's a lot of agency management tools like we talked about, I mentioned Monday, other ones I've used their Teamwork. I've also seen, there's Asana, there's a few other things like that, some people use, what's the one with the cards? It's got all those cards all the way along. There's one that has, it's really big -

Mordy Oberstein:

I only know Monday and Asana.

Crystal Carter:

So there's a few different ones. There's all these different flavors of all of these different things. And also even in Wix, with Wix Studio we have some great tools that allow you to do this, for instance, that allow you to set tasks and set workflows and things like that. And those are really great for real time reporting so that the COO who needs to have a bird's eye view of what everybody's doing can go and check those things without going, "Hey, what you doing? Hey, what you doing? Hey, what's this?" That sort of thing. So using tools like that can help you to get the information you need and also help you to not drive everyone crazy.

The other thing that's great about tools like this is they can also give you information on stuff that can help you help clients, help you help your team as well. So some of these tools will give you information on how much time you've been spending on a client. And sometimes clients will be like, "Oh, I want this and this and this and this." And because they ask a lot of questions, they get a lot of time, but they might not necessarily be paying for all of that time. And that's something that people have to be very mindful of, particularly when you're billing on a monthly, daily, hourly basis. That's something that a COO really has to keep track of for the whole team, and that's something that can make a really big difference.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll give you a tip on this, I putting myself back in those shoes, what I would do in that situation. Let's say I notice there's way too much time being spent on clients that I can tell this is not billed time. So instead of going in and saying, "Hey you, we can't be doing this," make it great sympathy. If you're an operator or your operations, you go to the person and you say, "Hey, look, I get what you're doing. We should be doing this. I have a problem though because the CEO is down my back saying, "Hey, why is so much time being spent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And ask them, "What can we do here?" And get their solutions on it. But don't make it about they're messing up. Sometimes the way you want to leverage it is that you have a problem that you have to figure out because your neck is on the line.

And it's not like I'm coming after you, I don't care that you do this. From my point of view, go ahead, keep talking to the client all day long. But I'm going to get nailed on it and I'm going to get asked about it, so what could we do to figure this out together? So you give an understanding of the fact that, "Hey, I understand where you're coming from and I personally don't care, and also help me out because I'm going to get nailed if we don't figure this out. Because at the end of the day, it's on me to make sure we're not doing this."

Crystal Carter:

I think that the good operations managers will definitely foster that kind of team mentality, that we're a team and we all need to move this needle. We all need to make sure that this makes sense for everyone so that we can all get some good results. And I think that that's really core to the operations aspect of SEO management.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know who's great at managing their news output and getting operating all of the news content for the entire industry on a daily basis? He might be a one-man show, but he sure knows how to operate. It's Barry Schwartz, which brings us to the SEO News. So here's this week's Snappy SEO News.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. The last week's episode was all about AI and ranking, but this week's news is all about AI and maybe ranking, I don't know. First up, from Barry Schwartz and search engine land, Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE. Some have speculated that Google's going to announce the launch of SGE at Google's IO event on May 14th. Google has said to Barry, "We have not confirmed that. We have not said anything like that. There is no date set yet." Many speculate that not going to do anything until they figure out how to deal with the ad revenue and whatnot. Anyway, so I guess it's a public service announcement more than anything. The SGE has no official date to go live yet.

Onwards from Barry Schwartz, but this time from Search Engine Roundtable, new Google Shopping and Maps search features. So a lot of these, okay, backtrack. Google announced a whole heap of features related to Maps and AI, and shopping and AI, and stuff and AI, and a lot of it, to quote Barry, is old, not new. And if you follow Barry on seroundtable.com, which you should check out each and every day for the SEO News. Barry's covered a bunch of these announcements already. This is why it's fun to track what Barry tracks, because you can see when people say, "Hey, Barry is this new?" And Barry's like, "Oh yeah, that's new." And it's a test and it finally rolls out. Barry's already covered it.

So officially though, Google's announced some of these features that Barry has caught over the past couple of months, such as, for example, you can now have, well, you've had it for a while I guess. But in the U.S., you could swipe left, swipe right to get style recommendations. Google has its feature for movie recommendations, so you can kind of refine what Google shows you. So it'll show you get style recommendations and you can, it shows you a picture of a polo shirt and with stripes on it, you give it a thumbs up and you swipe to the next one. It's a polo shirt with polka dots. You're like, "No, that's ugly. Thumbs down." And this way you can get more catered or more tasteful to your liking, at least shopping recommendations on the Google SERP, right from Google.

Another shopping thing that, again, Barry covered this, I think back in February, was that you can ask AI on Google to generate an image of an article of clothing. So you say, I don't know, "Pants with stripes and purple polka dots," which I think only clowns would wear. But anyway, that's your thing, or if you're a clown. You can now have the AI generate it and then say, "Great. Now show me similar looking products," and you can find the product that you want that way. So that's also rolled out. I don't know if that's, I think it's only... Yeah, that one's only in the U.S.

And then there's some interesting things around local. So for example, Google, you can click on an image in a Google business profile. So you go to your favorite pizza place in New York, Joe's Pizza, which is actually a real place. I'm not making that up. And you see the image of, I don't know, a Sicilian pizza, and you click on it. You'll now be able to see reviews related to that particular item of food and a whole bunch of other review summaries and that sort of thing in the Google Business profile. So that's interesting.

Another one just run through, there's a whole heap of these, I'll link to the articles so you can see all of them. But just another one that stuck out to me was, Google is using SGE to give you a trip itinerary. So you search for something like, "Create a three-Day trip itinerary for me that shows the history of Philadelphia," and it'll create a whole three-day itinerary of what you should do on day one, day two and day three. I think that's a little interesting, little Mordy commentary for you here. Some of these are great. I guess the shopping styles thing, I guess that's really helpful, you shop a lot online or whatever. The reviews for the particular item on the menu and then the Google business profile, that seems helpful.

Three-day itinerary where you're just like, "Yeah, show me an itinerary. I am not going to explore anymore. I'll just do what you say, Google." That doesn't really seem to be a good use of AI in my opinion. This is just my take. This is pure Mordy take. It just feels like, this is really fun, but it's not really helpful. And I wonder if sometimes the big tech brands, Google and Bing swing and miss on this kind of stuff with the approach of like, "Yeah, people don't want to actually explore anything. We'll just give you the answer and you'll just take what we give you." I don't think that's how it works. I think human beings are always going to want to explore.

If I'm taking a week off of work, I'm taking my family to Philadelphia, I'm going to explore the city. I'm not going to say, "Hey, Google, just create an itinerary for me. I'm going to invest in that. I'm going to look at each option. I'm going to say, "You know what? That doesn't look so much fun. That does look fun. My kids are going to freak out if I go to this one. That one looks way better or more interactive."" I'm going to put the effort in to explore and research for myself what I think is best for me and my family when we go on vacation to spend all that money. Maybe if I'm like, I'm blowing a day in Philadelphia, "Google, give me five things to do in Philadelphia today." All right, maybe I would do that.

So in some of these instances where I think the Google and the Bings of the world are basically saying, "We'll give you the information and you'll just take it I think that works with smaller things perhaps, but I think you're never going to get past the need for the human being to want to explore and see things for themselves and make their own decisions. So I think when they take these things like an itinerary for a vacation, they're like, "Yeah, take this. Use it. Go for it. SGE output, AI output." I'm not sure that works and I think the Googles and the Bings of the world, again, I think they're still trying to figure that out. But again, I think they'll see, my prediction at least, they'll see for those kinds of things. People, maybe they'll create the itinerary, but you'll see the next thing they do is start researching each one of those things and creating their own itinerary. That's just my take, and that's this week's snappy news.

It really must be an operation to produced so much news content on a day-by-day basis.

Crystal Carter:

I thought he went into real surgical detail with it. That's what I thought.

Mordy Oberstein:

See what you did there. He's a smooth operator, that Barry. Speaking of smooth operators, you know who operates an SEO agency with a ton of SEOs? It's Blake Denman over to RicketyRoo, which means that our follower of the week this week is Blake Denman from RicketyRoo. Spoiler alert from here.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, no, Blake is a great follower. He's got a fantastic, fantastic cohort of some wonderful, wonderful SEOs on his team, Amanda Jordan, Celeste Gonzalez, Melissa Popp, some amazing, amazing, incredible people.

Mordy Oberstein:

And they have a great vibe.

Crystal Carter:

A great vibe.

Mordy Oberstein:

And they get stuff done.

Crystal Carter:

Great team, and I think that, again, you're as good as your team, particularly from an SEO point of view, and when you've got a great team, then you're able to do incredible things. I also forgot to shout out VP of operations at RicketyRoo, Tess, who's fantastic. Tess, Voecks, who's amazing as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

The problem with RicketyRoo is that we're going to be here all day naming them.

Crystal Carter:

All day saying how great they are, because we love, shout out to the full Roo crew.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like that, the Roo crew. But if you have questions around, "Hey, how do I manage and operate an SEO team?" I think Blake would be a great person for you to talk to because he's clearly doing a great job with it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Because he's got so many great folks on his team, so he must be doing a great job.

Mordy Oberstein:

He must be, and you can follow Blake over on X @blakedenman. That's B-L-A-K-E D-E-N-M-A-N on X, formerly known as Twitter, currently known as Twitter in my mind. We have to do an outro now. I need to say something charismatic.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you all for joining us today on this great episode of SERP's Up.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was thinking of, hey, let's cut that out and retry that, but now we're not doing that. Now we're going to go with it. We're doing it live.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, whatever. It's fine. We're a team. We're a team. That's something we do, we support each other.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's how we operate.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. We just bring it back in and deal the deal, get the job done.

Mordy Oberstein:

I freely admit, I had an absolute brain fart there, I'm like, "Wait, what comes next? Oh, yeah. We need to end the show now."

Crystal Carter:

It's fine, we can end it. I think we've done a great job and we hit all our KPIs and our targets and our goals and our aims and objectives, and well done everyone. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

You'd think after 81 episodes, I'd know how to operate this thing, but clearly not. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Don't worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into the maturation process of SEO. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast, or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over 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.