Can you have TOO much SEO data?

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 Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who loves all things data, SEO data, LLM data, AI data, analytics data, GSC data, third party tool data, head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello people of the internet. I hope you are well.

Mordy Oberstein:

They can't answer. How do we ever know if they're well or not? Tell us.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. Do you think that we are going to be able to hear from them? They should tell us. They should tag us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh no, no. That opens up Pandora's box for all the hypochondriacs of the world to be like, "Oh, I'll tell you why I'm not doing well."

Crystal Carter:

"Hey, my sciatica's playing up, the weather's gone and I'm really struggling."

Mordy Oberstein:

Like, "Hey, how are you doing?" passing by in the grocery store, like somebody you don't really know so well, I don't know, a neighbor down the block kind of thing you never talk to and they're like, "Oh well, you know..." No, no, no. Didn't really mean it.

Crystal Carter:

Fine. Fine is the answer. Fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fine. Or, "Yeah, I've been better, but things will get better." That's fine too. Tolerable. Fine. As long as a conversation results in three seconds and me going to get a jar of pickles and you going to get whatever you're buying.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly, exactly. I think sometimes you just got to keep it moving.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just keep it moving. Too spicy early on the podcast?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, I don't know. It's like maybe they'll just start sharing stats. Maybe they'll pull out their health monitor thing and start telling me about their BMI and stuff. Just like too much data. Maybe that's what they'll give you.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what my blood sugar is right now? Nope. This Service Hub podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can subscribe to our SEO newsletter. Search for it over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter and take our SEO course. But it's also where you can get keyword data right inside the platform with our native integrations with Semrush, SE Ranking, Wincher, as this week we ask, can you ever have too much data? Let's explore the side that says you can never have too much of a good thing, as well as a side that says too much data might be a distraction, but also how is SEO data used today and how does it differ from yesteryear?

Bottled imaginations, PR director and co-founder Katy Powell chimes in on using data for creative campaigns that get links, high DA ones too, plus we'll chat about the different data LLM based search engines may use. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So throw on another scoop onto that cone and order an extra slice, because like carbs, you can never have too much of a good thing, which is SEO data on this, the 106th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Wow, that really tied into the blood sugar thing. Blood sugar now, extra slices and scoops. I didn't plan that.

Crystal Carter:

What? You've lost me, but I hope everything is well with you.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm fine.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, good. I am fine, I'm fine. Yeah, there was a lot of data for my little brain to handle. So on this topic, this is something that's been rattling around in my head for a little while. We are inundated with data. And speaking of those health tracker things, I saw somebody who was like, "I don't need to know all of this stuff about myself. It's too much information." I've got one of those apps and it tells you all of this stuff, your oxygen... I don't even know. I don't know what it means.

And I think that this is something that happens a lot of time in marketing. Marketing is full of charts and stats and graphs and everything. And it's really, really good to have great information about what's going on on your website. We, in our Wix studio tools, we've got Google Search Console data, we have Wix Analytics data, we have stuff that will tell you about people who have come in and what pages they've clicked on and where they've gone to and which channels people are coming to your website. Lots of that sort of stuff.

And these things are fantastic, but sometimes if you have too much data, for clients, it can be a little bit overwhelming, for instance. So if you're talking to clients, and I've had this before, where I had a client who was new to us as an agency, when I was working in agency side, and they said, "We get these reports," from their current or previous agency. They said, "We get these reports, but we have no idea what they mean." And there were so many charts on that, and they had so much information, but the client didn't understand them.

And I think that from a reporting side, there can definitely be data overload. We have a fantastic article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, and in fact we also have a fantastic course from Judith Lewis, and she talks about these in both of these. When you're talking to stakeholders, the executive summary is your friend. So have the data. If you're the person who's managing the data, who's looking at all of the information, the executive summary is your friend. Give me the TLDR of why I should care about this stack of stats and bubble charts and pie graphs and bar charts and all of that sort of stuff. Sum it up with some key indicators.

And Judith Lewis, in her article about talking to multi-stakeholder reporting, talks about all of this. And in her course in the Wix Studio Academy, she gets into all of these details as well. And it's absolutely super, super valuable and will absolutely upgrade how you relate to clients. Because you need to make sure that they only have the data that they need, otherwise their eyes will glaze over and they will get bored.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm sorry, you lost me. I got glazed over and talking about numbers. I blacked out there for a minute.

Crystal Carter:

Right? And I think it's important to remember that, that there's some people who, if you give them too many numbers and too many digits and too many charts, they will just tune out. I've been in meetings before where I've been pitching to clients, where I've been presenting my data, and I'm like, "Yeah, look at this and look at that," and it's too granular. They need to know sales went up, conversions went up, traffic went up. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also, even when they do, let's say they are a numbers person, and you're going into this little minutia of this and this. We fixed this for having broken links. And they're not an SEO person, you're talking about number of broken links, like yes, they might understand, they might even be a former SEO person. It's a distraction and it can show, by the way, that you're distracted, that you're not focused on the right thing.

And maybe you are, by the way, maybe you are distracted. Because sometimes data is distracting. So much data that you look here, you look there. And I'll say data, I know in certain things or for certain types of things, data is really linear, it's very direct and it's very logical. The number of broken links was 100, now it's 50. Or maybe it's five now, you did a better job. When you're starting to look at things that are a little more complex than the number of broken links, so then you start to look at activities. What was the user activity? They went to this page. But it doesn't explain the behavior.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're two different things.

Crystal Carter:

So here's another thing. So for instance, I've got an article on bounce rate. For GA4 they updated what bounce rate means. And bounce rate for GA4, before it was like people went to the site, they didn't click anything and they left. And now on GA4, essentially bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. So if they engaged by 10%, then the bounce rate was 90%. And that's the inverse of it. And it has to do with clicks and things like that.

Now, one of the things that I was looking at is people are very, in terms of data, this is something that people get really hung up on, as bounce rate, is certainly clients, also because it's kind of got a good name. But one of the things that's tricky is if you just look at bounce rate as a data point, it doesn't tell the full story. Whereas if you use something like Microsoft Clarity, and I'm shouting out loads of articles, we've got a great article on Microsoft Clarity by Celeste Gonzalez.

Mordy Oberstein:

And integration with Microsoft Clarity.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Where you can check it out on your Wix studio website. And one of the things that they point out is that for that tool, not only can you see how far people scroll, but you can also see rage clicks, where people are like, "Why can't I click this? Why isn't this working?" And they've clicked it seven times, expecting for the word that's bold to be a link and it's not a link, and they clicked it a bunch of times. And that tells you a different story.

So I think the other thing about data is making sure that you have the right tool to measure what you're seeing. So it might be that maybe you see the bounce rate thing and maybe that goes, okay, that's a clue. That bit of data is a clue, but that's a clue that you might need another tool to help you get into that information. And I think that's really, really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and it gets especially more complicated when you're looking at things. Okay, it's not like a UI or UX interface issue. You're trying to explain why did the user take this action? Why didn't they take it? Why did they share this post? Everyone went online, they read this article, they all shared it, why? What happened? So the data will tell you that everyone shared it, where they shared it to, who shared it, when they shared it, but it can't exactly explain why they shared it and what was different. And that's something where you have to actually create a narrative.

Data should help you create narratives. And that's where you can put together, if you look at the other articles that people shared, when they shared them, and now you're looking at this article, you can find, hey, there's a common theme between the articles that people tend to share, now I can create a narrative. Because I know SEOs balk at this, sometimes correlation does equal causation. Well, it doesn't actually equal causation, but sometimes causation is good enough, and sometimes causation is accurate, and sometimes causation, it's life is the best that you have. And if you have very strong correlation, you can create a narrative. And you can use data to create a narrative, but don't get lost in, I don't know, it's not one-to-one.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And so I think this brings us on to what you should use data for. So sometimes you get loads of data, like SEO tools will spit out lots of data points. They'll say, "Oh, this has low HTML on this page." And you're like, that may or may not be an issue, because maybe it's just a thank you page and maybe that's fine. And so there's lots of data points that you get. But how can you use the data? Once you have good data, how can you use it?

One of the ways, you use this really, really regularly, Mordy, and I'm a big fan of how you do this really, really well, is data studies. So data studies, where you're able to concentrate on a particular data point and look at how that plays out in different scenarios and things like that, that can be incredibly valuable for progressing an idea in your industry. But it can also be incredibly valuable for bringing together lots of information from a research point of view. And I think that that is something that can be super, super useful. But when you're doing that, you need to be really targeted with the kinds of data that you're looking at. And you need to, again, I think we have another podcast on this, so do check that out, about data studies and how you can make sure that you're looking at the right points.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I mean, by the way, one of the advantages of using a data study is you get the insight yourself out of it.

Crystal Carter:

And telling that story, as you were saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, but also, so with the data it's realizing what are the boundaries of that story? What does it say? What doesn't it say? And yes, I can draw a conclusion, but how far can I go with a conclusion, or how strong is a conclusion? And sometimes it's fine to say, you know what, I conclude X, but I'm not 100% sure.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also helpful. Also helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Definitely helpful. Definitely helpful. And I think that that's really important. So I think also it's important to sometimes, particularly if you're thinking about getting into thought leadership, sometimes if you're in a thought leadership space, you might be the first person talking about this topic. And so it might be that there's not a lot of data out there. So you can go like, this is what I can see, or this is what I've concluded from the data that I have. And people will take you at your word and they'll say, "Okay, well I will investigate this further," and they will add to that conversation.

And so that's really, really useful as well. And this is a thought leadership tactic that is useful in any industry. So if you are somebody who's advising somebody or some of your clients to do some thought leadership, it's also okay for them to take a little bit of a risk and say, "I know this is a new idea, but I think this." And what I see very often is people who do that, people who are confident enough to set out their stall and take the information they have and to run with it, they get a lot of engagement, they get a lot of people interested in what they're saying, because that is an evolving conversation.

If conversations that are already where we've got already got all of the information already sent out, that's ground that's already been covered. But if you've got something that's new, even if you don't have every single data point, that doesn't mean that the conversation isn't worth having, as long as you caveat with the fact that you're coming at it from your perspective and using the tools that you've got.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and it's like the abundance of SEO data. I don't know, keyword difficulty, keyword score this, that metric, search volume, there's a plethora of these metrics.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're all good.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're all great. By the way, Semrush has a cool new plugin its like a personalized keyword difficulty based on the assessment of your own site, how difficult is it for you. Which makes so much more sense, because I don't know if you want to rank for buy shoes, it's not difficult for Nike, they're ranking number two or number one. But here, we're super difficult. Anyway, but all of that, that's actually a good point. You have all this data, there's a ton of it out there, and I think if you're looking at doing SEO today, it needs to be qualified way more than it was ever.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, definitely. If somebody says, oh, you just need to... People would look at a keyword like buy shoes. And Nike, as you said, they say, "Oh, there's tons of keyword search volume for that." And the other thing about it, is that just because a big search volume, that data point, just because there's big search volume doesn't mean you're going to get all of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Doesn't mean it's for you anyway.

Crystal Carter:

It doesn't mean it's for you anyway. And it doesn't mean that the people that go to that keyword, that Google is sending them to a website. We have another podcast on this with people talking about this as well, but for those head terms, Google's very often like, "That's not enough information, hun, can we filter you? What kind of shoes do you want? You want sandals, you want sneakers, you want high tops? What do you need, hun?"

They're going to filter those people. So that's a starter query, and they will filter those people. And also, just because there's such high search volume doesn't mean there's high search intent, or doesn't mean there's high click intent at all. So it might just be that they're searching for how far is it from the moon to the sun? There might be an instant answer there. Nobody's necessarily expecting to click on anything.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right.

Crystal Carter:

So those data points, they're a clue, but you have to look into it as well. You can't just take those points at face value.

Mordy Oberstein:

Somebody asked me for my SEO predictions like 2025 kind of thing and I wrote, it's going to be less about overall visibility, and being at the right place at the right time, with the right tone, with the right message, at the exact right time, and resonance. Because just the way the internet is structured with AI ends, AI overviews and direct answers, and then consumers looking for being more specific and knowing what they want a little bit more, being more informed, not wanting to be nudged the same way, all those kind of things coming together.

So you being able to use that data, not just to find the keyword, but using the data to find the right keyword or the right kind of keyword or the right kind of keywords or phrases or topics for the right audience, that you could be there at the right time, is how you should be using this data now versus how you should have been using this data 10 years ago maybe.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think the audience point is so key, because the audiences are so clutch right now. The way that people are doing spray and pray SEO of just going after big keywords and doing skyscraper posts and things like that, cool, you'll still get some traffic from that, but the data that you have on your audiences will give you a lot more information on what will actually resonate and what will actually cut through when we are in the sea of content that we find ourselves in with the proliferation of AI tools and AI capability for creating content. So if everybody has the ability to write pretty good content, then you need to have content, like you said, that's the right place, for the right audience, at the right time that they need to hear, and they go, "Oh yes, thank you Mordy, thank you Crystal." This is exactly what they needed. And that's genuinely helpful and I think that that's really important.

Speaking of AI models, if you're building your AI models, data is super, super useful for this. It can help you to make sure that your models are doing the right things. AI models are also incredibly helpful for tidying up data. So if you get a massive data set for someone, one of my favorite uses for AI is to pull out the data points to sort of clean it up, so that you can use it for creating articles, so you can use it for telling that data story, so that you can use it for sharing online and things like that. So if you're not using AI for helping you to shape your data, then I highly recommend it. We have a great webinar with Ross Hudgens where he talks about that, and the team at Siege Media do this really, really well. So highly recommend that too.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're looking to use data to shape not just your AI models, but your creative campaigns in a way that gets links, well, here's the PR director and co-founder of Bottled Imagination, Katy Powell, on how to do just that.

Katy Powell:

We use data at all parts of the ideation process really when it comes to our creative campaigns. So first of all, researching into the topic area, we use content analysis tools which allow us to see really how many articles are written about a certain topic in our client's field at a certain time to validate whether that's a topic that the audience actually cares about. If we're going to do a big creative campaign, we still back this by insight. I think this really helps to answer that, "So what? Who cares?" point. Also, it really helps to remove the subjectivity of this campaign when we pitch it to the client. If we're able to say, there's been this many thousand articles written about this topic in this last year, so we really feel like it's something that A, your audience really reads about, and also cares about too.

Then once we've got the topics, we can kind of start to delve into the types of stories that are being talked about around this. So something we see works quite well is if we see a topic's being talked about a lot within the client's field, but it's all opinion led, is there a way we can find some data and turn this into facts? So rather than just an opinion piece, we actually bring the facts and bring the data and create something kind of ownable to our client that acts as the sort of true resource for this information.

For example, we've got a B2B Tech client. They want to land their marketing press. We saw that rebranding's talked about a lot within this kind of press. So we created a rebranding kind of hub of information of stats, which is now ranking, and it's also picking up links organically without us outreaching, because it's a true, strong resource of information for rebranding. That was also coupled with a really nice creative. I think we find if we've got some really solid data that's ownable to the client, plus a lovely creative, a beautiful piece of imagery or a video or whatever it is, and whatever the format is, that can be kind outreach gold.

And then the kind of data that we would use within these campaigns could be anything really from search data. So Google search data. We use Glimpse quite a lot. Big online databases, social media stats, government reports. I love YouGov. I think YouGov is brilliant for even just getting your brain going in that field. I think unfortunately there's not really a quick fix for the data part. I think it is getting your hands dirty and research. We would usually say let's try and find a free resource before we go to something like a survey, unless it's a client that is in a field where we really do need to do a survey, and then we will do that. I do think though, it's always good just to kind of get stuck into research and try and find some free databases before you pay for something, because it can be quite expensive.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks so much, Katy. Make sure to give Katy Powell a big follow on social media. Links to our social media profiles in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, their team are fantastic. Katy and everyone over at Bottled Imagination are doing some fantastic work. When we were thinking about this, they were the first folks that I thought of because they are amazing at, like she said, their owned data. So some of the clients owned data to shape a newsworthy story. A prime example of this is they were working with someone with Dap Gamble and they were looking at NFTs, and they ended up getting tons and tons of media, 1500 pieces of coverage around the world, because they figured out from the data that they had that most NFTs are worth nothing.

So they found out that when they looked at this, that most NFTs were dead NFTs, and they were able to pull something over. So they examined an entire asset class of 73,000 collection NFTs, and they found that most of them are worth nothing. And it went everywhere. It went absolutely everywhere. They have another campaign where they were looking at studies that said that public restrooms were likely to be removed, and so they had the toilets are endangered species or something was a thing. And they're really, really great at pulling together noteworthy information from data and driving a story.

Mordy Oberstein:

Finding gems.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, finding gems. And I think that we think about this in our day-to-day. If you find one of those articles that has all of the data points for the thing that you're interested in, then you go back to that page loads. You'll go back to that page because it'll have lots of information. If you're interested in, I don't know, sheds or something, I recently bought a shed, and you wanted, what different types of wood, what different types of roofs, what different types of this? How long does a shed last? What's the average size of a shed?

All of those different data points. If you've got people who are pulling together all of those data points from lots of different sources, then you're saving them time by creating something that's one big data set. And if you have that data set as part of your own information, then all the better. So that means that, for instance, with the case of the NFTs, there was only one place that had that much data. So if anybody wanted to talk about this topic, they have to come back to that piece of content. And this is the thing that Bottled Imagination are really great at, and this is something that I think that people talk about, how do we build links? It's like, do something link worthy. And they're really good at this, and data's a great way to do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of data and having lots of it, LLM search engines are looking at a wide variety of big data sources, which means it's time for us to run the little segment we call so many search engines.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like all we do is talk about LLM search engines now, by the way. That's the thing. I wake up in the morning, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm really bothered by LLM search engines. I really need to ponder them this morning for an hour over a cup of coffee."

Crystal Carter:

Dude, I've been doing a deck on this.

Mordy Oberstein:

This thing has gone viral. Your deck has gone viral. Queen of the LLM search engines.

Crystal Carter:

Do you know what it was? The reason why, it comes back to it, it's basically like people ask me, and then I ask myself. So people are like, "How do I show up in ChatGPT? How do I show up in Claude or Gemini?" and that sort of thing. And so then you start thinking. And I find that I end up writing things, and I think this is a data thing as well, and you do this with your studies, I know this, where you're like, what is this? You'll have a thing that sticks in your brain, and you're like, I really want to know if this equals this. And you can't get it out of your brain. If you can't get it out of your brain, you have to write it down. So that's the thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

So LLM search engines, they're obviously looking at lots of different data sources like, I don't know, the web, Wikipedia, all these mentions of you across the web, articles about you, kind of everything. They're kind of looking at everything. I wonder about social. How much you're looking at social. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Probably not. Reddit maybe.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So here's the thing. So a lot of these tools have content partnerships with various different folks. So Reddit has content partnerships.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. And so maybe switch that. I don't think X does, but Reddit does.

Crystal Carter:

Reddit has content partnerships with OpenAI, and they have content partnerships with Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Goog.

Crystal Carter:

The Goog. So they've got partnerships with that. In terms of Wikipedia, all of the LLMs are trained on Wikipedia.

Mordy Oberstein:

LLM has been training in all your stuff for years, you haven't even noticed.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So they've all been trained on Wikipedia. There's 66 million pages on Wikipedia, plus all of the Wiki data stuff that comes with it. And it's all comments. It's all copyright free. So of course, if I was building an LLM, I would absolutely train it on Wikipedia. But the thing that people forget is that if it's trained on Wikipedia, it's essentially trained on entities.

So all of the data that's backed up, that's on your entity, all of the information that's on your entity is attached to that as part of that. So I think that that's really important to think about. But in terms of other data, some of the content partnerships, OpenAI is out here like Thanos, collecting big publishers. So there's that post from Detailed that talks about 16 companies dominating Google search results. I'm sure we've all seen that diagram, which I find fascinating. And OpenAI already has content partnerships with three out of 16 of those publishers.

Mordy Oberstein:

So that's the whole thing, they have partnership with these publishers.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And that means that basically they have access to their whole archive of stuff. So that includes Hearst, Fox Media and Conde Nast, just from those top 16 publishers. But if you look at the web wider, another big one is News Corp. News Corp has tons and tons of properties. They also have a partnership with OpenAI, and it also includes, they also cover Prisa, Le Monde, Time, GDI, The Atlantic. So these are all things that are publisher collapse. I talk about this in my article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or Wix Studio Learning Hub, which talks about SEO for brand visibility and LLMs, I talk about it there. So there's a list of these as well, but Perplexity also has content partnerships. So with Time, Entrepreneur, Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah, Der Spiegel. Just saying...

Crystal Carter:

To be honest, from a little sidebar, it's a little bit of a random collection of publications there. But do you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Der Spiegel.

Crystal Carter:

So I think that it's important when you're looking at, if you're thinking about LLMs, the training data forms the basis for their knowledge. So with these LLMs, they will have a training data. They'll have a knowledge cutoff date that their training data goes up to, and it will vary by LLM. So for instance, and it will also vary within the LLM. So if you're using the free version of ChatGPT, for instance, if they don't have you on a test or something, which they sometimes do for mine, if you're using the free version of ChatGPT, the knowledge cutoff date for you is probably going to be around like September, 2021. But if you're using the premium version of ChatGPT, it could be as up to date as December, 2023. Claude-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's super up to date.

Crystal Carter:

Well, Claude is pulling in data from April, 2024 for their premium version. And Gemini won't say, they'll guarantee you to 2023, but I've also seen them update. They update on top of that as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

They'll be on the fly. They're kind of like Bing, because they're pulling in from... They have the whole search index. I don't feel it's as big of a problem for them. They have the connection, they have it all right there. They just have this sort of like left hand needs talk to the right hand.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And they're still testing everything and all of that sort of stuff. And then Copilot has an app, and their data goes up to October, 2023. And those are for the ones that are the, I call them sort of static pre-trained data sets. So those are the ones that aren't necessarily jacked into the web. The ones that are search augmented, like perplexity, like ChatGPT Premium, which has the search one, and also Copilot on 365, those ones will have the legacy information from their static pre-trained dataset, but the ones that are search augmented will also have search data.

So I tested this on Copilot for instance, and I tested it, it was a while back, but I tested this on Copilot and I said, what did Zendaya wear to the Oscars last week? And it was in a year when Zendaya didn't actually go to the Oscars. But online there were people sharing AI images of Zendaya in an outfit, and people were like, "Oh my God, slay queen." And she wasn't there. She wasn't there. And so I asked Copilot, I said, what did she wear? And Copilot said, "She did not go to the Oscars. She was spending time with her boyfriend Tom Holland," and that was that. And I was like, okay, Copilot, well done. Good job. Yeah, it's good. So they will update.

But I think that when you're thinking about the difference between a search augmented one like Perplexity, like Copilot on 365, like ChatGPT with search, versus a more static one like Claude, like ChatGPT basic I guess you would say, and Copilot the app, the data, understanding when the data cut off happens is really important, especially if your client or another stakeholder comes to you and says, why aren't we ranking in ChatGPT for this thing that we just launched a month ago? And you're like, because their knowledge cut off data hasn't updated.

It's a little bit like thinking about an encyclopedia. So the encyclopedia or the phone book would come out every year. If you launched your business in January and the phone book came out in the December before, then you're going to have to wait until the next time the phone book comes out or the next time the encyclopedia comes out before you're in it. And they will update their data training sets periodically. And if you're really interested in where you're in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, you're going to need to keep up to date with how often they're updating their data sets and which new data sets they're adding to it.

Mordy Oberstein:

You who's constantly updating and constantly adding to his data set?

Crystal Carter:

Who's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Who could it be? Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Damn right.

Crystal Carter:

Just talking about Schwartz. Who is the man who writes for a search engine land? Barry Schwartz.

Mordy Oberstein:

Damn right. That's this time. It's this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. It's going to be really snappy because we're covering basically what happened right around the new year, which was not a whole lot because everybody was on vacation. Anywho, Google wasn't on vacation, and neither was Barry Schwartz. He doesn't take vacations, he doesn't rest. He'll sleep when he dies.

Google December 2024 spam update done rolling out. By the way, that's what Barry actually told me when I say, "It's three o'clock in the morning your time, why are you answering me?" Anywho, the spam update took seven days to roll out, and Barry thinks that it was really big. Sites are hit really hard. He actually did a whole YouTube video about it. You should check out Barry. Barry, by the way, since you've been gone, which I'm dying to break out into song, Barry has become a YouTube sensation. An actual YouTuber. So check out Barry's YouTube channel and see all of that for all of its, I'll call it glory. Barry does seem to think that this was a bigger spam update than usual. Lots of chatter, lots of ins and outs, a lot of what have yous, a lot of different people involved.

Next up from Roger Monte over at Search Engine Journal. Google Speculates if SEO is on a dying path. This comes from Google's latest Search Off the Record podcast episode where they talk about search is dying and blah, blah, blah. There was an interesting part of the conversation where I think it was John Mueller were talking about how a lot of the things that SEOs currently do in terms of retrieval, data retrieval, kind of falls into what will happen with getting registered with AI platforms, AI search engines. So John says specifically, and when you talk about kind of the retrieval augmented part, that's basically what SEOs work on, making content that's crawlable, indexable for search, and that kind of flows into all of these AI overviews, basically saying a lot of the things that SEOs are already doing kind of speaks to what will happen as the AI era continues to emerge.

My take is we keep having these conversations in very fragmented ways. That part is true on the data retrieval side, crawling and indexing. Then there's all these sorts of SEO conversations about how to get into these AI systems so that you register, I don't want to use the word rank again, but you register with them, and conversations around marketing and other channels and brand marketing and what you should be doing and thinking holistically. We keep having these different parts of the conversation, but we've yet to come sit down as an industry and talk about the entire conversation from one part of the spectrum to the complete opposite side of the SEO spectrum.

That would be a great conference, by the way. I don't know who out there is listening to this who creates SEO conferences. Calvin, are you out there? That would be a great SEO conference. Like it just goes through every single part of the entire conversation of the implications of AI and SEO from start to finish. Because I keep feeling like we keep having these fragmented conversations. Maybe it's something Barry can do that on his YouTube channel. Because he creates a lot of really great YouTube content now, if I haven't said that already. Check out, by the way, it's new, our daily SEO new series with Barry, which are not nearly as good as just Barry on his actual YouTube extravaganza that he's on right now. And with that, that's this week's snappy news. We should buy Barry like a long leather jacket.

Crystal Carter:

Right? And a turtle-neck and a chain.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh. So good.

Crystal Carter:

Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll pay you. Whatever it costs. It's worth it.

Crystal Carter:

Totally worth it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Totally worth it. Or Barry in an Elvis costume I think would be interesting too.

Crystal Carter:

I feel like he could pull that off. Because we have that... I got a picture of him with the arm up. And the cutout we have was him with an arm up.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Interesting.

Crystal Carter:

That could work. I don't know, does he like peanut butter sandwiches?

Mordy Oberstein:

No. Only butter sandwiches and ripped bread.

Crystal Carter:

This is correct.

Mordy Oberstein:

As this show goes off the rails, we want to make sure that you follow Debbie Chu online. Debbie Chu, part of our Wix Studio SEO course, did the link building offline SEO section of that course, is our follow of the week.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, and she is fantastic at this, and this is something that she's been working on for a while. She's got a great article about how to do link building and how to get links the right way. And she's a big, big fan of using data studies to do this, and she outlines some great tips on how to do that in her article. And she outlines some great tips on how to do that in the course, which is absolutely free, and I highly recommend. In fact, Eli Schwartz just recommended this course just a few weeks ago as well. So do tune in for the quality education.

Mordy Oberstein:

Check that out. And check out Debbie's social link in the show notes so you can follow her on social media.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hope that's enough data and information for you about following Debbie. Too much data?

Crystal Carter:

No, I don't think that we have enough Debbie data.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not enough Debbie data.

Crystal Carter:

More data on Debbie.

Mordy Oberstein:

Interesting. Debbie, share more data.

Crystal Carter:

Yay.

Mordy Oberstein:

There could never be enough data about Debbie. We can just call it Debbie data. It really flows. It's like alliteration.

Crystal Carter:

I'm enjoying saying it, but knowing Debbie, I don't think she'd be over the moon about us saying it a million times.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so we'll stop here.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, watch out bosses of the world, here's how you can negotiate your SEO salary.

Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content webinars and courses on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.