Building SEO momentum for growth

Mordy Oberstein:

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

Aloha. Mahalo for joining us SERP's Up podcast reporting on some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Overstein, I am SEO of Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulously incredible, the absolutely unequivocable, the absolutely uncomparable, the absolutely best in every way, shape, or form. The best person on planet Earth. Head of Instant Communications here at Wix, crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

I think Mordy's finally reached the end of the platitudes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know what to do anymore.

Crystal Carter:

I must tell you. I'm mediocre at bowling.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm terrible at bowling. I stink with bumpers.

Crystal Carter:

I was in a bowling league when I was in my youth and my husband, who was never in a bowling league, always beats me at bowling. And I'm like, you're a non-bowler, you never even bowled. And yet I'm happy if I crack 100, if I'm doing that. If I hit three digits, I'm like, job done here. All right, I can go home.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm embarrassed to say this. So you have an 8 pound ball, a 10 pound ball, 12 pound. I really enjoy the 8 pound ball.

Crystal Carter:

That's like softball. That's just playing softball. That's not like bowling.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And then I'll, even with the bumper because I play with my kids, the bumpers are up. You know that one spot in the corners?

Crystal Carter:

Oh, just before the pins?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's me.

Crystal Carter:

That's you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Got my name all over it. That one spot you, you're lucky you get like one pin.

Crystal Carter:

I'm a mediocre bowler, but I cannot stand bad bowling etiquette. If I'm up there trying to set up my shot and I'm stood there on the little lines and I'm trying to get myself lined up pretending I'm like doing the Lebowski thing or whatever, and somebody just walks up on the lane next door to me and just rolls along and starts throwing the... I get so angry as if they were ruining my perfect shot, as if this was... It's never going to be the perfect shot. I'm never going to get more than two or three pins or whatever. But let me have my moment. Let me just meditate for a second before I embarrass myself. Let me do what I'm doing. Come on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I'm the baller who's standing behind you saying, "Hurry up to get on with it and let's keep this train wreck moving because there's still eight more frames left and four more people."

Crystal Carter:

I’m here] for the snacks. I love bowling alley snacks like the snack bar at the bowling alley is what's up. Also the beer is flowing. They'll give you a whole pitcher and you can just settle in and I love a good bowling session. The last time I bowled actually was with you, Mordy, you and Nikki Moser.

Mordy Oberstein:

We bowled.

Crystal Carter:

No, I completely made that up. It was with Nikki.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. We didn't bowl.

Crystal Carter:

Was it Nikki at Moscon? You missed it. I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh. Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't there. I was probably ed a baseball game.

Crystal Carter:

Nikki's very good at bowling, also Blaine. He's also very good at-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh really? Yeah. Okay. So note to self, never bowl these people. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you should check out our e-commerce offering from integrations with Amazon, to drop shipping, to a POS system to help you keep track of your client's transactions, both on and offline. Wix's e-commerce offering can help you and your clients' sites build financial momentum, which is today's word of the day momentum. Which means I should probably not take a break between talking about the next thing cause I just lost the momentum. Ah.

Crystal Carter:

Moving incremental gains. Move forward further.

Mordy Oberstein:

Momentum. That's right. Today we're talking about inertia science. Well, SEO inertia as we take out building SEO momentum for growth. Why the opportunity mindset is an SEO's best friend. The real advantage to growth by taking things slowly and keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of a sight, stages of development. Oh look, he's crawling now as... I don't know what that makes any sense.

And keeping your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse of a sight stages of development.

Plus Erica Schneider of Grizzle joins us to offer her take on how can you maintain quality when creating content at scale? Because momentum means scalability sometimes. So how do you keep the quality of the content at the same time? We're going to get into that.

And since we're talking about inertia and growth for SEO, Crystal and I will take a deep dive into the role of momentum in marketing. And of course we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

Careful now as you don't want to miss a thing because episode number 38 of the SERP's Up podcast is gaining momentum.

Crystal Carter:

We are on the move. We have reached velocity, we are going for it, we're moving forward.

Mordy Oberstein:

Warp speed. Continue with our Star Trek references for the past couple of episodes.

Crystal Carter:

Many.

Mordy Oberstein:

So many. Engage.

So this is a very much mindset podcast for me. I'm all about mindset by the way, and I know people are, oh, practical tips. And I'm like, yeah, what's the mindset behind those tips? And people are like, yeah, I want the tips. So whatever. I think this is very much for me, a mindset episode. We talk about SEO very categorically, very often on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO. Or we speak of SEO with a continuum of task like task number one, then task number two, then task number three, then task... I can go on.

Crystal Carter:

And check it, put it on the checklist. Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right, but... And I get that when we talk about SEO in that way, it feels like a chore to me. And I don't think SEO should be a chore. I think SEO should be meaningful and to make SEO meaningful, I think it's a mindset. And this is why I love talking about SEO from a growth point of view. So how does SEO help you grow? And growth for me, whatever it is, from growing social media followings to growing as a person, is all about momentum. One thing leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing. So huge sappy music about improving as a person by the way,

Crystal Carter:

One step at a time, everybody, one step at a time.

Mordy Oberstein:

As you grow as a person, one step of self-reflection of internal growth often puts you on a path towards transcending and transforming the self on this journey to step number two. And they are not disconnected, one small change leads to another. Same in SEO.

Crystal Carter:

I mean these are life lessons Mordy, you're dropping some gems here that people can live by as well as do SEO by.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not about podcasting, about SEO, it's about showing how podcasting about SEO was really podcasting about life.

Crystal Carter:

Philosophical this week.

Mordy Oberstein:

For the second time. Internal joke. For the second time. So anyway, one improvement you do to the site. One strategy you take on should, all things being equal, naturally lead to the next thing and open up all sorts of new doors. And all you really need to do is put your ear to the ground. So cue more sappy music.

Crystal Carter:

Music.

I mean, I don't think you're wrong here at all. I think there's that movie where it says we need a montage. That's that sort of thing. And I feel like that it's that way sometimes with SEO, you work and you add little bits. And even if with a single piece of content, you can create one piece of content and then optimize it again and then optimize it again and then optimize it again. And what happens is Google knows about that content and they learn about that content and they see that you're improving it and they see that you're continuing to improve it and they understand that this is a piece of content that is not being left to wither on the vine, but is growing and is increasing. And if they see that you're doing that across your site, then they will understand that your site is something that is constantly improving and that the bulk of information that they have around you is valuable and is valuable to users. And then they'll send users to you. I think sometimes people think they have to do all of the SEO all at once.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

You don't.

Mordy Oberstein:

So not true and don't, it's detrimental.

Crystal Carter:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mordy Oberstein:

And not only is it not helpful, it's a bad idea.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So a lot of times people will say, well, why do we need to do SEO for this long? Why do I need this agency to contract for six months or a year or whatever it may be? And it's because they're putting in building blocks for what you're doing. So you have your technical SEOs, your foundation, making sure that everything works. Then you're going to look at your architecture, then you're going to look at your keywords, then you're going to look at more content more, then you're going to look... And you add and add an ad, and sometimes you add them as in tandem. But the momentum is really, really important to that because I think I've certainly seen it where, and I don't know if you have an example of this where momentum can make a really, really big difference to make a really big impact on what your outcomes are. Have you seen this in the wild there, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

All the time. So one of the things that's great about momentum, and if you are bold enough to do this is that it will shift your strategy. So the detriment of being super checklisty is that you're not open to shifting, you're not open to changing. So as you start first off, you'll skip steps, you try to do it all in one shot. But if you're overly methodical where you try to break it into too many things, do you get hung up on the process? We did step one, now we must do step two. Now we must do step three. Now we must do step four. As opposed to saying after step three, where are we at? What are the things that we should be doing now? You'll often say, you know what, we should be shifting. Our business has changed, our audience has changed, or we've managed to capture an audience we never expected.

We never thought this would rank well and it did and now we have a new audience. How do we now cater to that audience? How do we now nurture that audience? How do we now move that audience down the funnel? Whatever it is, which means being open minded enough to say, okay, take stock, ear to the ground. Now let's shift and let's take on a new strategy. And I've seen this a million times over where opportunities that you never knew existed or never thought would exist or didn't even know existed come up because of momentum and be open enough to be able to say, okay, stop, shift change to grab those opportunities.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that you see this with trending topics and things. So we recently published an article on the Wix SEO hub talking about trending topics. And if let's say you write an article on something that's trending, and let's say it hits right? You're like, oh my gosh, people are really interested in that. You can build momentum on that. You can start to build a topic cluster around that. You can start to pull in a little bit of content around that. You can say, "Wow, people are really interested in this particular topic and we seem to be leading the pack here, so let's put more content on that." Now, if you have your checklist that you are sticking to methodically and you're not paying attention to the momentum that you've got from both users and from Google and also from maybe social interest, et cetera, then you might go, well, that did well onto the next thing and miss the opportunity to grow.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll ask you, how many times have you been working on a site or with a client or whatever it is, and the initial plan was X, and you get, let's say a quarter of the way, a third of the way, halfway through the plan of X, and you were like, wait a second, this doesn't make sense, we need to change this up.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, I mean during COVID,

Mordy Oberstein:

Right? I was just thinking that COVID is the classic case of this.

Crystal Carter:

Like the best laid plans were completely set of flame during COVID. I mean, so many times we'd say, "Right, we're going to do this," and then the business would have to close its physical doors and then you'd have to do something completely different, or you'd have to come up with a completely new funnel because they didn't have virtual tours of their real estate buildings before or book a video tour, that sort of thing. So these are things that you need to think about and yeah, it does make a difference. And I think that also, I love building up the momentum. If you think about it like sports training, and this is interesting because I asked the SEO hive mind, I said, "Do you think momentum matters in SEO?" And Myriam Jessier said, "It's like weight loss. On a diet you lose a few pounds early and then it motivates you to keep going. Then it's the same with SEO, but you need to keep building."

If you think about sports people, they don't do nothing in the off season. The people who do really well, I talk about Michael Jordan a lot on this podcast, but Michael Jordan was getting slammed by the pistons for years and then spent one season in the off season really bulking up. And when he was doing stuff for Space Jam, he set up a basketball court and had pickup games with all... So in the off season, he was building up all of these skills when nobody was paying any attention, when it was low pressure, when he had time to think strategically about what he wanted to do.

With seasonal businesses, the off season is a great time to start building up momentum and to start building up Google understanding your search, the focus of your content. It's a good time to take stock of your content, to do a sort of full audit and full update of things that are tricky to do when you're in the midst of everything. And so that means by the time you hit peak season, you've already crested, you're already at the top so that you're ready to meet that traffic because you built up the momentum when things were quiet.

Mordy Oberstein:

That example, that metaphor from Myriam, it's perfect because as somebody who's lost weight at one point a couple times in my life, like that initial like you have to get started with something. You have to get started somewhere. And then that one small success breeds another success. I don't know about you, but I look at SEO data when I want to start... That initial feeling, you're looking at a site for the first few times is overwhelming. You're like, I don't know, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where do I start? And what I like to do is start on one thing, one page, whatever it is, start somewhere with one thing and dive into that. And then you start seeing the next thing. You start seeing the next thing and you start slowly and slowly building a picture. That's momentum. That's an example of SEO momentum that I think is super important because when you look at, say in the case of data, when you look at it all in one shot, you get lost. You don't know where to go with it. So you need that momentum to guide you.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. And if you turn it off, you sometimes get this in PPC, people are like, oh, let's just turn off the PPC. Let's turn on the PPC. And with PPC, it can be tricky because nowadays, particularly when we think about momentum, there's machine learning. And if you turn off your PPC entirely, I always recommend that you keep a little low level bit of something running in the background just so that if you need to ramp it up, you don't have to do that part where it goes, "Oh, the machine learning is learning about your site." And you're like, "What?" You're like, "We have a sale that starts tomorrow." And they're like, "We're still deciding." And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. And Google, we talk about AI and we talk about machine learning and we talk about all of this, but Google's been using AI and machine learning for years through all sorts of stuff. It's been an integral part of search for years.

So when you stop and put things down, just like if you stop exercising... You'll notice that it'll be harder to get back going. If you've got the vacation in two weeks and you haven't done any exercise in two years, it's going to be tricky to get that beach body if that's what you want. Not that any body isn't perfect for the beach, but I'm just saying that sort of thing. If you're worried about that, you have to keep going with something so that if you need to ramp it up, you can when you need to.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly, which is why this conversation about momentum and SEO, it's really a much wider... Right? About momentum and marketing overall. But before we get into that, as you're growing, as you're building momentum, as you're doing... Which often means scaling things up, you have to worry about maintaining quality at the same time. So momentum is great, things are firing in all cylinders, blah, blah, blah. Or you got to make sure the quality is maintained. So to help us tackle this is Erica Schneider over at Grizzle who's going to help us understand how you can maintain quality when creating content at scale.

Erica Schneider:

So the best way to maintain quality when creating content at scale is to treat quality scaling, just like you would treat business scaling. Right? You need to document your processes, you need to have goals, a mission statement, objectives, like everything that you do for your business when you want to be able to scale effectively and not fail and have everything fall apart, is the same way that you should treat scaling your content operations so that you don't mess with your quality as you scale.

So my answer is twofold, right? It's really important that you set editorial goals, values, and integrity, and I can just quickly explain what those are. But the other piece of that is that you should start slow and then ramp up in my opinion, just like you're building a business, you don't bring on 50 clients on day one. Right? That would be an absolute disaster. You need to make sure that what you're doing is documented that it works. Get through all the kinks, figure out what you want to keep, what you want to discard from your process, all that jazz, and then scale.

So it makes no sense. If you are trying to produce quality content to try to do 10 blogs a week, it's better to maybe start with one a week. Right? I could go into the quality versus quantity argument, but I definitely think that no matter how much you ultimately want to publish on your blog or anywhere that you're distributing content, regardless of the amount that you put out there, it should always be quality content. I don't think that you should ever sacrifice quality, which I actually think means credibility and authority for the sake of ranking, for the sake of brand awareness. Because if people find your content, but it sucks, what's the point. Right? You're going to be remembered for all of the wrong reasons. So you should always put your best content out there regardless of where you are in the process.

So back to the editorial goals, values and integrity. The editorial goals are the reasons behind why you're creating content and who you are creating it for. So it just means that every single piece of content you create should be tied to your overall content strategy. It's simple, but if you don't have these editorial goals and you're not comparing them to your strategy, it can be easy to create a content that looks like it fits into your strategy, but it actually doesn't, right? Because the way that you've executed it doesn't align with your original mission. So it's that sense check at the end. What are the editorial goals? Editorial values? Describe how you as a business want to provide meaningful experiences to readers. Right? So deciding which content formats are going to work best to help you reach your goals and all that jazz. Define that at the beginning and that'll change, that's fine. But then continuously revisit it and define it.

And then editorial integrity is all about upholding your brand reputation, making sure that your tone of voice and your writing style and the way that you are speaking to your audience is exactly reflected the way that you want it to. And that again, comes down to making sure that there's a rigorous editorial process of sense checking the content. So every step of the way through the production line, there should be somebody in an editorial role reviewing it, whether that's a strategist, making sure that the brief aligns with the editorial goals, somebody checking out the outlines, somebody checking out the final draft. Someone should be sense checking it every step of the way against those original editorial goals. So the best way to maintain quality when creating your content at scale is to set up documented processes. Start slow and continuously sense check your content every single step of the way as you grow.

Mordy Oberstein:

So thank you so much, Erica. I met Erica at Semrush's Global Marketing Day. We were recording it in New York. She is amazing. Definitely give her a follow on Twitter again, EricasMyName, E-R-I-C-A-S-M-Y-N-A-M-E. She talks about an amazing amount of topics over on Twitter. You should definitely give her a follow. She's one of these people where you meet her for the first time and you're like, "Wow, this person has that it factor." That's how I would describe Erica. She loves talking about all things, editorial standards, quality, strategy, all of it is great. So follow her over on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

Fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fantastic.

So all of us talk around building SEO, momentum, SEO momentum, momentum for SEO and capturing opportunity and being smart about and so forth makes me feel like, as I mentioned before that we should be talking about the importance of, I'll call it, cadence and momentum for your business or for your client's business as a whole, not just from an SEO. Let's not pigeonhole momentum to make it all about SEO. That'd be narcissistic as SEOs, but there's so much about cadence and momentum. It's a huge part of doing good marketing. So here's a deep thought on the role of cadence and momentum in marketing.

So I think sometimes... I'll start this off... I think that ROI can sometimes be the killer of momentum.

Crystal Carter:

How so, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, let me just revel on the hot tick of that for a second. Because sometimes... it's so poetic... Sometimes the ROI is just showing that you're alive.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right? Sometimes the ROI is showing that you are still a relevant, vitalic... That's not a real word.

Crystal Carter:

Vital?

Mordy Oberstein:

Vitalicious? Vital.

Crystal Carter:

Vitalicious.

Mordy Oberstein:

Vitalicious.

Crystal Carter:

Vitalicious.

Vitalicious, we're sticking with that. Let's go with that

Mordy Oberstein:

Vitalicious part of the conversation of whatever your niche is. It's like sometimes you create content to get traffic, and sometimes you create content to show that you're just part of the equation here.

Crystal Carter:

This is really interesting because Christie Holtz was talking about this on her Instagram. So she was talking about how to do good marketing, and she was like, you do stuff and you tell people about it, then you do some other stuff and you tell people about it. So it's essentially, it's one of those things to sort of keep in front of mind and to keep in the conversation. And again, so that you are being consistent in your visibility, and so that you don't have to start afresh from zero. Going from 70 to 80 is much, much easier than going from 0 to 80, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like farming, which I know nothing about. I can't even plant a tomato plant without killing it.

Crystal Carter:

Old MacMorty had a farm,

Mordy Oberstein:

Old MacMorty had a farm and it all died.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

And no but so you have to plant the seeds, and from the seeds it grows. Wait, before you even plant the seeds, you need to, what's it sowing the ground. You have to sow the ground.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Cadence is sowing the ground so that eventually you can plant the seeds. So like you're saying, so that you don't just start off, all right, new product, got to get back in there, got to start shoveling the dirt to plant the seeds. If you have cadence, you have momentum. You're a natural, integral part of the conversation. Whatever community that you're in-

Crystal Carter:

Yep.

Mordy Oberstein:

... Lets you do the things later on that give you the ROI. So cadence and momentum is such a huge, valuable, I'll call it a tool in delivering ROI.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think that it's not easy to show up every week and do a podcast or show up every week and do your YouTube thing or show up every week with a brand new blog or show up with all those sorts of things. It's not easy. And that's the reason why it's so valuable is because it is not easy. The NFL happens on a Monday, right? You have Monday night football.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, there's Thursday night football now, and some weeks are we go Saturday football.

Crystal Carter:

There's always a Monday night football right? Now imagine if they were like, yeah, not this week. Maybe next week. Oh, we're not sure. Because that's the other thing is that if somebody knows that every week they'll get a new piece of content from you every month, they'll get a something from you. That you're consistent with your things. And even if they miss you once, they can come back to you for that. So again, so that they're ready to see that you do, and also being consistent there helps to show that you're somebody who is reliable. So whatever tool that you have, it helps to build trust that the thing that they get from you will be of good quality and will be valuable for them and will provide consistent and good results.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's going to a Google business profile, and there's no information there and you're like, ah, well. There's no cadence, momentum, there's nothing in there. There's no vitality, again, using that word.

Crystal Carter:

And I always check to see if people have been responding to comments, if people have been posting things, if there's actual, even if there is something there, if it's recent. So if there's something recent, then you can go, okay, this business is still working, this business is still doing stuff. Because sometimes things are online and you think, oh, this is online, and you get there and the ice cream shop is closed, they're not there, and you can't get any ice cream and you're really upset.

Mordy Oberstein:

And your day is ruined because you did not get ice cream. But it's a great point because the thing that really builds buzz, and the thing that really builds notoriety is not the going viral moment, which usually never happens. It's the micro moments. It's all these little things that add up and add up. So let's go with the Google business profile, the momentum around that. You see that they have a good description, you see they have reviews in there, they're answering. It's all these little things add up to create a sense, to create an association, to create a feeling or sentiment about that brand or product or whatever it is. So the momentum of one little thing and then one other little thing and one other little thing. While in and of itself, each little thing might not have a big ROI, whatever, but together it does. And you shouldn't look at it as each individual thing. You should look at it as all the things, all that cadence and momentum together. What does that produce?

Crystal Carter:

Right? Exactly. And this is why when I asked the hive mine, I said, "Does momentum matter in SEO?" I had a few people come back to me and they were like, "I'd say consistency is a better term." Amy Hergan said in the trades industries where there's a lot of black hat SEO, continuous white hat momentum is needed to be continued to be competitive. And this is what people were saying. They were like, "No, consistency. You say momentum, I say consistency," and I think it's because one breeds the other.

Mordy Oberstein:

Tomato, tomato. Tomato. I don't know what the heck of tomato is.

But to go full circle, it all comes back to what I was saying before about mindset.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Having that cadence, having that momentum is really a mindset where you're hunting, finding opportunity where you're hunting, feeling out where you're at with your audience and being able to shift. That's not a thing you can quantify. That's very much an outlook on marketing. It's very much an outlook on everything. It's a mindset first and foremost.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also to bring it back to a technical SEO point, this also affects your crawling and your crawl rate. Google understands your crawl rate based on the amount of content that you create. If you're creating content once a month and then like six weeks later and then a week later, and then three months later or something, Google's like, we don't need to crawl these people all the time. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know when they're doing. But if you're creating content every single day, then Google knows, well, they're making new stuff every day, so we need to check on what they're doing every day. So new sites that are publishing 20, 50, 60 articles a day, they're getting crawled lots over the course of a week. A site that's publishing something once a month, they're going to get crawled a lot less because Google knows they don't need to.

So if you're worried about your indexing and you haven't published anything new, like start publishing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is it new?

Crystal Carter:

Right? Is it new? No. And Google knows it's not new, so that's why your pages aren't indexed. So they saw them already and they have nothing new to report. So think about that. Think about that when you're thinking about your cadence and your momentum as well, is that it's both a marketing thing, it's also a technical thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

And all of them work together.

Mordy Oberstein:

It all goes together. Everything works together. Don't separate the things out in general, but you know who's constantly creating content, who Google itself cannot keep up with? It's Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

Barry Schwartz. Barry Schwartz.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry Schwartz is a machine of creating content. Google is probably like has a dedicated server just keeping up with the content that Barry is creating.

Crystal Carter:

Last time I checked, I think he was up to 40?

Mordy Oberstein:

Over 40 or 30,000 articles about the SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which brings us to this week's snappy news.

Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news.

Monster. Absolute monster of a week for SEO news. This week is the kind of week that brings warm and fuzzy feelings to Barry Schwartz's heart. That's how big the news was this week. Google IO 2023 was here, and we finally have the answer to what was whole AI thing on the SERP is going to look like. Needless to say, SEO will never be the same again. And I'm not even kidding.

Okay. As part of the coverage of Google IO 2023, first up as a port over at Search Engine Journal by Matt Southern, Bard, Google's version of ChatGPT is live for everyone. If you haven't had access till now, like myself, go play with it. Have a look at it and see what differs from, let's say Bing. Also Google showcased at IO 2023, how there will be links to sites within that ecosystem. So win. Great.

Now for what we're all here for, how will AI chat interact with the SERP and organic results? Drum roll please. For certain queries, for example, those not related to YMYL, health, finance, things can actually impact your life in a significant way, your financial life, your physical, mental life. Google will not show an AI produced summary answering those questions, but very often will produce an AI summary answering a question as part of a query, making featured snippets obsolete for those particular queries. By the way, that doesn't mean that featured snippets are obsolete as a concept, but we shall see.

Either way, there will be three cards representing organic results that are attached to that initial summary produced by Google's AI chat experience. You can then refine the answer or ask a follow-up question and/or expand the answer. Here, Google will break down each section of the answer produced into subtopics with links to sites under each breakdown, which I think is absolutely amazing. It's exactly what I think I'm looking for as a user in terms of getting a more topical breakdown of a particular query so that I can explore different areas of that query.

What exactly am I talking about? I will read to you what Google used as an example at Google IO. So they searched for what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog, Bryce Canyon, or... I don't remember, I think it was like Yellowstone National Park, was something like that. Anyway, so Google's AI experience produced, "Both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family friendly, although both parks prohibit dogs on unpaved trails. Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs." The summary goes on, "Bryce Canyon has distinctive features like hoodoos, natural bridges and waterfalls, and it goes on and on and on."

When you click to expand and you see the expanded generative AI experience, it took the original summary and started off "Both Bryce Cannon and Arches National Park are family friendly." Right underneath that is a little card to a website. Then it continues with the summary and goes, "Although both park prohibit dogs on unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs." And then it has three cards talking about pets at these different national parks. And then it goes, "Bryce Canyon has the features like hoodoos, natural bridges and waterfalls," and then has another card to another URL that talks about the features at Bryce Canyon.

So it's breaking down the summary into different lines and underneath each section or each line are different URLs, different cards to different URLs, helping you understand more about that particular subtopic within the general answer that Google gave. I think it's brilliant. I think it's awesome.

Also to this, when you query something related to a product, Google will show you a list of products underneath an entire summary. And when you click on the product, it brings up a knowledge panel around the product listing much the way that it does now on the SERP where you can actually see a list of stores where you can shop and actually get the product. Make sure your products are listed on Google Merchant Center and are properly optimized. It's already huge. It's going to be huger when all this goes live because the initial listing that Google is showing, the summary is built on the shopping graph.

Lastly, Google announces at Google IO or with the content around Google IO, a helpful content update is coming. We're getting another update to the helpful content ranking system to quote, "Google will roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on search." This is a big deal to me. It was part of the official materials created around Google IO, it was tacked onto a blog post where they talked about a new feature around perspectives.

Crystal and I talk all about what this means and what all of the AI announcements for search means on a special episode of the SERP's Up podcast we did covering Google IO so look for it wherever you consume your podcasts, we'll link to the show notes here or look for it on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. We talk a lot about the announcements, analyze what they mean for SEO, and do a summary of what others in the community, the SEO community were saying as well.

Also, check out Barry's coverage of both of these items of the helpful content update that's coming and of the overall AI experience on the SERP. Barry did a bang up job over a search engine land and an SE Roundtable. You can see what it all actually looks like there and get Barry's thoughts and analysis. So definitely have a look at what Barry wrote up over on Search Engine Land and at seroundtable.com.

With that, that is a mouthful of this snappy news.

Thank you as always, Barry, for your contribution to the SEO community and the articles that you write so that we can feature them on this news. And also to Matt Southern and Roger Montti, to all the other people, and Danny Goodwin who are contributing to the SEO news community.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you. And to everyone else, everyone on Twitter who's playing against this new all over the place. So yes, thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're here. We're here.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yes, it's Mordy's favorite game.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's my favorite game, but I never win. It's like bowling. It's my bowling. Is this new on Twitter is my bowling.

Crystal Carter:

I won once and I insisted on getting a little trophy. I think Lily Ray gave me a trophy and a trophy emoji.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, speaking of social media, here's who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomes, and this week, since we're talking about momentum and content and all that good stuff, we thought, who better than Casie Gillette, an SEO OG, has been around the community for a long time, super smart. Had the opportunity to work with her a little bit when I was over at Semrush. Super, incredibly smart, incredibly giving and sharing. So definitely give her a follow on Twitter at C-A-S-I-E-G. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

She's fantastic. I did a Twitter space with her, and the Twitter space was a little bit sort of like ding ding. Is it content or technical SEO? Which one's better? And we were both like, they're both good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fun story. Do you want to know who was the person behind who should be on that Twitter space?

Got two thumbs and loves controversy, right now... Because they said, "Who should we have?" "Oh, you should have Crystal for the tech. And ask Casie for the-"

Crystal Carter:

We just made friends Mordy. We just made friends. Casie's lovely and she's very smart, and she knows that you need tech SEO, and I know that you need content SEO, and we all just got along.

Mordy Oberstein:

I knew that you were in need of a friend, so I recommend them Casie.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for being a friend.

Mordy Oberstein:

And just cue the music. You've got our friend and me. I don't know if we can. Is that licensed? Can we do that?

Anyway, that's it for us. Not for us.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're still friends. We're still friends.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. What?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's it for us. I didn't mean it that way.

I mean like that's it for the show.

Crystal Carter:

I enjoyed it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Come back next week. Not like that's it forever. That's it till next week.

Crystal Carter:

Cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because we are consistent.

Crystal Carter:

Until next week.

Mordy Oberstein:

I am anything but a creature of habit and consistent.

Crystal Carter:

Until next time, everyone.

Mordy Oberstein:

Until next time, right. 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 getting it right with programmatic SEO or getting with the programmatic SEO program.

Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts 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 at you guessed it. wix.com/seo/learn.

Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.