Unsolved SEO Mysteries

Mordy Oberstein:

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

Aloha, Mahalo for joining us on this episode of the SERP's Up podcast everybody, we have some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, SEO brand here and I’m joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the unequivocally, unparalleled greatest person on the planet. Too far.

Crystal Carter:

I think so.

Mordy Oberstein:

Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

There are definitely better people than myself.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just because my wife is listening.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Also, I've met better people than me. It's fine, I do my best. I think we all do our best. I think we can sum it up as Crystal Carter, doing her best. I'm fine with that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I can think of some people who do not do their best.

Crystal Carter:

That's true, that's true.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's going to those people.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. I think maybe they're doing their best and maybe they still need to grow. There we go. I aim for some positives there.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's good. Yeah. We're still going to put a positive spin on things.

The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. That's a lot of slashes. But we can also take the mystery out of writing a good title tag and meta description with Wix's brand new AI meta-tag creator. Run the tag creation process with more efficiency using the new AI tag creator tool. Okay, fine, doesn't really solve any mystery of writing at all.

Crystal Carter:

Not particularly, but we're getting some great feedback on it. I had somebody on the Wix blog was like, "There are several things I love about Wix blog. I'll list them here for you. The SEO optimization tool just keeps getting better with AI. The editor is easy to use and yet powerful."

Mordy Oberstein:

There we go. Wow.

Crystal Carter:

That's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's quite-. Two likes.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's like my washing machine. My washing machine broke and I got a new one and I said to my husband, "You hear that?" He was like, "No." I was like, "Exactly. Exactly."

Mordy Oberstein:

The same thing. I just got a new washing machine two weeks ago, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Crystal Carter:

By the time it's done, when it's on the spin cycle, you're like, "What'd you say? What was that?"

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, the old one looks like it went through something real serious.

Crystal Carter:

Shoes. Shoes is the worst.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids' laundry. Okay, so the AI tag creator tool we have on Wix doesn't solve any mysteries, but you know what does solve some mysteries? Our session from Brighton SEO, in San Diego, we talked about unsolved SEO mysteries. See what I did there?

Crystal Carter:

I see, I do see that. The pivot. It was fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. By the way, just for clarification, we didn't actually solve anything at the session either. We just added more nuance and clarification and contextualization to some troubling SEO issues.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, but we had a lot of fun doing it. It's about the journey.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was, and it was very insightful, I like to say. I like to think it was very insightful.

Crystal Carter:

Literally, it's just an excuse for me to fan-girl at Cindy Krum and Mike King and Greg Gifford. They're great folks. It was a real honor to be on the stage with them, you were there as well. Oh yes, George as well.

I see you and George all the time, so I feel if I fan-girled at you all every day, that would be weird.

Mordy Oberstein:

That would be weird.

Crystal Carter:

"Oh my God, thank you for reading my email." That'd be so weird.

Mordy Oberstein:

You should totally do that. "Thank you so much for reading this email. I can't believe you. Oh my gosh, you are the greatest."

Crystal Carter:

Every time I log into a meeting with George, I'm like, "oh my God, can I get a selfie? Can I get a selfie with you? Do you mind if I just..." Yeah, he'd lose mind.

Mordy Oberstein:

We sat down with some brilliant folks at Brighton SEO, in San Diego from our own Head of SEO Editorial here at Wix, George Nguyen, to MobileMoxie CEO, Cindy Krum. The COO of Search Lab Digital, Greg Gifford, to the founder of iPullRank, Mike King. Plus, we got insights straight from the live audience sitting right there at Brighton SEO, that I mentioned was in San Diego. Also, there was dancing.

Crystal Carter:

There was dancing.

Mordy Oberstein:

There was dancing.

Crystal Carter:

There were a few different dance moves happening during the episode.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was epic. It was the best dances ever.

Crystal Carter:

I know that you all can't see it over the podcast, however, the dance booths were-

Mordy Oberstein:

They were videoed.

Crystal Carter:

-inspiring, You could use that. Like nothing I've ever seen before.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was interpretive dance for SEO.

Crystal Carter:

It was interpretive dance. I think sometimes if you want to make it rain rankings, you need to do a dance and maybe that's the thing you need to do.

Mordy Oberstein:

When it rains, it pours, and that's what you got, a deluge of terrible dancing. Anyway, this is our very special live version of SERP's Up from Brighton SEO, in San Diego. We hope you enjoy it.

Crystal Carter:

All right, thank you so much for joining us for this session. My name is Crystal, the is Mordy, thank you for joining us for SERP's Up live.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is a live recording of our podcast SERP's Up, so that means that we're talking to you, our live audience, but also to our recorded audience who doesn't exist yet, but they will in two weeks when this comes out. This by the way, is not just shameless advertising, but we're actually going to use these during the session to ask you questions.

Crystal and I'll be asking you questions, it's a yes no question. I'll tell you, "Hey, hold up green for yes and purple for no." We can survey you, we can interact with you, we can have a good time together. By the way, I will forget which one I say is yes or no, and I will switch them up, so stay on your toes.

Crystal Carter:

Do we want to do a trial run?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, let's do it, okay. Do you like SEO? Green for Yes. Purple for-who said No? Seriously?

Crystal Carter:

Do we have some PPC people in the place? No.

Mordy Oberstein:

The way this works is, we have multiple segments on our podcast and we're going to intro or integrate some of our segments to this live podcast recording with a cool set of guests. First up, from our own SEO Hub is the editor of the Hub, our head of SEO Editorial, the one, the only former editor of Search Engine Land, George Nguyen. Welcome to the show.

This is unsolved, SEO mysteries, and if you walk out today's session feeling like we solved these mysteries, then we've done a horrible job. Go walk away with some context about some mysteries and maybe a bit of answers, but we're not going to solve anything definitively. That's just not how SEO works. It all depends, right? The first thing we wanted to talk about were content trends, I think that sets the stage for today. We're going to be talking about Google updates, we're talking about how to deal with your clients, we're talking about SGE because we obviously have to talk about AI at some point or I'll just walk out. We wanted to start off with content trends and George is the master of creating content and we thought, Hey George, let's talk to you about content and that'll set the stage for algorithm updates because algorithms impact content and clients need content and SEO revolves around content SGEs.

George Nguyen:

Are you trying to sell me on content?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm trying to say content's really important.

George Nguyen:

I understand that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you?

George Nguyen:

I mean...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's good. That mystery is solved. That brings us to our first question, basically what is good content and how quickly does it change? I think that's something that we don't really appreciate, just how much content changes, how quickly it changes. What was good yesterday might not be good tomorrow. What do you think, George?

George Nguyen:

Think about your audience. If you're in the B2B audience, B2B folk, just raise up the thingy, the flag. Maybe 5% of you are B2B, your audience probably isn't going to change that much. It will change over time as technology is developed, but if you're direct to consumer, you are literally changing, it feels like every year. Think about how popular TikTok has become, right? We have some content on TikTok.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't do TikTok.

George Nguyen:

Crystal does.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, Crystal does.

George Nguyen:

Yeah, that's the whole thing. Good content. It might be good for somebody who's like me in their mid-thirties, a millennial, somebody who likes to read, but for somebody much younger, if I had a kid, maybe that's not the right thing here. You really have to think about what your audience is, and I feel like it's changing constantly. It's just what are you able to produce that really changes the lens. What you're able to do dictates what you consider to be good content no matter whatever your role is. If you're in an agency or in-house, you view what your success can be primarily through what you're able to accomplish. But you have to be more aspirational than that, because you look at all those other brands and that's what they're doing.

Crystal Carter:

Would you say that you define good content by whether or not it's helpful?

George Nguyen:

Yes. Definitely relevance, all the stuff that Google says, but I feel like we're at a point where how much more optimizing, how much more helpful. If you ask me a question, right now, there's a million ways I can answer it just like I am answering it for this podcast. Are you going to write content that same way? You have to choose a way, and that all comes down to your audience.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, because what's helpful for one audience is not helpful for the other audience. I think to answer what is helpful content, Google's not going to tell us what helpful content is exactly. It really all depends on what you're trying to achieve, who your target audience is. I think it comes down to empathy. If you can really understand and really empathize with your audience and I think predict what their needs are going to be. When I write content, I guess I'm okay at content, but then George edits it makes it much better. One of the things I try to do is really predict, okay, so if someone's reading this and are they going to have a difficult time with this sentence? Does this concept need to be explained? Does it maybe need to have a link so that they can go explore what exactly I'm talking about because I can't cover it right here. I think being able to predict the pain points and the problems that your audience is going to have with your content makes it helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that helpful?

Crystal Carter:

I think that's helpful, but here's a question to the audience. Do you think that helpful content actually ranks?

Mordy Oberstein:

Loaded question.

Crystal Carter:

Green for Yes, purple for no. Okay, so I think we have a lot of greens. We have a lot of greens. I'd probably say that was 75% green on that. That, I think is good. I think that that comes down to people seeing the way that users respond to content that adds value in a helpful way. Is that something you've seen as well, George?

George Nguyen:

I think that the fundamental basis of what helpful content is isn't going to change between me and you talking about it to what it is on the internet. Are you answering the question? Think about all that relevance. When your partner is just asking a question, "Hey, what do you want to have for dinner?" And you start contextualizing, "Well, I had this for lunch." That's not helpful. Remember, the same thing, you have a question, "What is a meta title?" "Well, before the internet." That's not helpful. You need the answer upfront, those things aren't going to change. The way that we approach that has changed a little bit, but we demand answers immediately and so that's always going to be what's happening.

Mordy Oberstein:

But on that idea of it not changing, at a certain point things do evolve and things do change. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the idea of does SEO impact content trends or do wider content trends impact SEO?

George Nguyen:

It's like a chicken and the egg thing, right? The listicle. How many of you, just raise the flag here if you spend time optimizing listicles still in this day and age? Don't lie to me. We're not above this. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you for saying no.

George Nguyen:

Yeah, okay.

Crystal Carter:

I love listicles. I'm not going to lie. I love them.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have a debate about this.

Crystal Carter:

I love listicles, I love a list.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hate listicles, they're the worst.

Crystal Carter:

I love a list. I like to be able to scan and then pick the thing I want to invest my time in.

Mordy Oberstein:

When Danny Sullivan goes on Twitter? X? Whatever? He's like, "Yeah, unhelpful, let me show you an example." It's a listicle.

Crystal Carter:

I find them helpful. I will go through and I go, "I know all of those. I don't know that one. I'll check that out."

Mordy Oberstein:

Agree to disagree.

Crystal Carter:

There we go.

George Nguyen:

You always have these situations, okay, listicles, where is that in this debate? Or even recipes, like your blog recipes. All the SEO in the world, all the guidance that we tell people, well you're not leading with the main content and that's for other considerations. I feel like there's a giant influence, especially nowadays, think about what's ranking in terms of Axios. They publish incredibly concise short content, it's well optimized and that's what it's built to do.

I don't know if you can hear this from the recording, but there's this Star Wars theme playing back now it's both fueling me but also making it very hard to concentrate. If you're distracted, I don't blame you for that. Yeah, there's definitely an overlap here, especially as the publishers, the people, the C-suite becomes more aware of SEO and the importance of ranking that one position might be millions of dollars for you on the SERP rate. Of course, it's going to influence because you need to make money ultimately, but then it's different if you're doing it for branding, then it looks different. Then there's Google's vision of it, and Bing's vision of it where it's Index now. There's so much there.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think one of the things that's interesting though, like RankBrain. RankBrain is a Google machine learning property and part of what its built to do is basically look at how users are behaving and assimilate that into their machine learning process and now change what ranks based upon what people want. I was doing an article or something, I don't remember, and I went to the way back machine and it was a product review, best microwave content. The page now, has the word "our" and "we" 150 times, if you go back, I don't know, two, three years ago, it only had it eight times. I don't know if that was an SEO saying, we think Google has the E for experience, let's add a bunch of "our" and "we" to the content, but it could also just be content has changed and people are writing in a different style. Google does realize that, that's literally what RankBrain is built to do and those things get assimilated into the algorithm and the algorithm is changing based upon what users are doing.

Crystal Carter:

I think it has a lot to do with the competitive landscape. I think we're all, as SEOs, we're all working in a competitive landscape. The content that we make doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you see that there's a trend that lots of people in your sector or in your vertical are using lots of video for instance, and then you are not using video, then it becomes a question of satisfying customer demand, satisfying customer expectations and remaining competitive there. I think that content trends, like you said, it's like a chicken and an egg. I think they pull and push at the same time with those things.

George Nguyen:

We will develop any tactic, we will test any tactic working with content at scale. If that's the case and you just want to outrank someone and you have all this time to try to do that, of course SEOs are going to find a way to push the limits of content, create new formats, and that's how we're going to affect it. Then, eventually we're going to take that and be like, "Look at what I did." Then speak about it on stage at a conference. That's how the game works essentially.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you George for coming on our podcast. I'll see you around the office.

George Nguyen:

Every meeting is like this pretty much, ladies and gentlemen.

Mordy Oberstein:

We get nothing done. For the first 10 minutes, the other people in the meeting are like, "Okay, enough jokes. You have to stop. We have to do work now."

George Nguyen:

Can I go?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, you can go.

George Nguyen:

I did want to say one thing. This is the first session of the morning. I really appreciate you showing up here. I'll be at the Wix booth in between sessions and if you don't know anyone, if you're here alone, feel free to come by. Say hi, you know me.

Mordy Oberstein:

With candy.

George Nguyen:

Why do you-?

Mordy Oberstein:

Although we have coconut candy.

George Nguyen:

It was all good until you said that. Thank you everyone.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much George.

Mordy Oberstein:

We do a little segment on the podcast, we call, Is It New? All about Barry Schwartz. We sometimes go through different changes to the SERP and wonder if they're new. They never are, by the way, but we try to explore the impact of their new-ish status. In this case, we're doing something a little bit different with the segment. We're taking a look at algorithm updates because I think the entire landscape is new. This is a very special version of, Is This New? It's the Google algorithm update version of Is This New? To help us, we have the founder of MobileMoxie herself, she's an SEO legend, I would say an SEO-G.

Crystal Carter:

She's fantastic. I met Cindy, I met-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's Cindy Krum, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

It's Cindy Krum. I met her yesterday and I literally screamed a full fan girl, which I'm not ashamed of.

Mordy Oberstein:

Can we reenact that?

Crystal Carter:

No, I'm not going to. Yeah, I'm so honored, so pleased, and you're in for a real treat because Cindy's amazing and here she comes to the stage now.

Cindy Krum:

Hello, I'm excited to be here.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much for joining us.

Mordy Oberstein:

That chair is really comfortable by the way.

Cindy Krum:

It's pretty good. Yeah, I like it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome to the podcast.

Cindy Krum:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome to the show.

Cindy Krum:

Thank you. How are you guys doing?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm jet-lagged.

Cindy Krum:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

You?

Cindy Krum:

Yeah, not as jet-lagged as you.

Mordy Oberstein:

You all had snow last week.

Cindy Krum:

We did, a lot of snow.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's nuts.

Cindy Krum:

It got down to 11 degrees.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. Okay, it's a podcast. We have the banter, I feel like I have to explain that. Let's kick this off about the algorithm updates. Let's ask the audience first. Do you see more rank volatility? Is rank more volatile than it normally is? Green if you think rank is more volatile, purple if you think it's not. Everyone from the audio audience, everyone except for Michelle Ford said the rank is more volatile than it was before. I feel like it's always that way.

Crystal Carter:

I think we've had another core update since the conference started. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's been five in the last five minutes.

Cindy Krum:

It's constant.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a review update, another spam update. It's been crazy, right?

Cindy Krum:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

There was the August core update, then there was a helpful content update in September, then a spam update in October, another core update in October, another core update in November, and now we're review update.

Cindy Krum:

Now they're overlapping them, so you can't really identify or know for sure which impacted what and when, and stuff like that, if it did at all. Although the good news is, I think in general, the rule for me at least still seems to be if you're doing really good clean SEO strategy and not really pushing the boundaries of the guidelines, then you don't get impacted by these things. Is that what you guys are seeing? Can I ask audience questions?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Sure.

Mordy Oberstein:

Green for if that's what you're seeing, okay.

Crystal Carter:

Generally keeping it-

Mordy Oberstein:

Good content.

Cindy Krum:

There's some purple, people who disagree. You're doing good content and following all the rules, but you're getting bouncy stuff.

Crystal Carter:

That's interesting. That's interesting. I think some verticals are finding that more than others.

Cindy Krum:

That's true, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also, sometimes keywords are just like that.

Cindy Krum:

Yes, some keywords are more volatile.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's just volatile keywords.

Cindy Krum:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Definitely, and I think that it's something that you've talked about being able to diagnose the impact of the different updates. I know that you can be very scientific with the way you break all of that down. Do you find that to be challenging for clients and things like that?

Cindy Krum:

Like I said, I haven't had a lot of clients who've been massively impacted, but I do find that clients are getting bored of hearing me freak out and be like, "There's an update and I just checked and everything looks fine, don't worry about it." They're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's always fine." It's the boy who cried wolf story, we used to have a couple updates a year or a couple major updates a year and we would make a big deal and be like, "No, I think everything's fine." We'd look really, really detailed. Now they're coming so fast that you can look but you can't get too detailed and you're like, "Nope, looks fine, looks fine. It's good."

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that the new norm? Is this the new norm?

Cindy Krum:

What I've been saying is that I think that part of what Google was going for when they switched from old school crawling indexing to mobile first indexing was this ability to make changes faster. Because remember, if it was about crawling, they would've called it mobile first crawling. It was about indexing, and they've changed the index to make it, I think more flexible and easier to change.

Mordy Oberstein:

The review update is going to be real time, basically. They're not going to announce future updates and it's going to just be basically constant, ongoing. It's almost like Penguin.

Cindy Krum:

I think that we should expect to see more of that with regular updates too. It'll just be, they don't necessarily have to announce everything. I think we're already seeing that things are going live and things are changing in an ongoing way. They're not always announcing it.

Mordy Oberstein:

You heard it here first, the core updates. I don't think they're going to keep announcing them, I think they're just going to put them real time, like the review update, which is going to be scary because you're not going to be able to figure out what's going on exactly.

Cindy Krum:

I think they may try and pull back and slow them down just so that people don't freak out, but they're still doing them, they're just not announcing all of them. I think Google's fighting an interesting battle because they're trying to look like they're being more transparent in ways that get them out of legal problems that they might or might not be having. They want to look like they're being transparent, but without being too transparent to make things too gameable, so they roll things out quietly sometimes. Then, if there's a risk, it's going to be a big fuss, then they'll give you a heads-up and be like, "Hey, next week this is happening." So they can say, "Oh no, we warned you."

Crystal Carter:

Sometimes within SEO chatter, you hear people talk about unconfirmed updates. Is that something that you pay attention to? Is that something that you think about.

Cindy Krum:

Yes, I definitely have seen unconfirmed updates, especially around things that are highly regulated. You see Google change their mind about how they feel about this topic or that topic, or changing just their understanding of a topic. Is this an informational query versus is this a e-commerce query.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unconfirmed update, Google, it's supposed to say a core update where they now announce them and they say, "Okay, it's coming." There's constant volatility, and we generally either see that in our own rankings or the SEO weather tools. You have MozCast and SEMrush Sensor and the Grumper, whatever. There are all these names for all these tools. I'm curious, this is a controversial question and if you're from one of the tools in here, this is probably one you want to pay attention to. Do you trust the SEO weather tools when they say, "There's a spike in rank volatility, there's an update, there's something going on." Do you believe them? Green for I believe the SEO weather tools. Purple for no, and it's a mixed bag.

Cindy Krum:

That's more purple than I expected.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a lot more purple than I expected. By the way, each tool is a little bit problematic, and I've worked on two of them. The inside scoop is there's different keyword sets. Moz is very transparent by the way, they'll tell you that MozCast is built in high search volume keywords. The SEMrush Sensor is much more diverse with the type of keyword, and there's a case for each way of doing it. It is interesting that people don't trust them as much as they used to. I think part of the reason is that they're always on, there's always something going on and you really believe something's really happening. I have a wild theory about some of this, I'm curious what you think. I think a lot of the spikes in volatility that are not part of a confirmed update is machine learning, basically recalibrating. It's saying, okay, I'm implementing X. Let me try see if that works. Let's try Y and reverse it and see which one is better. Okay, let's go with the X.

Cindy Krum:

You hit a threshold and that threshold is a signal to the algorithm to recalibrate or reevaluate. I think that's true. I think though, that let's say we have a tool that measures these things and we realize that we've totally missed this whole industry or there's a new industry popping up that didn't exist, like TikTok, creator studios, whatever, and we have to add a bunch of keywords. Adding this infusion of new keywords changes the model entirely, and unless there's a lot of transparency about that you don't realize.

I think the weather tools also sometimes miss some things that might be very important to people, to SEOs, because they are trying to find signal from noise. They omit what they think is noise but might not be noise for you. Something that I'm going to show in my talk tomorrow is I have a tool that grabs a screenshot, full screenshot of mobile search results every single day for a particular keyword in a particular area on the same phone, pretty standardized. What I saw in testing is that even if your position can stay the same, the presentation of the position can change day by day. Where today it's one big picture, tomorrow it's two pictures, then it's a grid of four with a thing over here. It's always potentially in the same position, not always in the same position, but I think that the weather tools might call that noise not signal, but for you that's signal.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, entirely.

Mordy Oberstein:

They totally miss them and they don't track that.

Cindy Krum:

Or because they have to show something that's statistically relevant for everyone and that's only relevant for you. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt with the weather tools.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely, and I think particularly on mobile, there's only so much real estate on a screen as you know. If there's a new SERP feature that pops up that takes up 30% of the screen, that's really going to affect your click-through rate. Even if you're ranking number one, if you're below the SERP feature, then that's not really going to happen.

Cindy Krum:

You can see situations where they're ranking number one consistently, but the click-through rate is all over the place. Maybe it's because of the images or how it's presented or things that might not come into every single weather tool. What if the weather tools aren't checking pixels from the top and there's a knowledge graph that shows up all of a sudden? Or there's People Also Ask above it today and so click through and it tanks because everyone's clicking on People Also Ask.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I like to look at all that data very directionally. It's not telling you anything in specific. It's okay, something might be going on here. It's a red flag thing. I wouldn't put too much stock in what they show. I know it's a little controversial.

Cindy Krum:

I think you can take stock and say when they're red, stuff's changing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, right. That's true.

Cindy Krum:

When they're green, stuff might still be changing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Something to know about the weather tools, they all recalibrate after 20 or 30 days, because if they didn't, what would never really happen is it would be read the entire way through. I actually just looked at a bunch of data on this. If you look at 2022 and 2021, there's not much of a difference in the rank fluctuations. They're on average. If you go into 2023, the beginning part of 2023 looked very similar to 2022, and this actually ties into what I want to get into in a minute about AI. When you hit the summer, the end of the spring in 2023, ranks started going bonkers.

Let's say on a scale of one to 10, how high was rank volatility? January through March, January through April was a three. When you got to May and you started going through the summer on a scale of one to 10, the level of volatility was an eight. The tools were still green because they recalibrate, eight was a new normal. You're looking at the tool, you're like, "Oh, it's green, everything's fine." But if you compare it to what rank was a few months ago, it's extreme. The green now, is way more volatile than the red back in January.

Cindy Krum:

Okay, so that's fascinating. But also, I think I want to talk a little bit about your choice of terms, rank volatility versus cert volatility because rank is specifying a numeric evaluation that used to be one through 10 or whatever. I think that Google has persuaded us to ignore things that matter when we're counting ranks because they're like, "Don't worry about the paid stuff up there and don't worry about the knowledge graph and don't worry about People Also Ask, those things don't rank." But they do. They push everything down. I think talking about rank volatility versus cert volatility, and maybe pixels from the top or some more universal metric where we can agree that every pixel counts. Pretending that a knowledge graph that's above you doesn't count is a lie. It counts and it's taking traffic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, and when you're tracking by pixel, you don't see it because on the desktop, it's on the right-hand side.

Cindy Krum:

Right, but on mobile, pssh.

Mordy Oberstein:

Did you see, by the way, it was a Search Engine Land article. It was part of the whole antitrust DOJ trial thing which was going on, which is fascinating. Some document came out where it was Ben Gomes, I think, a former VP of search there. "We can get more ad clicks if we add refinement to the SERP and more filter." If you fast-forward to now, the SERP is filled with filters. Broaden this search, refine this search, the bubble filters on top, People Also Ask, there's tons of filtering going on.

Cindy Krum:

What you need to notice when you click any of those filters that are on your screen, especially desktop, is that it's executing a new search and showing new ads. This is a monetization strategy. Don't ever forget that Google's a business that's trying to make money.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do like the filters though.

Cindy Krum:

The filters can be nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you like the filters on the SERP? Green for Yes. See people like filters.

Cindy Krum:

Okay, but here's the thing. Filters do two things for Google, filters get them the ability to show a new search result, increase their search volume and say, "Oh, we're getting loads more searches because that's a new search because you filtered it and show more ads." Also, filters I think, and people can tell me I'm wrong and people can make fun of me. I've always been bullish on voice search. But, filters are the future of voice search, because if you think about a phone tree when you're calling in to change your insurance or whatever, they're like press one for this or press two for that.

Those are filters and you're going to be able to do that with voice with your Google Assistant or whatever, where they say, "Do you want to do this or that, or do you want to see this kind of filter versus that kind of filter." When they predetermine what your choices are, it's easier for them to latch in and preload or know what they're going to show. Then you don't go off the rails and come up with something that they hadn't thought of. They're coaxing you into something that they can answer instead of something that they potentially can't.

Mordy Oberstein:

As a serial podcaster, I pride myself on my pivots and I don't have one right now.

Cindy Krum:

Is my time up? Is that what you're saying?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I want to talk about AI. I feel we have to talk about AI. Do you think that the rank is incredibly more volatile since the summer, basically. How much of that do you think is AI? Before we answer that, dear audience, do you believe Google when they say that they're not targeting AI content? Green, if you believe Google, purple if you don't. There's one person.

Cindy Krum:

Not a lot of trust-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's way in the back, who trust Google, that they're not targeting AI content. Even Michelle doesn't believe Google. I don't believe them either, by the way. They're definitely targeting AI content.

Cindy Krum:

They like to mince words and get really detailed in what targeting means. They're just saying, "We like the best content and we make AI content too, and if we're going to show AI content, why not ours?"

Mordy Oberstein:

I have a theory about this, that Google can't say for their stock pricing that we're anti AI.

Cindy Krum:

Yes, they cannot.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, we'll just say, "No, we're not targeting AI content. We're targeting low quality content." Pre-med, pre-law, same difference.

Cindy Krum:

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 5:

What I think is interesting about this though is that what I've seen is that on the one hand that I know that there's a lot of people within the affiliate space who have been really struggling with this. They've been making a lot of bulk content by AI and they've been getting a lot of traffic and then a lot of volatility. What I've also seen is teams, for instance, LinkedIn, they have these community posts and it says right at the top, this is an AI generated article. If people haven't seen these, essentially they have a collection and they'll say the topic is AI content, for instance. Then they'll have machine generated content and then they'll have spaces for people to contribute answers, individual answers. Those pages rank for tons of keywords and they have done since April. It's very interesting, they seem to be trying to hedge how they're managing that content. Are you seeing that across the space as well?

Cindy Krum:

Yes, but I don't know if it's an intentional effort to hedge. I think that they will also be studying what's ranking in their algorithm and then they'll do it better because that's their model and they can show ads on that. When you get to a LinkedIn, then LinkedIn's making money instead of Google. Google, they've said for years that they don't always know exactly how an algorithm is going to impact results. It's not a guaranteed thing and it can change over time. When they push the button to roll something out, they're watching too and that's why there are rollbacks where they're like, "That went a little bit too far."

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, another piggyback on the ring volatility. When you see the tools go, you don't know if that's a reversal and there's really no net gain or loss.

Cindy Krum:

Yeah, I mean it's still bad for the month or whatever, that you were down. Yeah, for Google, they're looking at things in a much longer term and they're like, "Whatever."

Mordy Oberstein:

There's been again, a ton of rank volatility on the SERP since the summer basically, and you know what it reminds me of? Because I've been tracking stuff religiously for years, it reminds me of Covid, when Covid hit the SERP bonkers.

Cindy Krum:

It totally did.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because they couldn't figure it out.

Cindy Krum:

Totally new industries popping up, new things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Terms didn't mean the same things anymore-

Cindy Krum:

Terms meant different things.

Mordy Oberstein:

-and can totally switch. I think what's happening is the perfect storm, there's a ton of more content because of AI and it needs to figure out, do we want to actually rank this and there's a method to my madness, to tie into what George was talking about before. Content trends are changing. People are looking, they didn't pull experience out of their ass for EEAT.

Cindy Krum:

Content trends and content and creation trends are both changing, and so the algorithm has to keep up.

Mordy Oberstein:

People want experience and Google's like, "Okay, let's integrate into the algorithm." Everything's changing, and I think Google's having a really hard time figuring it out.

Cindy Krum:

I think that what's going to make the difference in the future potentially is, Google has this horrible situation where they have, let's say there's 5,000 dentists in the United States, and every one of those 5,000 dentists think that they have to write an article about why it's important to floss. Okay, and how different are those-

Mordy Oberstein:

Nobody flosses anyway, no matter how many times they write it, right? Green if you floss, I'm just kidding.

Cindy Krum:

I floss.

So, all 5,000 are writing basically the same article about why it's important to floss. How is Google going to choose which of those 5,000 should rank? Maybe it could, maybe one or two of those dentists is writing a vastly superior article or maybe one or two of the dentists has a song that's going to get stuck in your head to remind you to floss. Or maybe there's only three dentists in this area, so they want to rank a local dentist.

I think context and connection is going to be the new ranking factor that they're going to try and do. So, influencer marketing, super important, but not something we talk about as much in SEO. I think that for a listicle, if I was writing a listicle about my favorite travel hacks and things on Amazon that you could buy, you would be like, "I know Cindy and she travels like a mad woman and she knows this." But, if you knew someone else who had five kids, which I do not, by the way, and you had five kids, you'd be like, "I know that woman and she has to deal with what I have to deal with." So, more personalization, more context of who you are and who is recommending whatever, or where they are or what's going to resonate with you like the song to remember flossing or whatever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is there a song? Do you know a song?

Cindy Krum:

No. Does anyone?

Mordy Oberstein:

I wish there was a song. If you're doing SEO for a dentist, it would totally help to have a song.

Cindy Krum:

It would help, something like Going to the Chapel, that going to get stuck in everyone's head. You're welcome.

Crystal Carter:

As long as it doesn't get stuck in your teeth. There you go. On that bombshell, thank you so much for joining us and for talking about this fantastic subject. Give us a big hand for Cindy.

Cindy Krum:

Yay. Now you want me over there, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. With rank being bonkers and with content changing, one of the problems are clients and communicating all of this to clients. So we're going to take a deep thought into how you're going to be communicating with clients and how to get buy-in for clients and how to deal with the clients and all the stuff for the clients with the master of disaster himself. The one, the only, the COO of Search Lab Digital, give it up for Greg-fricking-Gifford.

Greg Gifford:

I feel like you moved over because you don't want to sit by me.

Cindy Krum:

I want to sit by you.

Mordy Oberstein:

I need to razz you, you're C level now?

Greg Gifford:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. You have your own corner office and stuff?

Greg Gifford:

Yeah, only because I'm on the corner of a hallway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is it in your house?

Greg Gifford:

No, no. I have an office. I can't work out of my house. I have too many kids and pets and my wife doesn't get that I'm working and I can't go do stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have the same problem, my kids will bang on the door.

Greg Gifford:

Oh yeah.

Crystal Carter:

They regularly just come into the meetings.

Mordy Oberstein:

They come into our meetings all the time.

Crystal Carter:

All the time.

Mordy Oberstein:

All the time. I just give up.

Greg Gifford:

I'm old school. I need to be somewhere separate where I can mentally separate work from home.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice.

Crystal Carter:

That's good.

Greg Gifford:

When I'm home, anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

C levelness aside, clients, it's a little complicated because if there's so much volatility, the SERP is changing, content is changing, everything's always changing. Like Cindy was talking about, two November updates, three October updates. At a certain point, do they just not believe you anymore?

Greg Gifford:

Yeah, we get the vast majority of our clients call us freaking out. "Oh my God, I saw that there's an update today. What are we doing to address it?" We're like, "Bro, we don't even know that it's affecting you yet. Slow your roll, calm down, it's fine." Then they're like, "Ah." We're like, "Okay." We don't share.

Can I do a question?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Greg Gifford:

Green, if you share ranking data with clients, how many people do?Purple, if you don't.

Mordy Oberstein:

Lots of greens.

Greg Gifford:

We do not share ranking data with clients. We in fact refuse to if even if clients ask for it, we say we won't.

Crystal Carter:

Why?

Greg Gifford:

Because, can I use adult language on this?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, yeah. We'll edit it out of the podcast.

Greg Gifford:

This will be lots of beeps right here, folks. No, I think ranking data is a complete bull vanity metric and it doesn't mean anything to a client's bottom line. What's the point of sharing rank data? I've had clients in the past that in a space of 12 months tripled their organic traffic, doubled their leads, every month was a record setting month for sales, yet they still canceled with us because the owner of the company wanted to rank for some vanity term that wouldn't have gotten traffic anyway. No human would ever search for it, but all he cared about was, do I rank number one for this term? So he cancels. That's why we don't get into ranking data. When our clients freak out, they're like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're like, "Look, we have rank tracking running, you know we won't share it with you. You're fine. Nothing even changed."

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, honestly I'm having PTSD over this because I've definitely had clients like that who it was a little financial firm and they wanted to rank for financial advisors. I'm like, "You're not going to rank for that."

Greg Gifford:

Yeah, we had this one guy that was like, "I want to rank number one for Toyota Camry."

Mordy Oberstein:

Are you Toyota?

Greg Gifford:

This was also the guy that was complaining that $3,000 a month for SEO was too expensive and he spent $1,500 a month on paid search, so in his mind between the 3000 of SEO and the 1500 for management fee, and then I think it was a $500 management fee at that agency. He's like, "I'm spending $5,000 a month, I should be number one for Toyota Camry." We're like, "Bro, it doesn't work that way." Then we tried to explain to him like, "Hey man, look, Toyota's going to rank for that. You don't have more money." He goes, "No, it doesn't matter, because there's no way Toyota's spending $6,000 a month on SEO. I should be number one." We're like, "Buddy, no, no, no."

Yeah, so we do get those calls where clients are freaking out because they hear about all these updates lately, but I think we're a little bit insulated because we only do local SEO and a lot of these updates, you'll get a lot of fluctuation for maybe a day or two when the update's rolling out. But, a week later, once everything's settled in, we really don't see much of an effect for our clients.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are you seeing Cindy, is it harder for you to communicate with the clients because there's so many updates?

Cindy Krum:

I do it a little bit differently, so I don't have clients coming to me going, "oh my God, there's an update." They're not paying attention to SEO. I go to them and be like, "Hey guys, there was an update. I've checked, it seems like you're fine, but let's just keep an eye on things and watch closely." It's a little bit different, but then I don't have anyone who thinks that they should rank for Toyota Camry, so it might be just a different kind of client.

Greg Gifford:

The day that SGE was released to beta where we could finally all apply to get in and see it. We had three clients call us and go, "What's your SGE strategy for us? What are you doing?" I'm like, "Bro, it came out today. We don't have a strategy for you." We still had a client last week call us and go, "What's my SGE strategy?" I'm like, "Bro, we do not care about SGE and we're not going to talk about it with you because most likely it is not coming out for at least another year or two. it's still SEO, let's do marketing. Let's release this stuff that answers the client's questions. That's going to bring them to you because you have the solution." It's just like the voice search thing years ago where everybody's like, "Oh my god, voice search, what do we do?" Nothing changed.

Cindy Krum:

It's so funny because your approach is the opposite of my approach. My approach should be like, "Dude, we've been doing SGE strategy, everything that we've been doing to get featured snippets and to have stuff that's easy to parse and easy to understand, that is what's going to help SGE, this is baked in."

Greg Gifford:

Our clients don't get featured snippets. We're like, "Bro, we just got you this amazing snippet, look at it." Okay, another question, let's be interactive. Green, if you think getting a featured snippet takes traffic away. Purple, if you think getting a featured snippet gives you more traffic. I'm really curious. More purples.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love this.

Greg Gifford:

I'm a purple too, because we've tracked it and we'll get a featured snippet for how do you hook up Apple car play in a Kia Soul or something related to a car. You get it and you can track because it's going to that page and all of a sudden your traffic just goes like this. We tell them, "Hey, we got this." They're like, "Nobody's going to search for that. I don't care. I want to rank number one for this.

Crystal Carter:

Where's the Toyota Camry, Greg?

Greg Gifford:

That's why we just don't get into the rank tracking stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

If I can ask the audience, do you have a harder time communicating with all these things going on with your clients now, because of all this stuff? Green, if you have a harder time communicating with clients and purple, if you have an easier time.

Crystal Carter:

Got a lot of arms up very high with the green.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a lot of green.

Crystal Carter:

A lot of purple.

Greg Gifford:

We had a client that was a little bit more advanced, they understand the SERP layout more. This was April or May, they called us up. They're like, "Hey man, this People Also Ask section, do you guys have a strategy for that? Are you doing anything for that?" I'm like, "No."

Mordy Oberstein:

Did they ask you for every SERP feature and what your strategy is?

Greg Gifford:

They're like, "What's our strategy?"

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you have a related search strategy?

Greg Gifford:

Not, oh my god, I'm awesome, I'm C-suite, but I don't really talk to clients anymore, which is actually really badass that I don't have to talk to clients. I don't deal with a lot of this crap. This was a guy that I've known for 10 years who is a client, so yeah I'll talk to you. He's like, "What's our strategy there?" I'm like, "I don't have a strategy." He's like, "What? You guys are awesome. You've done so much good work. How are you ignoring this?" I'm like, "All right bro, let's jump on a Zoom." We jump on a Zoom. I'm like, "Let's do a screen share. Let's do a search for whatever your term is." It was a dealership term, and he shows up and there's five PAA questions and I'm like, "Let's click on this one. Look who ranks number one for that? Let's go back. Let's click on a second. Look who ranks number one for that?"

I'm like, "Dude, you already rank because we are doing SEO the right way. We're not doing SEO for Google. We're doing SEO for your clients so that you're going to be the answer for what people are looking for and that's the right way to do it. You don't have to worry about what is this tricky thing that we're doing now just for this one update that just happened because that's not sustainable for long-term."

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like you have strong feelings about clients.

Greg Gifford:

I love clients.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is anybody else getting that vibe?

Greg Gifford:

I love clients. I just get really spun up when I just keep getting these really asinine questions and I get it, they're curious, but what are you doing for SGE when it came out four hours ago? Come on, don't waste my time with questions like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

What kind of client do you think is going to be more successful now?

Greg Gifford:

I think for us, the clients that are the most successful are the ones that are actually engaged. There's a lot of people that will do SEO and do paid search and do marketing because they know they need to. But it's pulling teeth to get them on the phone to actually talk strategy. They're just like, "Just do it for me. I'm hiring you to do it." You need to tell us what's going on. You need to help us. What are the questions you're getting? Are these leads the right kind of leads because we can get you more leads.

People are always like, "Your traffic's going up, your leads going up, SEO's winning, but sales are going down." You want to have those conversations and really dial in the customization of what you're doing but these people are too busy to talk to you. Those, I don't think are anywhere near as successful as the ones that are engaged and they do want to talk strategy and they do want to look forward. Even though we don't have contracts, we're month to month, we have to earn business every month. Some people treat it as month to month and they're like, "All right, cool. I'm here." Some people are like, "I'm not going anywhere. Let's talk about what our strategy is for the next two years." I think those are the ones that are more successful, because they're more engaged, they're more bought into this SEO thing is helping my business.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you find the same thing, Cindy?

Cindy Krum:

Yes, to some degree. We have different models of business a little bit, but I do think that the customers that are the most successful are the ones that are wanting to work collaboratively and understand that I don't wish, pray, and do dances to make the rankings improve.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do have a whole dance. You don't do it?

Cindy Krum:

I mean, I do it.

Greg Gifford:

Show of green, if you want to see the dance right now, come on, help me out. Put those greens up, now you have to show us, the crowd wants it.

Mordy Oberstein:

My ranking dance. Then, automatic feature snippet.

You have to nail the turn. For the audio audience, I just did a terrible dance, I'm so happy you're not here to see it.

Greg Gifford:

Please, can we somehow get the video team to make that into an animated GIF.

Cindy Krum:

It's like the baby dancing GIF.

Mordy Oberstein:

I forget where I am right now.

Cindy Krum:

Wait, so yes. Collaboration is important because the clients that just hire you and be like, "I paid you 5,000, why am I not ranking for Toyota Camry?" It's like, "Because, you didn't do what I said to do." Or because your developer tried but screwed it up and then pretended that they didn't do anything wrong.

Crystal Carter:

I do think it has to be collaborative because like you were saying, I've definitely had it with clients where I look at all the data and all the data's telling me we're winning. Yeah, we have tons of leads, tons of clicks, whatever. Then I talk to them and I was like, "So, how did those leads go?" I literally had a client that was like, "We didn't get more calls, did we, Julie?" She was like, "I'm not sure. I was on vacation." They're like, "Oh, I didn't." Literally, there was no one there to answer the phone. We were sending phone calls and there was no one there to answer the phone. If they don't tell you what's happening on the other end of the funnel, you can't complete the funnel, and if they don't make money, you don't make money. You have to work in collaboration and yeah, I absolutely agree with that.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have a lot of people who are clients listening to this podcast. Not right now, eventually when this comes out. If you're listening to the podcast, talking to the audio audience, you're all here, but if you're a client, communicate with your SEOs.

Cindy Krum:

I've had clients, I was going to jump in. I've had clients that try and sneak things by me intentionally and they're like, "Oh yeah, we didn't want SEO for this, so we duplicated all our product pages and put them on a separate domain. But, we don't want SEO for that, so don't worry about it." Keeping secrets from your SEO team is like keeping secrets from your doctor. It's not going to help you.

Crystal Carter:

It's not good for you. "Oh yeah, we're going to migrate the site tomorrow." I was like, "What?"

Speaker 7:

Surprise. Don't do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you have clients and they're communicating with you but they're a little bit concerned about what's going on. How do you walk them off that cliff?

Greg Gifford:

Again, I think because of our model of we're months to month, we are really centered in on the relationship that we build with our clients. It's not always rainbows and unicorns, you're going to have months where traffic goes down. Some of our clients have a very ,seasonal business where it'll be up for a few months and then they know it's going to be down for the next six months. It's more about on our side, we found that it's better to build that relationship so that they trust us and they know that, "Hey, if my traffic just dropped 20% since last month for whatever reason, I trust that this team is there to help me." So many people have bad experiences from other agencies in the past that just do the BS checklist, SEO, that doesn't do anything. If you're lucky to get on a call once a month with some account manager who probably changes every two months and you just have this bad experience, so then you inherently mistrust all digital marketing moving forward.

We work really hard to establish that trust so that they know we are the experts, we are in this with you. We are a partner, we're not a vendor because we care, because we have to earn that business every month so that we don't have to fire people or lay people off. So we work on that customer service and I think that really overcomes. I was joking about the weird customer calls, we don't get that often because the people that work with us choose to work with us because they trust that we are the solution and we are on top of these massive changes in volatility of the SERPs and different features that pop up and what's going on with local and new things that are coming out specifically just for car dealers in the business profile that other businesses can't do. They just trust that we are on top of things for them.

I think where I work now, that's a different frame of mind than agencies I've worked for in the past where it was more about, "Your leads are up, your traffic's up. Hey, this is working guys." Then people are mad and they're leaving. It's the same checklist stuff for everybody due to the nature of some of the things that happen in automotive, and so I love where I am now where it's more about let's build this mutually beneficial long-term relationship. Even though it's a month to month thing, we assume that clients are going to be with us for a minimum of two, to two and a half years and we operate that way. It gets into their head that like, "Oh yeah, this is a long-term relationship and they are on our team. They're not just some vendor that we pay money to." I think that's made the biggest difference for us.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a huge deal. It's the EEAT for your clients, I hate to use an SEO term, but it's an SEO conference.

Crystal Carter:

I think in terms of the audience, do you find that from a month to month, so purple for the stats and green for the relationship makes the difference for the outcomes for your clients.

Got a lot of green.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. It's all pretty much green.

Crystal Carter:

A lot of green, a lot of green. I have Sean, who's in our customer relationships, manages that and he's like, "Yep, green."

Mordy Oberstein:

He's still holding up the green. You can't see it.

Crystal Carter:

All day the green. Thanks. I think you talked about the partnership element of the customer relationship things, and you also talked a little bit about marketing as well. Do you find that you need to help clients to navigate a few different channels in order to manage all of the different things that are happening in the SERP and on Google?

Greg Gifford:

Yeah, a hundred percent. A lot of our clients, they work with us because they know that we have a lot of top level experts. I'm not like, "Oh my God, I'm the best SEO in the world." But, I speak at a lot of conferences, I'm friends with all of the other top experts. We just have a better level of connection to what's going on than a lot of the crappy checklist SEO people they've worked with in the past. They come to us knowing that, "I know I need SEO, I know I need Facebook ads, I know I need YouTube pre-roll or whatever it would be, but I don't know how to do it and we haven't had success before. Can you help us?" They also trust us that when something comes out that's new, we can say, "Hey, look, here's this new thing that you can do. That's awesome."

They just released LSAs for auto repair in California and Florida, so we came to all of our clients we're like, "Look, LSAs are a crapshoot. Maybe it's great, maybe it's not. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's cheap, but this just came out for you and it's the first time you can do it. You need to be a first in the market, so that people are going to see you first and it's going to be amazing." They're all like, "Oh my gosh, thanks. I never would've known that was available if you hadn't come to us with that." Our team specifically wants to do that collaborative partnership approach as opposed to we're getting on a call, we're looking you up in our CRM to remember what the last call was about so we can pretend like we know you. We're really focused on, we want to build that long-term relationship with the clients we work with so they get that trust. We don't really have a lot of that, "Oh my gosh, there was an update. What do I do?" Or, "Oh my gosh, what happened here?"

Crystal Carter:

I think I see you nodding alon, Cindy. I know that you've been a big proponent of Google Merchant Center and people using additional channels to mix in with the SEO.

Cindy Krum:

Absolutely. I think that looking at LSA, even though it's not SEO, looking at just what's available is super important. Our job as SEOs is not just to do SEO, but to know the things that affect SEO. When LSAs come in, they push organic rankings down. That's not to say that we just need to get mad about it. We say, "Okay, that's pushing organic down, so do LSAs." It's not a pie where SEO loses because there's something new in there, you can leverage all of it for a huge benefit. Yeah, keeping an eye on everything that's coming into a search result should be part of how you envision your job. Whether you can impact it with organic stuff or not, you need to know what's there that might be taking traffic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of what's coming into search, I don't know if you saw, but SGE has been released in 120 countries. Our last unsolved SEO mystery is going to be about SGE. We're doing it a little segue that we call from the top of the SERP. I think we both like analyzing what's happened, what's working for sites that are ranking, what's changing at the top, something like LSAs. We have a little segue we do where we run through what's changing, what sites are doing that are ranking, what they're not doing and how you can improve.

In this case, our from the top of the SERP is SGE because it's literally at the top of the SERP. To help us, you see what I did.

Greg Gifford:

That's clever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I'm a master of pivots. As a podcast, you have to pat yourself on the back for the pivoting, which yeah, thank you. Which ruins the whole pivot, but it doesn't matter. To help us navigate the wide world of SGE, he's the only person outside of Joe Biden who could rock aviator shades the way he does. He's sitting right there. He is the one, the only, Mike or drop the Mike King.

Mike King:

Where's my band?

Mordy Oberstein:

You're not mic'd up. I forgot.

Mike King:

What up. What are we talking about?

Mordy Oberstein:

Aviator shades.

Mike King:

It's bright up here.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so bright. It's so bright, I'm blinded.

Mike King:

Hey Cindy.

Cindy Krum:

Hey, good to see you.

Mike King:

You guys, Cindy is the smartest SEO ever. I've been saying it for years. It's a fact. Clap for that.

Mordy Oberstein:

What do you feel about Greg though?

Mike King:

Greg's cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love that you're holding the mic like you're rapping, man.

Mike King:

That's the only way to hold it. Nah, I love Greg too because he's such a great energetic presenter and he's been riding the whole movie thing for 10 years and it doesn't get old. I'm not even playing.

Greg Gifford:

I really just do that to keep myself entertained more than anything else.

Mike King:

It's dope. It's dope.

Crystal Carter:

Get out of the USP.

Mordy Oberstein:

There are new movies, right?

Greg Gifford:

Yeah, I have to update it every year.

Mike King:

Of course, of course.

Crystal Carter:

It's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, SGE.

Mike King:

Heard of it.

Mordy Oberstein:

You all in the audience. Are you worried about it? Green, if you're worried about SGE.

Mike King:

Green is not a worry color.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm sorry.

Mike King:

Purple's more a worry color.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was saying we should switch it up, see?

Crystal Carter:

We just have to pick one. There's two options.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, purple if you're worried.

Mike King:

Now they're confused, they're like, we're not doing this.

Crystal Carter:

Purple, if you're worried. Green, if you're not.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sean's worried.

Crystal Carter:

Sean's worried.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sean's very worried about the SGE. Are you worried?

Mike King:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you worry about anything?

Mike King:

No, I don't.

Mordy Oberstein:

So that's a bad question then, huh?

Mike King:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mike King:

I think it's an opportunity. Just like when feature snippets came out and everyone was like, "Oh, our traffic's going to die, blah, blah, blah." I think the reality of it is one, how people are meeting their information needs is changing dramatically. So it's not just Google, it's Chat GPT, it's TikTok, it's all these things. I think we as SEOs need to grow or evolve into these findability experts where we have to learn the interplay of channels and how to optimize for the different channels and so on. Undoubtedly, your clients are going to be like, "Hey, TikTok has a search, what do we do?" You can't just be like, "We only do local search." I mean, you can do it.

You're going to have to have an answer to some degree and I'm not saying you need to be an expert in every channel, but search fundamentally works the same everywhere. There's a determination of relevance, there's a determination of user signals to reinforce those things. What is it that happens in TikTok that we need to be doing? Findability is definitely our future, but I think for SGE, users never wanted 10 results. They wanted an answer. Google is like, "Cool, let's give you an answer." It's not perfect right now, but it's a good step in that direction. There was a paper written by this guy, his name is Andre, I can't remember his last name.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Giant?

Mike King:

No.

He's been at Google. He came from Alta Vista to Google with people like Jeff Dean and all these people. He's the guy that invented the informational transactional navigational query classification. He wrote this paper recently about what are called Delphic costs, and so Delphic costs is effectively the mental costs that you go through to get a search result. What he's talking about is no one ever wanted to have to go through 10 results and be like, "Is this right? Is this what I'm looking for?" Google has always tried to answer your question and it makes sense that they're going more in this direction.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's interesting. I think they're competing with so many more search engines now, we used to have a segment on the podcast called So Many Search Engines.

Mordy Oberstein:

We still have it.

Crystal Carter:

We haven't done it in ages, but there's so many different ways to answer a question now. The prime example I use for Chat GPT, I use a lot because George, who was on here earlier tried to teach me how to play Magic the Gathering and-

Mike King:

Get your manna.

Crystal Carter:

This is the thing, I was struggling. I'm like, "Can I play this with summoning sickness? Is there trample? I don't understand. I'm very confused. Am I a wizard? I don't know what's going on." Basically there's been a lot of SEOed content around Magic the Gathering, 4,000, 7,000 words about the thing. I'm like, "Can I play this turn?" It's much easier for me to just literally talk into my phone and go, "I have this guy with this manna. Can I play this on this turn or can I not?" Then Chat GPT will just go, yes or no. Rather than me having to read through 17 pages of content. The SGE, if it's able to do that for some of that content, that's a win.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are you saying we've ruined the internet?

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mike King:

Put up a green if you're a content goblin.

Nobody read that shit.

Cindy Krum:

Wait, wait. Can we do a green if we ruined the internet?

Mordy Oberstein:

Did SEOs ruin the internet? Green, if we've ruined the internet, according to the verdict, we have.

Crystal Carter:

Purple, No.

Cindy Krum:

Some people think so.

Crystal Carter:

Some people say yes.

Cindy Krum:

Maybe just you ruined the internet.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's that guy.

Crystal Carter:

He woke up in the morning, he was like, "You know what I'm going to do today?"

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like Pinky and the Brain.

Mike King:

Yeah, but I think to your point Crystal. We as SEOs, we can't unsee what it is that we do. When you're looking for something important and you're like, "Well, someone clearly optimized this. Some junior copywriter wrote this about whether or not I have cancer, I'm skipping this result." I think that is a reality of the internet, and people do have a sense of is this authentic? It's why we are like, "Okay, I have this ailment, where's the WebMD? Or where's Mayo Clinic or something like that." You don't trust what's on the web, but there's a lot of people that do, which is a problem. I think the standard audience is like, "If Google says it, it must be real."

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mike King:

I think that's one of the problems with SGE is because sometimes it's not right. It being Google, you inherently trust it, and so you're going to get bad information in those cases.

Greg Gifford:

Don't you think, right now it's not out, it's still beta because they want people to start thinking that way. By the time it's really officially out and in use, it's going to be way better than what it is right now.

Mike King:

I agree with that.

Greg Gifford:

Or do not think that.

Mike King:

No, I agree with that, but language models inherently have the ability to hallucinate. The way that SGE is built, it's taking the results and then using that to fine tune the language model to give you the actual response. It can still be wrong. `I don't know that the current generation of that technology is good enough to solve that problem.

Greg Gifford:

I totally agree. Everybody talks about SGE with us and we're like, "It's not coming out soon. Stop worrying about it. It's got to get better before it's going to be public."

Mordy Oberstein:

What does it look like in the end? When it goes live, it's out of beta. Forget the type of content, what does it even freaking look like? Because they've changed it 10 times.

Greg Gifford:

It looks Star Trek, man.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm wearing Star Trek socks.

Greg Gifford:

We're going to talk to our computer in a conversational way and get the answer that we want for most of this stuff. If you just want an answer like you said a minute ago, you don't want to read, you want the answer.

Cindy Krum:

I think it looks like a Google Home Hub with a knowledge graph and an answer and filters so you can drill down more and not 10 blue links or maybe any blue links or just a couple blue links. I wanted to build on what Mike was saying, I think when SGE came out, Google created part of its own problem by not doing citations. When you cite someone, then you could be like, "We didn't say it. They said it." But, when Google wasn't doing citations, then it's Google's fault and they're going to have to do citations for any number of reasons but the legal one and the getting it right or wrong is going to be a big part of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Can I ask, about the citations and about updating content, if publishers are now going to block things like Bard-

Mike King:

Why? That's so shortsighted.

Mordy Oberstein:

I agree, but I think it's spiteful. I think because they can.

Mike King:

They can't, because if you block Bard, which you have to block Googlebot in general for, you're still going to get crawled by the common crawl, which is a data source that's used for training. It's a pyrrhic victory for you to do that.

Cindy Krum:

You're just going to get ripped off, someone's going to crawl and republish.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I am with you.

Mike King:

Agree, but one of the things that I think we don't pay enough attention to is that search is also a branding channel. If you are searching for something and then there's a featured snippet and your brand is mentioned amongst other brands that are in that consideration set, that is a good thing for Mindshare. If you're not there because you want to just block Google from learning from your content as though it's so precious, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's stupid.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think it's the most under-talked about thing in the SEO world that is a personal, I am on a soapbox about this. Content fundamentally, yes, there's acquisitional content, but a lot of your content is branding content, a lot, and it's important to think about it like that.

Crystal Carter:

I think you talked about how that shows on the SERP and how that shows with things. I think that brings me to a question for the audience in terms of the SERP and SGE, can you optimize for SGE? Are you optimizing for SGE? Green for Yes, and purple for No.

Mordy Oberstein:

The people who said green, it's mostly green, maybe want to offer Greg some strategies so we can….

Greg Gifford:

Okay, can we adjust the question? Okay, if you had a green, hold it up higher still. Keep the green up, so you're optimizing for SGE. Keep it up. How many of you that have it up, you're answering this because you're doing something different than you were doing before, specifically for SGE or you have it up because you're like, "I was doing good SEO anyway." Everybody put their cards down.

Mike King:

He didn't.

Mordy Oberstein:

For the audio audience, there was three people who said yes.

Greg Gifford:

But for the audio audience, most of the people that had it up, put it back down because doing the stuff for SGE, if you're doing legitimate SEO now, you're not really having to change that much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not really. I can see you squirming in your seat right now.

Mike King:

I don't squirm. Come on. Don't make the people in listener world think that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry, I take it back. Hey Aaron, can we edit that part out. Jury, forget what I just said, stricken from the record.

Greg Gifford:

I'm curious what you have to say about this.

Mike King:

No, I mean I think it goes back to things again about Cindy being the smartest SEO ever. She was talking about fraggles five years ago. Fraggles are basically the components of the content, the passages of the content that Google has identified as most relevant and is then serving it to the language model to then determine what to say in the response. In SGE, if you click on the carousel, the links in the carousel, it has the fraggle, what do you call it? The component at the end of the URL, it's the anchor link to the actual fraggle.

Cindy Krum:

Fragment.

Mike King:

Then it'll take you specifically to the line of text that Google has used. What I've done in my analysis of this is we've pulled those fraggle for a bunch of pages and then compared it against the AI snapshot. The one that has the highest cosign similarity, the one that's most relevant is the one that ranks best in the carousel. So it's really about optimizing those fraggles and identifying them if you want to get more visibility in those.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ultimately speaking, when-

Mike King:

Should I just drop the mic then?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, in nine minutes and 53 seconds.

Mike King:

He's like, no, don't break my equipment.

Mordy Oberstein:

You break it, you buy it, by the way.

Mike King:

I can afford it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ultimately speaking then, I have to ask, I hate this question, we're going to ask it anyway. How does SGE impact traffic?

Mike King:

We don't know yet.

Mordy Oberstein:

What do you think?

Mike King:

Yeah, we've been modeling it and it's 30 to 40% based on a variety of different factors, but there's no way to know. We don't have any user behavior data on it. We don't have anything in GSE, I don't even know that SimilarWeb has anything yet. If they do holler at me, let's figure it out. We don't know. We have to wait and see until we get actual data.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, code red for the SEO tools, either they need to figure this out, because they're becoming-

Mike King:

It's already a code red for them. I was just talking about this in the other room, google shifted to semantic search 10 years ago. All of our SEO tools are still on the Lexical model, so really we are not doing something relevant to how stuff works right now. Effectively, we are still just making great content and Google is figuring it out and we're just messing around with all these tools that still do T-F-I-D-F. It's actually silly what we're doing as an industry right now.

Cindy Krum:

Also, all those tools and the weather tools and stuff like that, as far as I know, they're still focusing a lot on desktop results when more searches are happening on mobile, just more.

Mike King:

Facts.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also their keyword data sets are years old. They're almost irrelevant.

Mike King:

Sorry guys. Everything you're paying for is waste of money.

Cindy Krum:

The tools suck.

Crystal Carter:

I think in terms of click-through rate, and here's a question, maybe to the audience as well, do you think that for the SGE that brands who have a well-established brand will be less affected by a drop in clicks on the SGE? Green for Yes, purple for No. Is that too complicated a question?

Cindy Krum:

Say it again.

Mordy Oberstein:

Green, if it's too complicated.

Crystal Carter:

Basically, what I've experienced going through some of these AI SERPs and tools is that you sometimes get a repeat of people on a certain topic. I was trying to use Bard to figure out why my plant was dying, and what I found was that there was the same website that kept getting referenced for all of the different questions that I had about this plant. At the end of the day I was like, "I'm just going to go to the website because they've answered three of the questions already. So they probably have the whole bit of information there." Do you think that the brand overlap where people are getting that visibility in the circle lot, if that's going to make a difference between actually getting the click through?

Mike King:

Yes and no. What you're describing is actually a function of the context window. If you're asking Bard a bunch of questions about the same thing, all of those answers and questions are informing the next response. Whatever they looked up, because Bard is effectively a retrieval augmented generation implementation where it's just searching Google, the same way that SGE does based on your question, which is using its as a prompt. Then it's saying, "Okay, these are the pages that are most relevant to it." The original pages from your first questions remain in that context as you ask subsequent questions. That's part of why that same website kept coming up over and over. Is that going to impact SGE? Yes, it will on the follow-up questions, because again, the follow-up questions is bringing that context window concept to search.

Crystal Carter:

Then do you think it'll be more important for people to rank for those first questions?

Mike King:

Absolutely, and I think it's going to require that the content you create be more robust. Rather than the whole long tail strategy where it's like, "I'm going to make a hundred pages for a hundred queries." You may need to make 20 pages for five queries each, so that page answers several of those questions and remains in that context window.

Cindy Krum:

Google is crowdsourcing what they call these journeys. This came out when we started talking about MUM. They're looking at people who are using Bard or just using regular search to understand why their plant is dying. They're saying, "Lots of people have an Aloe plant and it's looking like this and here's the right journey." I think they'll fine tune, and I think at some point we'll get to a point where Google will try and add diversity to not just show the same website over and over again and then a QDF query deserves freshness or whatever. They're going to be honing these things in a similar model to what we've seen them go through historically with the current results. Don't you think so?

Mike King:

Yep.

Crystal Carter:

Then do you think as part of thinking about the way we create content within this space, that understanding the user journey rather than just the keyword as you were saying, or even just the semantics is going to be a critical point?

Mike King:

Yeah, and I think to Greg's point, at least at iPullRank, we've been on that for a long time. I was on that persona driven keyword research back in 2012, and that's been how we've always done it. Google is just making it more explicit like, "These search journeys actually matter, and we are building around that because we understand that people are searching to fulfill a specific need." They're not just keywords. They are people doing a series of things so they can do something in the real world.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's almost trying to do an entity-based optimization, which I know you're going to-

Cindy Krum:

Also, when they've mapped that journey and they've modeled the journey, their processors don't have to work so hard for the estimation of what's going to come next. They can be working in the background to get that information, serve it faster, which they're always trying to serve things faster.

Mike King:

To Greg's earlier point, SGE being a test is largely so that they can get the data that they need and also cache a lot of these responses, which is another reason why it's gotten a lot faster since it first rolled out.

Greg Gifford:

Wait a minute, so are you saying Google does something and tells SEOs about it to get us to give them more data? No way. No way.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, go back to what you said earlier before about whether or not the LMs are even capable of spitting out content that's going to be good, ultimately speaking. At a certain point I feel like they're going to end up with a problem. I don't think it's going to be, and they're not going to backtrack on using SGE and putting it out there. You're going to end up, I think in a situation where you're going to have a lot of great answers coming out of the SGE and you're going to have a lot of garbage coming out of the SGE.

Mike King:

I feel like you just led me in your question. What do you want me to say to you?

Mordy Oberstein:

What happens to the ecosystem? How are they going to handle that?

Mike King:

I think the bigger problem is that we're at a space where all content moving forward is inherently polluted. What I mean by that, is there's a cutoff on what content is from November of last year because it's pre-Chat GPT.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mike King:

There's a lot of stuff out there that's not accurate. There already was, but it's accelerating at such a rate that Google has had to solve that and that's where the helpful content update comes into play. I think that the primary mechanism that they have to use to understand this is information gain because with Chat GPT, you're regurgitating things in different ways more or less unless you're doing a rag model or something like that. Google is trying to sift through to say, where is the net new information here? It can't just be like, "Okay, well we have 500 pages about flossing." Like you said, and everyone is just like, "Here's how you floss." So what do you rank? Yes, we can go back to links and all of that, but Google has to understand where is there something new, otherwise users aren't going to feel like search quality is good enough.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's great. I'm just conscious that we need to wrap up and I think it's fantastic and thank you so, so much. So, a big hand to all of our guests who have given us such amazing conversations. Before we wrap up, to the audience, green for Yes and purple for No. If you'd like to see Mordy do his ranking dance again.

Greg Gifford:

You all better put your greens up.

Crystal Carter:

Green.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't remember what I did.

Greg Gifford:

Now we'll have two different GIFs to show.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hold on, I got to get in the zone. Wait, can I do a different one?

Greg Gifford:

Please do.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to do my Axl Rose.

Cindy Krum:

Do the featured snippet dance.

Greg Gifford:

Oh my gosh. Please make a GIF of this.

Mike King:

This is Donald Trump campaign energy right now.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Crystal. I really appreciate that.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful, fantastic Brighton SEO. Thank you so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.