Removing the fluff from SEO reporting

Mordy Oberstein:

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

Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I am Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the one, the only, the greatest, the best ever, the head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. I mean Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello Internet friends and welcome to SERP's Up. I'm very pleased to be here with you.

Mordy Oberstein:

You were just at a recent event and saw some really cool friends of ours at the-

Crystal Carter:

Yes, I did.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't remember the name of the event that you were doing.

Crystal Carter:

I've been doing loads. I've been doing loads of events this autumn. It was a local event called Building Brands, which I was really pleased to be doing because they're actually on a Wix website. And they rank really well. There was another I did-

Mordy Oberstein:

How appropriate.

Crystal Carter:

I know, I know. I did another event for another team, PPC Live UK. They're also on a Wix website

Mordy Oberstein:

Also on a Wix website. Amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And both of them are ranking really well and both of them sold out their events. So I'm just saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

ASMX, MozCon, brightonSEO, Pubcon. Just saying.

Crystal Carter:

This is the kind of fun you could have. Yeah, just throwing that out there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is perfect placement for the SERP's Up Podcast, is brought to you by Wix, where you can rank and get all of your conference people into your conference. Or if you want to earn click from Google Discover, you don't need to change your max image preview robot's meta tag in order to produce that gloriously large image within Google Discovery, you know the big image that drives the clicks, not the little one that doesn't drive the clicks, because we set it to the max image preview by default. You could change it manually by the page or folder level, but why would you? You don't have to. It's one less thing at Wix.

Crystal Carter:

One less thing. That's what we're trying to do. Trying to save you time so that you can get out there and make money, get leads, do the things you want to do on the internet.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or at least brag that you were in Google Discover and got clicks.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's what's up.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bragging rights are a real thing.

Crystal Carter:

Bragging rights are definitely valuable. I will work for bragging rights.

Mordy Oberstein:

Basically. Right? So another great episode for you today, actually, a really important topic, SEO reporting. You know the point in time where you show the value of your work to your boss, client or friends, it's kind of a big deal.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's kind of a big deal. Normally happens once a month.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we're going to get into some of the challenges come with reporting on your SEO effort as well as a mindset that sets up your reporting for success. And we have SEO OG, Joe Hall will join us to share how he decides on which KPIs he reports on. From there, we'll make a stop over at the top of the SERP to see what works and what doesn't work when trying to rank it, including relevant topical matter. And of course, on from there to the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social for more SEO Awesome. All aboard, episode four 14 of the SERP's Up Podcast.

So SEO reporting, everyone's best friend.

Crystal Carter:

It's really not. I'm pretty sure Aleyda Solis did a Twitter survey on this and they were like, what is the thing that you most dread? And I'm pretty sure that the answer came out being SEO reporting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is why we're doing this episode. SEO reporting is really important. Your SEO efforts don't exist in a vacuum.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's all part of the sites and their businesses' overall goals, whatever those may be. And because SEO is part of the site's overall business goals, all sorts of stakeholders are interested in what's happening with the SEO work that you're doing. And then if they're not interested, you need to get the buy-in to make them interested so that they keep the SEO services that you're offering up. You might say they want to know, what's going on.

Crystal Carter:

I wasn't ready for those delta tones, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't have that deep voice to really nail that song, but you know what I'm trying to say.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Kidding aside, folks, whether they be clients, C-level executives and marketing managers, slew of other internal teams who you need help from need good SEO reporting. I'll just say it's a lot easier to get a designer or developer, whoever, to help you out if they know that organic search drives a lot of revenue for the business. So even cross team SEO reporting can be really, really important for getting buy-in.

Nothing I'm saying here is novel. It's all pretty intuitive until you get into the weeds and until you start thinking about what to actually report on to whom to report it to and what data sets to use for what data source. Because there are all sorts of pitfalls, all sorts of pitfalls when it comes to SEO reporting, from vanity metrics to overlying on whatever graphs and charts the SEO tools are throwing your way and well beyond, which is why Crystal and I are here to help you with the help of SEO and Joe Hall, to discuss the framework of mindset that you should have behind the reporting that goes into your SEO efforts. And that could be reporting to, again, whatever client, manager or stakeholder, because there's a lot to say about be getting this right. And I've been talking a lot. So Crystal, take it away. What goes into reporting SEO efforts properly?

Crystal Carter:

I think when you decide what you're going to report on, you need to understand what's most important to the business or the project that you're working on. I've worked on projects before where we were reporting a certain conversion, which was an existing metric on a Google Analytics account. And we got to the end of the month and we were like, "Ugh, we have crushed this. We got way more leads than we've ever seen before. We doubled your leads. They were amazing." And we sat and spoke to the client about this and they're like, "Oh, we didn't notice that." And we were like, "What?" We were like, "Well, it says that all the leads came in and stuff." And they were like, "Oh, well did you get those?" It's like, "No, I didn't because some so and so was on holiday, someone was on vacation, they didn't pick them up, we're not even checking that email anymore."And all of this sort of stuff.

So we were reporting on something and thinking we were doing amazing when this was not having any business value because the infrastructure for instance, wasn't set up for that. And so I think that it's very important to understand that whatever you're reporting on actually has some business value to the business. Sometimes people say, "Oh, we increased traffic." But if you increase traffic full stop, that's not necessarily valuable unless it's traffic to the right pages. Sometimes there are websites where they will have lots of tag pages, for instance, or lots of category pages which happen to rank and happen to get lots of traffic and things like that. And cool, awesome. Do you know what I mean? If those don't have actual value to the business, then getting traffic to those pages isn't of any worth.

So it's really important that you understand the connection to the business with whatever it is you're reporting on. So I always recommend actually talking to the business owners about what they need to know in order to make actionable decisions across the business and what metrics actually reflect business value to them. With e-commerce, it's fairly straightforward. Sales for instance, is going to be your top metric and then maybe email signups for newsletter or maybe video views or something like that. With lead gen, it can be a little bit trickier. And so you need to understand and make sure that any metrics that you're measuring actually are going somewhere and actually have business value. Talking to the business owners about what they need outside of SEO, outside of the website, is really, really important for them.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I think for SEO or in SEO, it's really easy to get caught up in vanity metrics because the data is amazing. There's so much data, there's a whole industry of data providers and a lot of it looks pretty linear. Let's say rank. I've always found rank to sometimes lend itself to being a vanity metric. Because as you mentioned, I could rank a website for a million keywords and it's totally irrelevant.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sometimes you're right, it's a little bit harder with rank or things like that because if it's not, let's say an e-commerce, say it's a blog site and they're bringing, they just have ads sense, they're running ads on the blog and that's how they're bringing... So the traffic's super important. But yeah, so I'm bringing all this traffic or we're ranking for all these keywords and it's bringing in all this traffic, but are those going to be users going to click on those ads or those ads are relevant for?

So you sort of always have to qualify what the data is you're showing. And I feel that's a point about data in general that goes well beyond just SEO reporting. Data needs to be qualified because data as a concept is fundamentally, you're taking a quantitative thing, numbers or amounts, and you're often trying to explain qualitative things with them. For example, user behavior. And you need to be able to show or to be able to explain how that quantitative metric, and usually it's because there's so much quantity we use to be able to explain the qualitative behavior. But you still sometimes need to bridge that gap and qualify it. And a lot of that is not just in the data that you're presenting, but how you're presenting it and the notes that you're doing it with. And I think it's super valuable.

And a lot of the data reporting tools that are out there will do this. They'll give you a point where you can add on notes. And use the heck out of those things to be able to explain, here's what the data is, here's what it says. Because again, not everybody looking at what you're going to have on that report really understands it right off the bat. So you need to explain it and then show them the value. Here's why this data matters for what you're doing, like you said before.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And also, I think you touched on something really important. So with every tool you have, they'll be like, "Oh, you have this chart and that chart and this chart and this one and these scatter points and these averages and this percentage and all of that sort of stuff." And it can be really easy to over report.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

It can be really, really easy.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it looks really cool, like, "Oh, look at this really cool thing." I had an SEO tool ask me recently, "Can you take a look at this tool?" Blah, blah blah, "What it'd say? Do you know what it does and how you'd use it?" I'm like, "It looks really cool. I'm not really sure how I'd actually use this, actually."

Crystal Carter:

If you're working with clients or if you're working with stakeholders who are not in the weeds, like you are on the SEO, sometimes if you just give them a wall of stats, they'll just completely turn off, they'll completely switch off. Whereas, if what they need to know is, we got this ROI, we got this ROAS, we got this many clicks, we have this many impressions, just to give them some signals that it's working. If they need to know five metrics, then give them the five metrics, and have the data available if you need to do a deep dive. But just give them the five metrics and they will trust the rest of your data a lot more than if you just give them a wall of data that they don't understand at all.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think that's a great point. You said that you want to show them whatever you're doing is working. In other words, don't get lost in the numbers per se. Use the numbers to show that it's working. And sometimes, I think we get lost in, especially as SEOs like, "Oh, here are the numbers." First off, no numbers are exact. Whether it be Google's own data, whether it be third party data numbers. These are not the actual number of links that you have. Even the rankings may not be the actual rankings right now. It could have changed, whatever it is. But the numbers indicate a trend of where things are going. And I think that's more important than anything. Are we headed in the right direction?

Crystal Carter:

Right. Have you moved the needle? Are there some green chutes in this tactic? Because sometimes you'll have a tactic that you're just rolling out and you want to have some kind of sign that it's working in some way and whether or not, as a sort of test. So we're doing this test on a few blogs before we roll it out to hundreds and hundreds of blogs and you want to be able to see some signals that it's beneficial. So yeah, you want to have those metrics. But as you say, yeah, not exact. And I always say don't rely on a single data source. Make sure that you have a few different data sources. Because sometimes it might be that if you're reporting... Because that's another pitfall, you don't want to report on wrong data. So if you're somebody who is a client and you're looking to get SEO support, your SEO will almost certainly go through analytics and make sure that everything is set up properly in the first place.

Because if you're getting information that's incorrect, then you will be making incorrect actions based on incorrect data. So you need to make sure that you're getting good data sets, good information, and make sure that you're cross referencing that data from a number of different points. So third party tools will have one set of information about where you're ranking and Google will have another set of information about where you're ranking. For instance, if you go to the SERP, you might see certain something else to show you where you're ranking. So it's important to think about all of those things when you're thinking about data and when you're thinking about reporting.

And that's what makes it really interesting because you want to show you're going in a certain direction with things and you use multiple data sources for multiple providers to do that. And it also means, I think reporting is not marketing, reporting is reporting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And because you're trying to show directionally where things are going, don't worry, "Oh this one data point, or these two data points are showing not the right results, I won't include them." First off, you are ethically obligated to tell the client or manager, whoever it is, the stakeholders, what's happening, even if it's not good. And also, it's going to hit the fan at a certain point.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yeah.

Crystal Carter:

So you might as well instill the confidence that you know there's a problem, it's not going where we want it to go or this particular aspect is not going where you want it to go. "I've identified the problem, here's the recommended fixes. I got this." Because again, you want to instill confidence and the only way to do this is not to hide the problem because they're going to find out eventually.

Oh, and I always say within marketing, if something doesn't go... We're not magicians. Nobody expects you to be a magician. Nobody expects you to be right 100% of the time, every single time about every single idea that you have. However, in marketing, it's not a problem until you run out of ideas. If you don't know what to do next, if you are like, "Oh, this blog's going to be amazing, it's going to be the best thing since sliced bread," and it hits and it's kind of like straightaway doesn't quite do it. If you just go, "Oh, it wasn't good." If your reporting's like, the report says it was bad and that's it, that's not good. Don't do that.

If the report's like, "Oh, our numbers are saying that it didn't work, we should do this next." If you say we should do this next or we should try that, or maybe we should try a different topic or maybe we should try a different content medium, that's beneficial. And the reporting can help you prompt new action, new ideas with regards to SEO. And also, if you're able to come out of that, it can build a lot more trust with your stakeholders when you're working. So if you're like, "Okay, I found this problem, it doesn't work, but we can try this based on the data that we have and we'll get a better result." And if you do, then that's great. They'll know that when you hit a bump in the road, you can get out of it.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's fundamentally, I think, what reporting... To me, if you want to break it down to what is it fundamentally, it's trust between the stakeholders, between you and your clients or you and the other stakeholders, whoever they may be. And I think if you look at reporting that way, and I think one of the things you can do with reporting to build that trust is to educate whoever it is you're reporting to. Really taking the time to use it as, I think you called this a one point, a teachable moment where you can be able to explain what's happening, what it means, and dragging someone along with you on that journey and bringing them along with you rather on that journey.

Crystal Carter:

Dragging.

Mordy Oberstein:

A bad way to put it. You don't want to drag anybody anywhere. You want to bring them along autonomously.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Creates a deep relationship that's built on trust and mutual work forward to the next goal.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I think that SEO touches on so many different parts of a business that if you're able to do that, then you're more likely to have more conversations about other parts of the business and about analyzing different elements of things that they can do. So yeah, it's really, really valuable. And I think that there are some great tools that help you to do that. So Looker, formally known as Google Data Studio, allows you to make templates, templates which you can add new data sources to. So for instance, if you make an organic performance template, you can plug in different data sources. So you can make one organic performance template and then with using one set of data, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, whatever, and then you can build on that. So if you're working on multiple projects, you can also make a copy and input new data.

And so, as you're building on this, if you get client questions, you can add notes to them, you can add links to them that can help you to educate your stakeholders. So if they don't know what this metric means, if they don't know how to use the document, you can make a link. And I would link to looms. So I'd make looms that said, if you don't know how to use this report, here's a link to a quick walkthrough of how this report works. And that means that when they're sharing it across the business, anybody can understand it. Because that's the other thing about reports, they should be readable by anyone in the business, not just people who are right in it. They should be readable by anyone.

Mordy Oberstein:

But first off, there's a lot of great templates that are already out there, which I'll link some in the show notes. But let's run a couple Google searches for SEO reporting templates on Looker, or you can use Data Studio because maybe Google doesn't know what Looker is yet. I don't know, it's very confusing at this point.

Crystal Carter:

There's also templates in Google Data Studio/Looker.

Mordy Oberstein:

Again, confusing. Name switch is always confusing. But there's also the idea of, okay, now that you have... And I personally think with these sort of things, the framework and the mindset is more important than anything. But there still is a question of what exactly do you report on? Which is why we ask an absolute legend, Joe Hall, who is again an absolute legend in the SEO community. We asked him, "Hey Joe, how do you decide what KPIs to use in your reporting?" Hey, here's what Joe had to say.

Joe Hall:

When trying to decide which is the right KPI for a client or project, I like to set it up in three different ways. I like to think about KPIs as either communication KPIs, strategic KPIs or business KPIs. Communication KPIs are measurements that communicate an idea and educate the client every time you talk about them. They are used to educate and inform about bigger ideas and things they need to focus on. I usually find these KPIs by talking to the client and asking them specifically what they're interested in. This is because these are the KPIs that they are already used to talking about and they already are familiar with. So it's easier to have a conversation around those KPIs. The second set of KPIs I like to look at are what I call strategic KPIs. These are metrics that are aligned with strategic objectives. So typically, when you are starting out to do SEO, you have some sort of strategy development.

And in that strategy development, you have a specific objective. And so to find these strategic KPIs, we can start backwards by looking at the intended objective for the strategy and deciding what types of metrics that can be counted to ascertain the success of that objective, or not, and these are called strategic KPIs.

The last type of KPI that I like to look at are called business KPIs. And these are metrics that are aligned with business goals. And I like these because it helps connect the dots between the SEO process and the business objectives, the bigger business objectives. So basically, we could find these KPIs by trying to understand how does the SEO process impact the business model or the bottom line. So for example, if you are a publisher, then the specific KPI that might be good for you would be organic page views because many publishers sell advertising and the amount of page views can make for more expensive advertising. But whatever method you use to pick out your KPIs, whether it's communication, strategic or business, just know that the intention is to educate, inform, and align with key business objectives. And I think if you follow those three areas, you should not have any trouble picking out the perfect KPI for yourself or your client.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Joe. As a really nuance and layered way of looking at KPIs and to the point you are reporting to your clients or internally to whoever should be multi-perspective, multi-layered and tell the entire story.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. Like a fantastic sandwich. It should have many layers and lots of textures and something that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Something crunchy. Something slightly crunchy.

Crystal Carter:

Something crunchy, something you can really sink your teeth.

Mordy Oberstein:

But not lettuce. Lettuce is crunchy but doesn't count.

Crystal Carter:

Something you can really sink your teeth into. But also something that's really satisfying basically, for everyone. So I think he was talking about lots of different elements of lots of different stakeholders and how he thinks about stakeholders all the way through. So the business KPIs, the strategic KPIs, the SEO KPIs. I think it's a really, really interesting way of thinking about it. And I think it's something that makes sure that everyone feels involved from the beginning because you don't want to have to redo your KPIs further down the line. It's like if you're playing Uno or something and then they start changing the rules. Nobody likes that. You don't want to change-

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, there are rules in Uno?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, of course there's rules in Uno.

Mordy Oberstein:

I honestly make those up as you go along.

Crystal Carter:

No, they got some new ones where you like swap hands or something like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

You see the double sided UNO cards? Those are awesome.

Crystal Carter:

I have not.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we'll talk about that later.

Crystal Carter:

Other cards are available. But yeah, nobody likes it when you have to change the rules in the middle, it does not build trust at all. So it's really good to think about what he was talking about with regards to the multiple stakeholders and making sure that everyone has a KPI that makes sense to them is super, super valuable. Incredible, great advice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. And don't forget to give Joe Hall a follow on Twitter, @JoeHall. That's J-O-E H-A-L-L. Joe Hall. It's pretty straightforward, it's Joe Hall.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks, Joe. So speaking of reporting, I was looking at a little nifty reporting dashboard that I have behind the scenes from folks at Semrush. And I was looking at some data about page or pages that we're ranking for a given keyword and I figured I would share what I found with you because we haven't done this little segment in a while. Personally, it's one of my favorites. And we're going to take a little bit of a thematic look at what kind of works for ranking overall from this particular case of what I saw was ranking at the top of the SERP, which is why we call the name of the segment, From the Top of the SERP.

Crystal Carter:

All the way from the top.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like these used to be some kind of '80s rock song about being on top, coming right after this segment. Know we got the whole surf thing going on?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Rocky.

Crystal Carter:

(singing)

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll arm wrestle you to the top of the SERP.

Crystal Carter:

There'll be like a montage and some power cords.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, a montage things ranking at the top of the SERP.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I was looking at ranking after a Google algorithm update and I happened to stumble on something I thought was really interesting. The key word is WHO hand washing. Not like who, as in who are you, but World Health Organization, WHO hand washing. It's confusing. The intent is I think finding what WHO, not the band, but the World Health Organization, recommends as who how to wash your hands.

Crystal Carter:

What they recommend that you do?

Mordy Oberstein:

Wash your hands. Who are you? Anyway. Wow, there's a lot of singing in this episode.

Crystal Carter:

Too much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Welcome to the musical version of the SERP's Up Podcast.

Crystal Carter:

We should totally do a musical.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the SERP's Up Podcast on ice.

Crystal Carter:

We should absolutely do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

We should do a musical version of... Anyway, I was looking at this keyword and I saw that Google was ranking a page from, it's from one of the universities, I think, it was the University of Minnesota or something like that, or it was the Minnesota Department of Health. And what I noticed was Google was ranking one page from their website about washing your hands and their hands, everyone's hands, for a really long time. And then all of a sudden, Google stopped ranking that page and swapped it out for a different page. Like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, why did Google do that?

Crystal Carter:

On the same domain. So it's a different page on the same domain.

Mordy Oberstein:

Same domain. Different page for the same website. That's really interesting. So naturally, curiosity got the better of me. I went to the old page and I went to the new page. I'm like, what's the difference between these two pages, that Google would say no more ranking of that page and now let's start ranking this page? And that was really perplexed because the new page I thought wasn't as good. I thought the old page was better. I thought the old page was more... It had better page structure, the information was more digestible, it was a little bit clearer. The UX and the UI of that page was better and the new page was not as good.

I'm like, "That's so weird." Okay, what's going on here? But I noticed that topically, the new page included talking about hand sanitizer and washing hands. I'm like, isn't that interesting? And then I dived even deeper, and I noticed that most of the pages ranking on page one all talk about washing their hands with water and with hand sanitizer. And when you go to page two, it gets a little more spotty. Some pages do, some pages don't. I'm like, "Ah, I see what's going on here."

Crystal Carter:

Right. Google's made a decision that hand sanitizer is something that's important for ranking for this term.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right. Topically speaking, hand sanitizer and hand washing, if you want to adequately comprehensively cover hand washing, you must also cover hand sanitizing.

Crystal Carter:

So I'm interested in this one because Google sometimes curates SERP. So for instance, during peak COVID, if you were to look up something like COVID testing, they'd have a very specific set of websites that would rank for that, for instance. And none of them were commercial. All of them were health organizations, for instance. So I'd be interested in knowing where they added that criteria, whether that was criteria that came from, say like the CDC or something. Maybe the CDC changed their criteria because that's the other thing, sometimes with certain SERPs, they will prioritize content that aligns with official information. So I wondered if that decision came from something like the CDC or if that's something that they saw from consensus that they saw that users were looking more for hand sanitizer when they were looking at hand washing. Because that's probably a question, can I wash my hands with hand sanitizer or-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, totally.

Crystal Carter:

... Hand sanitizer instead of washing my hands if I don't have option to wash my hands or something to that effect.

Mordy Oberstein:

Totally. And in fact, when I looked at, not just this query, but I started looking at a whole bunch of other kinds of hand washing queries, and it's the same pattern. The hand sanitizer pages or the pages that talk about hand sanitizing with the hand washing all started to rank. I think that's what's happening. I think that semantically speaking, Google realized at a certain point, topically speaking, these two things now are very much a part of the same corpus of content. And you sort of have to have both. Not as a hard fast rule. But again, to comprehensively cover the topic, google kind of realize this has to be there. Because yeah, all the time when you're out there and you're like, "I'm not near a sink. Can I wash my hands or can I sanitize my hands with sanitizer?" By the way, I think at a certain point you can't. You need to actually wash it off at a certain point.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I only know that because my wife's a nurse and she told me that. Google didn't tell me that.

Crystal Carter:

This is true. But I wonder if this changes with different relationships between other entities. So for instance, if you think of famous couples or something, I don't know, Jennifer Lopez recently got remarried to Ben Affleck.

Mordy Oberstein:

What?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

No.

Crystal Carter:

Last time I checked. You didn't know?

Mordy Oberstein:

Poor A-Rod.

Crystal Carter:

It's not new. It's not new.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is not new?

Crystal Carter:

Not new. So sometimes when you look up SERPS, for instance, certainly Wikipedia will say the spouse is this person or sometimes when you look up SERPs like that, they'll have an information box that just says who the spouse is, for instance. So I'd be interested to know if Google changes that information, that they'll rank information around content that has the most recent connection, for instance, if it's like a spouse or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know for a fact, because I've tested this out. I've tested it out on sports trades. So a player has traded on one team to the next team. It's so quick. The knowledge panel updates, not the pictures. The pictures obviously don't, takes us a little bit of time or it might not get it all right. But it'll tell you who is this, what team they play for. It'll the new team right within an hour.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's super quick.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So then does that mean that the pages that rank within the sort of core search results, do they adjust the ranking there so that whichever one has the most recent one and ranks better?

Mordy Oberstein:

That's interesting. That's a really good question. But it also just goes to show you that it's not just what's on your page that it helps you rank, but it's also what's not on your page that helps you not rank.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is something that people need to think about. And I think it's again, one of the reasons why we do this segment at all the Top of the SERP, because it's worth looking at what's on the SERP as well in order to make sure that you've got the right content for what you need to do.

Mordy Oberstein:

So From the Top of the SERP, to the top of what's happening in the SEO news, here's this week's Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, they have arrived. Some of the product updates around Google Shopping and local search now previously at Google's search on event have arrived, or arriving, depending on where you live. Per Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, Google's new local search features are finally here. So these updates include being able to use serve to find local eateries that serve a certain dish, meaning you could search for General Tso's chicken near me, which I plan on doing immediately following this recording. You could also take a picture of the dish via Google Lens and use that to search for local establishment that serve that particular dish that you a picture of, which is amazing. Also, and this is super cool, in my honest opinion, AR is coming to local search in London, New York, LA, Paris, and Tokyo to start. It's called Search With Live You. And it basically means you can use your phone's camera point in a local shop, and you'll get a layover of visual information as to if the establishment is open, how busy it is and so forth.

I was just in Times Square, New York City visiting my father. This would've been super useful. There were a million business around. If I could have simply picked up my phone, pointed it at the various establishments and just kind of did a 360, I could see how busy they were, which ones are open and made a better decision, which one I wanted to frequent instead walking around for a half hour, in and out of various shops, which we actually did.

Anyway, can be very, very highly useful, super cool technology and is absolutely amazing, particularly in an area like Times Square, New York where there's a high concentration of businesses. And with that, that is this week's snappiest of Snappy News.

Boy, that Snappy News of short tops. Now I'm connecting back the other segment. You see what I'm doing there? Top of the SERP, Top SEO news, so much-

Crystal Carter:

Flawless-

Mordy Oberstein:

Flawless. Flawless victory for all you video game folks in the 1990s, not in the 1990s, it's got to be later in the '90s, right?

Crystal Carter:

Finish him.

Mordy Oberstein:

Mortal Kombat. And speaking of finishing, let's finish this podcast by ending off with who you should be following for SEO Awesome. And since we're talking about SEO reporting, I think one of the greatest people out there who has done a lot by way of SEO reporting is speaking of Google Data Studio or Google Looker Dashboard, she definitely has one. She is the one, the only, Christina Brodzky LeVasseur.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. She has some fantastic Google Data Studio templates she shares around G4, around other types of reporting. And she's a great person to follow, particularly if you're getting started with SEO. She talks about reporting, she also talks about client relationships, which is why you're reporting it all, is to make sure that you're managing your client relationships. And yeah, she's a great person to follow for lots of different reasons-

Mordy Oberstein:

And is super helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Super helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Super accessible. So if you have questions and we'll link to her Google Looker, I'm never going to get this right, template. And if you have questions, just go on Twitter and she'll answer them for you. She's super accessible, so I think she's a great resource for you. So don't just follow Christina, but engage and interact with Christina because she's a wealth of information and super happy to share it. And on Twitter, it's @CBrodzky. That's B-R-O-D-Z-K-Y, over on Twitter. Of course, we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes. And that's it.

Crystal Carter:

That's it, that's all. Is that everything?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm here to report that we finished the episode. See what I did there?

Crystal Carter:

I see. We have a fantastic KPI of having recorded a podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right.

Crystal Carter:

How many recordings? One.

Mordy Oberstein:

One. One recording. That's our data, one.

Crystal Carter:

That is our data. Our data says one recording. Well done.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like the Count from Sesame Street right now. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry? We're back next week with an all new episode. We dive into the value of Google Reviews. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all of 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 a review on iTunes, we're already on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.