Does SEO's reputation linger?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast to project some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of the SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she with a sterling reputation. Nothing could sully of her. Nothing stands in the way of her and her wonderful reputation from here throughout the entire SEO industry. She actually does, legit. She's the head of communications here at Wix. It's Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you very much. I'm also knocking on wood. I don't know if people can hear that, but knock, knock, knock, because-

Mordy Oberstein:

People love you. People love you.

Crystal Carter:

I know you. I love you too. We do our best. We try. We try. You have a fantastic reputation as well. We do our best.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Okay.

Crystal Carter:

We do our best, we try to do the good things.

Mordy Oberstein:

I try.

Crystal Carter:

And try to just move on from the other things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I just realized my motto, he tries. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. Where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight each, and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. But where you can also manage your reputation online with the integration we built with Trustpilot. Look for it in all the other great integrations and apps we offer inside of the Wix app market as today, in case you haven't realized we're covering reputation.

But in this case, SEO's reputation or SEO's troubled reputation, does it still linger? Why every SEO needs to understand the history of SEO's reputation, as it can impact your bottom line. Does SEO still get a bad rep? And if so, is that fair? No. Fair. How the SEOs on planet Earth can heal our world for you and for me and for the entire digital space. The great Cyrus Shepherd of Zyppy SEO will stop by to take a look at how SEO's bad rep might or might not be our own fault, scandalous. Plus, we'll chat with Michael Lewittes about how the SEO tools have only added fuel to the negative fire that is SEO's reputation. Let's fill out a fire brimstone right there.

So gather yourselves ye content goblins, because episode number 70 of the SERP's Up Podcast is going full jet on you with don't give a damn about your reputation because you're living in the past. It's a new generation. By the way. That was the theme song for 'Freaks and Geeks'. It was a great show. It only had one season and it was the most unbelievable show. I'm not even sure why it didn't get a second season.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I feel that way about 'Ugly Betty'. 'Ugly Betty' didn't have enough seasons for me. I absolutely love 'Ugly Betty'. It's America Ferrera, peak America Ferrera, and also Vanessa L. Williams being amazing.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel that way about 'Friday Night Lights', which had five seasons, but I could have gone for 50.

Crystal Carter:

But sometimes they just get a little silly at the end. But then you're already committed, so you just keep watching anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, it doesn't matter. It's all good. You got me. I'm in.

Crystal Carter:

Great, right. We're all good. We're all good.

Mordy Oberstein:

So let's talk about SEO and reputations. I think it's worthwhile to get a little, for those of you who don't know, let me get you caught up a little bit. So back in the day, a lot of, I'll call them SEOs, did a lot of practices in the past. And it looked as SEO as kind of a way to manipulate search engines, and it looked as if SEOs were a low quality service providers trying to manipulate you with all sort of these spammy practices to get you growth that may or may not have been long-lasting, generally not long-lasting. And it's developed with a point where the average person, and this is the way reputation, and it's a good lesson in brand marketing in general, the way reputation unlike Reagan economics does actually trickle down. That was too political for this podcast, but we're going to leave it in anyway.

Reputation does actually trickle down. And the things SEOs were doing way back when did trickle down to a wider audience where the average site owner was like, "Well, maybe SEO is kind of eh. Do I really want to touch that?" A lot of it had to do with the focus on backlinks and the shady practices and those, I guess digitally unethical practice around link building. And I think that got further propagated by the tools inadvertently being so focused on link building. So just driving this whole link building thing. And people caught on to that, well, this isn't really the way we want to build a website, or we want to grow our website, or we want the kind of practices that we want to engage with to build a website. Why are you SEOs recommending this? This seems shyster-ish.

And I'll end on this. Then you have major figures showing off these aggressive tactics and these less authoritative tactics showing, "Hey, here's how they work and they're great, and SEO should be done this way." And people do see this kind of thing and they're like, "Whoa, that doesn't look good. That's not ethical, that's not great." And then on top of that, just to further solidify SEO's bad reputation, you have major publications most recently, the Verge, which we'll get into, I am assuming a little bit. Saying that the things that SEOs have done over the years have ruined the way, which I think is a little bit hyperbolic. Or even not to take a shot here, but you even have the CEO of Shopify saying, "SEO is snake oil", and this is where we're at.

Crystal Carter:

There's a couple of things there. So I think that this trick does this and this trick does that, and that trick does this. Back in the day, pre Panda Penguin updates and things, pre that sort of stuff, I think those things did kind of work.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Keyword stuffing, whoever gets stuffed the most keywords wins.

Crystal Carter:

They kind of did work. And I think that it comes back to the real idea of a reputation. If you think about the reputation of let's say Dolly Parton, because everybody loves Dolly Parton. So let's say about Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton's reputation doesn't just come because of one thing she's done. It comes because of years of her doing good stuff and doing admirable stuff and being a pretty solid human. And everybody has flaws and everybody has ups and downs and things, but overall, the average, the taken as a whole, it's consistently pretty good. And I think that when you think about your reputation of your website, when you think about the reputation of an industry, people are trying to get quick wins, really quick wins without thinking about the long-term benefit sometimes or the long-term impact sometimes. And it might be that, let's say you were running a race and you were like, "Yeah, if I just push this person over, I'll get ahead." It's like, "Yeah, but then everyone will see that you're a terrible person."

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Crystal Carter:

You want long-term goals. So you work and you practice and you build up your skills so that you can have that long-term goal. And I think that one of the things that's tricky is that a lot of people were relying on those super quick wins that don't actually contribute to the overall value of the whole. Because a quick win is, there are sometimes quick wins that are totally perfectly fine, but I think a lot of people were relying on those and partially because they were getting results. It's just like if you do a crash diet or something, you might see results straight away, but then in the long-term, you probably won't. So I think that a lot were relying on those things and not thinking about the long-term thing. And I think that part of the reputation has shifted, and I think there's been a lot of emphasis from Google on shifting towards better, more long-term SEO practices, because Google is 20 plus years old now, in the early days of Google people maybe didn't even know how this was all going to play out. So you do whatever works.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, no, look, I think back in the day, it was back in the day, and the whole web was really in its infancy. And I think that's why I think we want to do this episode, because if you are an SEO, you do need to be aware, especially if you're newer to the SEO conversation, you don't remember the good old days. It's something you need to keep in mind when you're talking to your clients. And even if you are not an SEO and you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to learn about SEO or you're interested in SEO and you see, you come across things that make it sound like SEO is not really a viable tactic. It's scammy. It's spammy. It's snake oil. Why you should ignore that and focus on the actual truth, which is SEO is a great way to grow your website, you just need to understand what is real SEO and what is a bunch of shysters putting stuff up on social media saying, "Look what I did."

And to your point, I think one of the things that I'm not a big fan of going on, and if you do this, I am not trying to call you out. I apologize if I hurt your feelings. But if you go out there on social media and you start, "Here's a graph," with absolutely no context whatsoever, "Look at my success." And then you start talking about the aggressive tactics that you used in order to achieve this 'growth', I think it's a bad look overall. I think it's a bad look for SEO, I think it'd possibly a bad look for you. And I don't think it's really reflective of, it might have worked on this site in this situation, but I don't think it's reflective of what actually works on the web, especially long-term.

And if you are somebody who's not an SEO and you do see these things, do not think this is what most SEOs are doing and what most SEOs talk about. Because what most SEOs talk about, and the core of the SEO community talks about is how to make websites better for people, how to make websites and content better for search engines, how to grow a website slowly and steadily and substantially. And I think that's why it's not fair, but if you're listening to this podcast and you're looking at all these things that are not great, that's not what SEO is really about. SEO really has, it's not fair because it has pivoted, many years ago, to being far more substantial and we need to weed this out from the narrative.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's a question of, there are a million types of cars available. There are a million types of suits available. There are a million types of anything available. There's lots of different types of SEOs. There are lots of different good SEOs. There are SEOs who are maybe improving or whatever. And the person that you're working with will have different tactics. However, if they've got demonstrable results and if they've got a solid reputation, and if you can look at their work and see that they're able to see long-term sustainable growth for their clients over time, then that's good. We have an article on the hub that talks about how to choose an SEO agency. One of the good ways is to, what's your oldest client? If they have a client that's been with them for years and years and years, that's a really good sign. If all of their clients turn over every three months or something, that's a terrible sign.

And I think that who you are working with makes a really big difference in the end, even if you're taking SEO advice, we also have a podcast on taking SEO advice, look at the kinds of projects that they're working on and the kinds of gains that they're talking about. A solid SEO will be like, "Look at the growth that we saw over 18 months." That's a good amount of time. And then you can see some quick wins on tech SEO things, like if somebody was a really dire situation and then you fix something that was broken, then you can see some quick wins in that. But particularly with content and with some other things, it takes a little bit of time and it should take time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, for sure there are quick wins. We did a whole webinar with SEJ about quick wins, and there are things that you can do that are not very complicated that really do matter. They might not be quick in the sense that you might not see immediate results. Sometimes with a tech fix, I have no index the entire site, and now it's index. Quick win. But that doesn't mean those are aberrations for the most part. And if you are an SEO, and you are showing, "Hey, look at this quick thing, the quick traffic that I got," contextualize that. There are many things that should not be contextualized, but there are some things that should be, and in this case, if you're saying it's a super quick win, if you're on the social media showing this stuff, say, "This is kind of an aberration. This is not the norm." So the people who are looking at what you're showing don't be like, A, "That's what I expect." Or B, "Well, there's another SEO scammer again."

Which brings me to my next point. We as the SEO community have a responsibility. I think Cyrus we'll probably talk a little bit more about this tangentially, but we have a responsibility to fix this reputation, I feel like, as a community to fix this bad reputation that we've had. Because you still have folks like The Verge writing pieces, like, 'The SEOs have ruined the world.' No, we haven't.

Crystal Carter:

We're not in charge of the web.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's completely unfair and unjustified. If anything, we do a lot to make the internet a better place, I feel like.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Well, regularly, I mean, the team from Google have said that they rely on us to say, "Oh, this isn't working in search. This isn't good on search." And I've seen people in our community say, "This isn't a great result for this." And sometimes it's for sensitive stuff, sometimes it's for general search quality, sometimes it's for other things like that, but it's something that people regularly do. And if you're somebody and you see something that's amiss on Google, then you can, you can speak to them and say, "I found this and this isn't good." And that's something that people regularly do. I think in terms of that Verge article that talks about the people that ruin the internet, which is giving us a lot of credit. A lot more credit than we have. I think that-

Mordy Oberstein:

How powerful am I again?

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. And I think that they're talking about some of the content that people are making, and they had a similar article that was somebody who was saying, "Oh, I have to make all this content to sell my key chains on my website." And I'm like, "Well, that sounds like you have low quality products that you're trying to sell with low quality content, so maybe you should sell something else." And I think that that's not necessarily the fault of SEO, but what I would say is in terms of what we see on the SERP, SEOs are very often working in a reactive space. So very often Google will change something on the SERP, and then we need to respond in order to adjust the content to fit to that desire that Google's indicating.

So for instance, if you have structure data stuff, you would respond. And so if Google changes the SERP so that the thing that's at the top of the SERP relies on structured data, then you have to go through and add structured data to your content in order to even be in the field of play. Sometimes, for instance, say you recently introduced an examples filter on the SERP. You might think, well, "Oh, hey, I have a page that has examples on it. I'm going to change that now. So the Google knows that this is a page that has examples on it." So very often we're reactive. So I think that in that response, in terms of ruining the internet, a lot of times we're responding to what we're seeing on the internet that people want to see videos, that people want to see examples, that people want.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the incentive cycle. And it should be at this point, right? Google's moving towards very strongly, especially in how they're talking about satisfying users in a really substantial quality way, and we need to help facilitate that with the website that we're working with. It should all work in harmony. And I think that's why SEOs, we are stewards of the web to a very large extent. Which is why I think, and I don't want to come off holier than thou or on a soapbox or anything, but we do have a responsibility that we're talking about what we're doing with our clients, what we're doing with content, what we're doing with websites, to speak in a way that's mature and that speak in a way that shows we actually do care about the internet. We don't just care about getting as much traffic as we possibly can, and no matter how we do it doesn't matter.

It's not a good look. To put it practically, long-term for us getting clients, the more we do that, the more it's going to propagate the lingering reputation that SEO is snake oil. Which inevitably, every SEO comes across a client that thinks that way. And it's also a crying shame that people who are looking into SEO as a way for them to grow their own websites on their own, look at them like, "Wait a second, maybe I shouldn't be investigating it." I think that's a crying shame too.

Crystal Carter:

So here's the thing. I've encountered this when pitching to clients, where somebody, he was a dev and he built his own website and he was great, but I'll tell you right now, it was a mess. It was full of issues, and they were making money and they were doing fine or whatever, but there was full of issues, there were a bunch of issues within. And he was like, "Oh, I can read the Google Webmaster Tools guidelines. I don't need you to do that for me," and stuff. I'm like, "Yeah, but I could clean my house really well, but I might have a housekeeper who does it better. One doesn't necessarily preclude the other." I don't have a housekeeper, I'd love one, but I don't. But anyway, he was very skeptical of the entire operation.

And I think that the other thing that people get really skeptical of is the price tag. And she talks about this in The Verge articles, "Oh, they make all this money," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll tell you right now, one of the reasons why SEOs charge what they charge is because, again, PPC people do this as well. So PPC folks will charge depending upon how much the spend is. If somebody's spending a million pounds or a million dollars on ads, you're not going to charge them $500 a month, because the stakes are higher than that. So if they're spending a million dollars a month on ads, you're going to charge them something that's appropriate for the money that they're going to make on that. Because if they can spend that much on ads, they're going to expect a return of something appropriate. So you're going to charge them that.

Similarly, one of the things that happens very often with SEOs is we can see all the analytics, so we can see the conversions that you are getting from the work that we're doing. So the fee will be appropriate based on what that is. And if you've got somebody, and I've done smaller projects for smaller folks, and loads of SEOs, all the good SEOs that I know do charity work and do work with special projects and work on things that they care about and things like that. And people aren't just out here like these, what is it? Pirates, mega maniacal pirates, she called us. So people aren't here for all of that stuff. People do plenty of charity things. But if you're seeing that somebody can make, I don't know, $3 million in a month or something over the work that you're doing, you're going to charge appropriately. And that's just reasonable. That's just reasonable.

Mordy Oberstein:

Got to eat.

Crystal Carter:

You got to eat. And also, it's not fair for you to not be paid appropriately for the value of your work, supply demand and the value. That's the value of your work. And the thing that's tricky about SEO, and here's the other thing, is that in terms of reputation is that there's a lot of, we talked about this previously as well, there's a lot of myths. They talk about Google as being a black box. There's a lot of misinformation around as well, but there's a lot of good information as well. And so I think that you also want to look at the things that people are referencing. If people are sending you to the Google documentation, then they probably know what they're talking about, because they actually read the Google documentation, which is freely available. That's important to think about as well. I think that we can forgive clients for being a little bit skeptical, but I think we also as SEOs have to spend that time illustrating the value and demonstrating the integrity of our work.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look, that overall mistrust. A little bit of mistrust is, it should probably be a little bit healthy, a little bit pressure sometimes can be healthy. But it's kind of created this niche market where you have, I've been approached many times about this, "I have an agency working on my website, could you make sure that what they're doing is actually good?" And that is bonkers. I don't take that kind of work. That is not what I'm into. I think I've done it once for a friend just to...

Crystal Carter:

A sense check.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's just a bad look. It propagates bad relationships. It propagates a bad reputation. It's an incredibly valuable niche market that I'm sure some SEOs are benefiting from. I'm not getting on anybody for taking the money and doing it. Fine. There's a need, go ahead. But it's not a healthy thing for the industry, and it really shows you where it's at by the way, that you have a niche industry of check my agency for me.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that a lot of times that has to do with trust. So I've had it before where we had a client come to us because they couldn't understand the reports and they couldn't understand what the people were doing for them. And I think that that comes back to client communication. You need to be able to explain what you do to the people that you're working for. If you're doing SEO for someone, you need to be able to explain what you're doing or at least the value. And you also need to be able to demonstrate the value. Because a lot of times, particularly if someone's on retainer, they might not see what you do every month, and it might not necessarily be evident to them. Obviously.

If you make a bunch of blogs or something, then they can go, "Oh, okay, I can see that the blogs are on the website and there's some traffic to the blogs, and I can see that that's happening." But if you're doing alt texts on images and you're resizing the images to make them smaller, the images are going to look the same. They might not even notice it. If you're working on a back corner of the website, they might not see that either. So it's very important that you're able to illustrate what you're doing and you're able to explain what you're doing in order to keep trust so they don't go to somebody else and say, "What is all of this? I don't understand this report."

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, if you do something that sounds fishy, the cases I've been approached has been about, "This doesn't sound right. They said this, but I don't know." The clients are not stupid. They know this doesn't make any sense.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I think that hiding behind jargon can be something that, I think we talked about jargon as well, but hiding the high jargon, not being available to help clients when you need them. Not being able to speak in business terms can build distrust. Because if you start talking about, oh, canonical backlink indexing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's canonical.

Crystal Carter:

If you start talking about all that stuff, they're going to assume that you're not giving them good value for money. And when things hit the fan, because not everything's going to be plain sailing on our website traffic. There's a lot of volatility on the SERP. I mean, we have update after update, over update on top of an update in the last couple of months, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, we talked about with Greg Gifford back at Brighton SEO for our podcast there.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that it's going to be something that you need to, we talked about it with Greg, you need to be able to explain that stuff to them, and you need to be able to tell them how you're going to write it out. I always say that in terms of marketing, there's no mistake in being wrong. You can't predict the future. Sometimes stuff happens. But the problem that you have is if you don't have any more ideas, if you don't know how to get out of it, if you don't know what to do next, if you can't figure out what caused the mistake in the first place, that's when people get worried. And so you need to be able to be clear and articulate about what you're doing, why it went right, why it went wrong, all of that sort of stuff. And that, I think reduces some of the reputational issues.

Mordy Oberstein:

So let's then be clear and articulate, as controversial as it might sound about how much of SEO's lingering bad reputation is actually our fault. This gets a little scandalous. Anyway, here's Cyrus Shepherd to handle that.

Cyrus Shepard:

Hello, this is Cyrus Shepherd answering the question, how much of SEO's bad reputation is or is not legitimate? So I used to have a vice principal in high school, and he dealt with all the disciplinary actions, and he said that even though he only dealt with the same one or 2% of students time and time again, he did that all day long, all week long, all year long. And it tainted his perception of the entire student body. It made it seem like the entire student body was constantly getting in trouble, when in fact, 98% of students weren't doing that.

And I think that's kind of the problem that the SEO industry has. If only 5% of SEOs are soiling Google's web results, if that's what the public sees, it makes it seem like all of SEO is comprised of bad people or illegitimate tactics. This is especially poignant this week when we saw a tweet go viral about stealing rankings using a very low effort technique. That tweet had 6.3 million views at the time of this recording, because people want to make money online. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the whole business side of search engine optimization. But when people make money online with no care for the end user or the consequences, it does give us a bad reputation.

So I don't know how much of SEO's bad reputation is legitimate or not, but I do know there are a number of kind, hardworking, caring people who like doing good work, who like supporting artists, who like supporting creators, who like magical experiences on the internet. And that's who I would rather focus on and ignore the people making the internet a worse place. Let's celebrate the creators. That's all.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Cyrus. Make sure you follow and look for Cyrus, who by the way, is the founder of Zyppy SEO. Say that one more time. A founder of Zyppy SEO. Is a great name, by the way, over at Cyrus Shepherd on X Twitter at C-Y-R-U-S-S-H-E-P-A-R-D link in the show notes. It's exactly right. I used to work for a property manager company way back when, and we were managed 3000 apartment units. But you heard from the same people over and over again, it always make it feel like we're the worst company. Everyone hates us. We're not good at providing housing for people.

Crystal Carter:

Always calling up about that one radiator.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know the radiator, it's a pressure from the boiler. It's not a lot you can do about it. It's like 5% of the universe you just keep hearing from over and over and over again. And I feel it's very much the same way with SEO. Most SEOs are amazing people. The Glenn Gaves, the Cyrus' of the world, the Lily Rays of the world, the Alidas of the world, the Barry Schwartzs, I guess are legit, not just great SEOs, but really wonderful people in general. But you do have this five, 10% of the universe, I think they're all on Reddit, but...

Crystal Carter:

They're going to come for you, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Who just propagate this old school, manipulate the search engine reputation, and it does, for whatever reason, kind driving this lingering reputation about SEO that to a certain extent as that Verge article illustrated, we just can't shake.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think that there are so many good folks, and there are so many good folks who are just quietly going about their business. You talked about a lot of high profile SEOs like Lily, et cetera, and they're great. They're wonderful, they're fantastic. And thank you so much Alida and Glen and Lily and Roddy and everybody for sharing all of the things you share.

Mordy Oberstein:

And Barry.

Crystal Carter:

And Barry for sharing all of the wonderful things that you share. However, I know tons, tons of in-house, SEOs, agency, SEOs, who just ride out every day just getting those results, getting those results-

Getting those results and just quietly minding their business, but being really good at it. And I think that those folks are the folks who saved a bunch of businesses during COVID. Those are folks who help small businesses grow, who help people to avoid mistakes, who help people to discover new product lines that they didn't even realize that they could possibly do, because it's online.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look at ourselves, pat on the back, look at Nati Elimelech, Einat, Shira Amit I mean, all the people who are working on our SEO product tools at Wix are bringing SEO to literally millions of people who might not have known how to go about SEO or how to think about their pages from a search engine perspective. And now they are. So SEOs do amazing things, and that Cyrus is right. We should focus on that.

Crystal Carter:

If you're a good SEO, give yourself a round of applause.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a pat on the back and a gold star. But also, let's talk a little bit more about how the tools have played into the bad reputation for a minute as we shift gears from being positive very, very quickly.

Crystal Carter:

Very quickly, let's get back to the...

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey, it's my style. As we alluded to before, SEO tools for not any fault of their own have played a little bit of a role in the wider perception of SEO, in the ways that maybe SEO tools haven't really evolved from back in the days, the ways that maybe they should have. Which can maybe lead to overemphasis on some less than updated SEO practices that kind of maybe further sully our good name. The fact that SEOs may not have met the call for a tool revolution, although some tools really have, I'll call out Suganthan Mohanadasan with keyword insights, doing some amazing things and so forth.

But one person who we were talking to at Brighton SEO, who is taking it very seriously, is the founder of Rank, which by the way is on a Wix site. Michael Lewittes, who is now going to join us to talk about the role of SEO tools in the future and how that can play a role in the further development of SEO's good name as we take a very special edition of Tool Time.

So welcome to the show, Michael Lewittes, how are you?

Michael Lewittes:

It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Crystal Carter:

We are so pleased to have you. It was an absolute pleasure to finally Meet you at Brighton SEO, and it is such a pleasure to have you here today.

Michael Lewittes:

Well, it was great to see you and Mordy too.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Did you know, by the way, so I've known Michael for a while, but I've never met in person. And he sends me a DM, "I don't want to freak you out, but I'm six foot eight. I know you can't tell by the Zoom calls."

Michael Lewittes:

Just so that when you meet me, you don't get like, "Oh, wow, he looks a lot smaller." And then you see that I'm actually six foot eight, I'm not six foot.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think five foot eight would be pushing it.

Michael Lewittes:

That's about right.

Crystal Carter:

I was literally rattling through my brain. I was like, "I don't remember you being that tall. Do I remember that?" I'm just trying to remember the things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you imagine if he was, and you didn't remember him being that? I'm like, "No. I always thought he was like five foot eight."

Crystal Carter:

I don't remember. Oh gosh. These are the things that rattle through your head and you're like, "Do I just be polite? Do I just keep going?" Yeah. These are the things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so we were talking before about SEO's bad reputation and how the SEO tools, for lack of intention though, have I think in some ways helped propagate this or perpetuate rather this idea of SEO being a little bit on the spammy, scammy side because the tools really haven't fundamentally evolved like the industry has. See the exclusion, like I mentioned before, Keyword Insights, there are some tools that have, so I don't want to say no. But you founded it, Ranktify, and I think we've even had a few conversations about this. One of the intentions behind it has been about moving the needle, moving the bar, so that SEO tools align to what SEO is now. So by the way, feel free to pitch Ranktify and let's talk about that.

Michael Lewittes:

Well, all that said, 1-800. No. So the other thing is, and I'm not going to knock keyword research, it is important, but if you have a furniture store or if you're a news organization and you're writing about President Biden and these tools tell you, "Oh, wow, the competition's too tough." It's, you're never going to say, "Mrs. Biden's husband vetoed a bill yesterday." You could, but no one's going to search for that. And I was a journalist for 20 years and then became obsessed with SEO. And so the written word is very important to me. And also you have to see over the years, Google has definitely moved away from the easy tricks to really analyzing the content itself.

Ed is really not just a concept for the quality graders, it's really for the users and the people who are generating the content. And so everything really has to exude this expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness. And so at a certain point, I had run another company, a content company, I had sold it, had some time. And one day it hit me, SEOs don't really care too much about creating content. And I get that, and reporters or people who are creating content don't want to spend their time SEO-fying content. So I started to think, well, it's really one and the same thing actually these days. It's about making content that's helpful. So forget about all the link building, forget about all the keywords, just concentrate on making the most robust authoritative piece on any particular topic. And that's why I created Ranktify at 1-800. I'm just kidding.

Crystal Carter:

And that helpful thing, they tried to steer us in that direction and things. But I think helpful comes down to who wants to read this and why do they want to read it? And that's really what you should be considering when you're thinking about which content you're making really.

Michael Lewittes:

I have to say, a real pivotal moment, I'll name drop John Mueller here, but when I was running my other company and we were fact-checking celebrity gossip. And so the algorithm is an algorithm, it doesn't know people necessarily or their reputation or how well-connected they are in Hollywood. And I remember during one of those office hours, I said to him something like, "But our content really is much more authoritative than the people we're debunking." They're claiming George Clooney's getting divorced. And George Clooney is telling me he's not getting divorced. And yet we knew nothing about SEO practices at the time, so we were writing sort of maybe 40 words saying, "National Inquirer says this, we say this, and George Clooney tells us X." But the algorithm isn't going to pick up on just George Clooney tells us this.

And one thing that John said during that office hours, he said, "Listen, you may be an expert on this topic, and you may have great sources, but you have to prove to your users why the story isn't true." And really that set us off when I was running that company on making everything transparent. So it wasn't anymore a source tells us, we were able to back up like George Clooney tells us this. And not only that, he was pictured yesterday in New York with his wife linked to that.

So it's really important when you're creating content, forget about all that link building stuff. Forget about the keywords. Think about how you can prove to the user that you know more, that you are an expert on this particular topic, and take them through the steps so that they can, in a sense, given everything you told them, they create it themselves and go, "Wow, that's right. That's why it's better than X, Y, and Z."

Mordy Oberstein:

So first a question and then a statement. Question, was it true that Tom Cruise was engaged to a panda bear and was that denied by the panda bear?

Michael Lewittes:

He was not engaged. I have a great Tom Cruise story for another time, but not engaged. Lovely man. Lovely man. Also six footed.

Crystal Carter:

I was just going to ask you that.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was hard to judge that from the jumping on the couch. It looked like he was much shorter, but I was wrong. A statement, I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think that one of the things that I think does that or that helps you qualify whether or not a piece is actually helpful to the user is that whether or not you've really parsed that topic well enough. So a lot of times what you might consider to be a great piece of content, but a lot of that context doesn't exist, and that one point that you're making might be great. But as a piece overall, you haven't really parsed out the topic, what came first, what came next, what might happen in the future, and all the different zigzags that... In this case, let's talk about a news story that the news story kind of went about in order to be where it's at now. If that's not covered, then it might be great, but it's not helpful.

Michael Lewittes:

That's right. And one of the things is you have to just really be incredibly exhaustive. And another thing that sort of, John said, he was talking more about the layout of our website, but I think it pertains to content as well. It's, have a third party look at it sometimes, just a fresh pair of eyes, and are they going to walk away saying, "Okay, now I fully get all of this"?

Crystal Carter:

You mentioned keyword research and things, and I think that really keyword research should be used as a sense check. Not necessarily the end all be all of the thing. But if you're seeing that there's more search volume for this than there is for that, then you can say, "Okay, well people seem more interested in this somewhat than they are in that." That doesn't mean that you don't necessarily write for it on the topic.

Michael Lewittes:

That's right. You shouldn't be scared away from a topic because of the keywords. If this is what you do, or this is what you want to write about, go in full force. It's like pretty much everything in life. Like, "Oh, I know I'm never going to succeed at it, so I'm not even going to try." It's like...

Crystal Carter:

Well, that's ridiculous.

Michael Lewittes:

No, but you hear this, little kids-

Mordy Oberstein:

I never would've got married if that was the case.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I'll tell you right now, I'm not a good tennis player, but I really enjoy tennis, and if I keep it up for long enough, I'll be better than I was before. So that's fine. That'll be good enough for me.

Michael Lewittes:

That's right. That's right. And so taking that, so let's say there's a local community tennis tournament, you might win it.

Crystal Carter:

And that'll be a big day for me.

Michael Lewittes:

And it's not about Wimbledon. I always tell people, you don't need to beat the internet, you just need to beat your competitors. You don't-

Mordy Oberstein:

To go full circle on this, the tools as they're currently constructed, I say the tool very broadly, aren't conducive for that. Or they're conducive for, okay, let me look at the keyword. Oh no, it's hard. It's easy. It's got this search volume. As opposed to, here's a topic I know I need to write about, help me better understand what I should and should not be including in this topic, and how could I best go about being successful with this topic. That they're not geared and that's where I feel a lot of the tools, to no fault of their own, to a certain extent, are perpetuating this old school SEO outlook, which again, just sullies SEO's reputation to a certain extent.

Michael Lewittes:

And that's why I created this, because I wanted stuff that was robust for me as a reader and as a writer. I wanted to sort of create something where you can create your content, you think it's great. And then it may be, by the way. And you put into the tool, and we'll tell you really what the blind spots are, the things that you're missing that to make it more expertise, more trustworthy, more robust, more helpful. And I think the problem is a lot of these tools were created by SEOs who were not writers. And I think that's the big difference. I've written or edited, I thought it was 75,000, but when I started doing the math again with my kids, it's probably closer to 90,000 articles, in my career.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, Barry, is that you?

Michael Lewittes:

Yeah. No, it's crazy. So I did a column for the Daily News that ran seven days a week. We were there in the office five, and that was something like 10 articles a day. And then the content company that I ran for a decade, we were doing about 30 articles. When you start doing that, and then what I did for the New York Post and for Cosmo, and it just sort of, as you added it all up, it's like, "Oh my goodness, that's a tremendous amount."

That's why I don't read anymore. I've done it enough. So I can tell you right away when I'm reading something like, "Oh, that's big," for instance, not the biggest deal, but take entertainment story like, "Oh, no, look what Taylor did now," first paragraph, and then the second paragraph gets into it. It's like, no, no, who, what, where, when and how, first paragraph, very simple.

Mordy Oberstein:

Taylor Swift ruins football her entire season by taking focus off of football and onto Taylor Swift. Hot, spicy take right there.

Crystal Carter:

But her jets, she's trying to bury-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that was a great SEO thing, you saw that? She had a whole thing where she was in trouble, I don't follow Taylor Swift.

Crystal Carter:

If you did follow her, you would need a private jet to do so.

Michael Lewittes:

Why do you have 13 written on your hand? But okay, continue.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't understand the reference, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

That was a deep cut.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because I like Dan Marino?

Michael Lewittes:

By the way, another embarrassing story. Shortcut, friendly with her people, they invite me to a show. I get front row seats. My niece can't come. I'm there alone.

Crystal Carter:

At Taylor Swift?

Michael Lewittes:

A room of 13 year olds and a grown man.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's awkward.

Crystal Carter:

This is why I didn't go see Dua Lipa. I love Dua Lipa, but I did not go and see her because I was just like, "It'll just be children and I don't want to go and spend my time at a creche."

Michael Lewittes:

But I knew if I didn't show up clearly they would see that the tickets weren't picked up, they would see I wasn't in the front row. Run into a friend who's there with his daughter, and he says, "Oh, who are you here with?" And I'm like, "Alone."

Mordy Oberstein:

I like to go to Bob Dylan concerts because I miss my grandparents.

Michael Lewittes:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway, back to SEO.

Michael Lewittes:

SEO.

Crystal Carter:

SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I've used Ranktify, it's a great tool, and I think that's one of the things that it does do, you put it really perfectly, it fills those gaps that you didn't even know existed. But there are tools that kind of do that, but they're very top level as opposed to actually offering you the specific details and the specific nuance that other people are covering or whatever it is. That you can have a better idea of, "Okay, this is where the topic is directionally, I need to start thinking about it this way."

Crystal Carter:

So I'm going to just jump in here and say, every time I see Michael, he goes, "Well, but wait, there's one more thing." Because when he showed me Ranktify, there were so many different sections to this, and I'd be interested to hear you just give the top levels of those quickly. Because I think that this is interesting for anybody who's creating content to think about the levels of content creation. You'll do your research, you get your ideas, and then there's other levels that you can do to add more to it. And whether that might be when you're creating the content, but it also might be when you're going back doing when your content refreshes, when you're looking at a content audit, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's a great tool.

Michael Lewittes:

Thank you. So there are a lot of functionality. And by the way, there's one more thing since I last saw you, and there may be by the end of this podcast. So we take you through a lot of things. Some of it is SEO, some of it is just good writing, but good writing dovetails into good SEO. So the first thing we do is we check your spelling and grammar, because a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes people will question the trustworthiness, may not be an issue for Google. Then we basically say, "Hey," again, I don't focus on keywords, but if you're missing the keyword in the H1 in the first paragraph, that's a problem.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. It just makes your job harder.

Michael Lewittes:

Right. Again, going back to that example, if I were to even make it worse, like, "Oh, guess what celebrity did this," and you get to it, two or three paragraphs, by the way, I have seen that where they've buried it, honestly, three or four paragraphs below.

Crystal Carter:

That just makes people angry.

Michael Lewittes:

So we check the spelling, the grammar, the keywords, make sure that you have them where they need to be. We do check your anchor text so that it doesn't seem spammy, like click here. What we do is we actually tell you, you need to give context to what you're linking to, because think of it from the user side. I want to click on a link and know what I'm going to get on the other side. And I'll tell you, and I'm sure Google is picking up on this, there are a lot of places that do not even semantically similar stuff. They do tangential stuff. They'll say, "So-and-so showed up dressed like this," and then it's suddenly a gallery of people who wore blue, it's unrelated.

So what we do is we try to help you and make sure that your anchor text is related. We'll tell you actually if it's unrelated, and then suggest how to make it better. From there, we check whether your content is unique or duplicate, where it's been, even if it's semantically similar, it doesn't have to be direct quotes. Who else has done this.

And everything we do, by the way, is linkable, clickable, verifiable. So when we say it, we have these little blue bubbles underneath, where it came from. You click on it'll take you to that area and it will highlight it. And then I say, the biggest thing is we find all the missing facts and data that you haven't included in your piece, which to me are table stakes.

I was talking to, I won't say the name of the publisher, but they were complaining. This goes more than a year ago. It's such a great example. They were saying, "Oh, our stuff is better than the New York Times, but because they're the Times they rank higher." I'm like, "Okay, what story do you think you should rank hiring with?" So it was when President Biden got his second COVID shot. So we throw it into the tool, we go through the spelling, the grammar problems, the anchor text, which was all over the place. And we get to the facts and I'm like, "Well, I see that New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, a bunch of other named reputable places are saying that Biden had COVID four weeks ago." And they were like, "Oh, but everyone knows that." I'm like, "Actually, maybe they do, maybe they don't. I forgot."

And when you start seeing certain data points over and over again, that's table stakes. That's the kind of thing that Google will notice. Ooh, you dropped the ball. You have to mention certain things. So we find everything to give it in context and to help it become more robust.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's amazing. It's super cool. Check it out, ranktify.com

Michael Lewittes:

At 1-800.

Mordy Oberstein:

Michael, where can people find you?

Michael Lewittes:

Local saloon. No.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I'm saying, before nine o'clock, where could they find you?

Michael Lewittes:

Or seven o'clock. LinkedIn. There's a Ranktify and Michael Lewittes account, Twitter, the Facebook, all of it. We're across all social media.

Mordy Oberstein:

But we'll link all or at least one of your social profiles in the show notes.

Michael Lewittes:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, thanks coming by and I'll talk to you out there in the ether.

Michael Lewittes:

Thanks so much. Good to see you, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you.

Michael Lewittes:

And you too, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's okay, I get it.

Michael Lewittes:

I started that way.

Mordy Oberstein:

Break it down, full circle. Take care, man.

All right, so thanks again, Michael for stopping by. Definitely check out the Ranktify tool, a little plug for it at ranktify.com, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Very cool. Anyway, you know what's also really cool, Barry is very cool. When you think Barry Schwartz, I think, wow, that's cool. He's so cool.

Crystal Carter:

Obviously, obviously. The king of cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Some people try really hard to be cool, but they end up not being cool. Barry doesn't try at all, but that makes them cool.

Crystal Carter:

Basically.

Mordy Oberstein:

So this of course means the part we wax poetic about Barry clearly means it's time for some snappy SEO news.

Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news, two articles for you this week, both from Barry Schwartz from the newly beautifully designed Search Engine Roundtable. First up, Google, no such thing as perfect formula for ranking. This is not something very complicated, but it's based on a statement that Google's Danny Sullivan said, and I applaud Barry for covering these sort of things because it does help us be in the right mindset to how we should think about SEO. And what.

Danny said was, "Hey, there's no perfect formula to follow that must be used to rank highly in Google search. It really all does depend on what the piece of content is, what the pages is, what the website is, what the users are looking for, what the intent is, what users need, what users want. There's no set checklist follow boom, boom, boom, boom, that guarantees ranking at all. It really does all depend on what you're trying to do, what users are looking for, what everything is all about. And it's a little bit more holistic than just a checklist in general, anyway."

Which brings us to our second article, again from Barry on seroundtable.com. Google, author bylines don't help you rank better. Google doesn't check credentials. Now, this is based on an article from The Verge that was talking about SEO a little bit, and they made some interesting claims. It was an interesting article, I found it a little bit off center. I'm not getting into that here, but part of what they said was that Google looks at author bios and that's a ranking factor that helps you rank better. And Google's Danny Sullivan said, "No, not exactly." To quote Danny, "Author bylines aren't something you do for Google, and they don't help you rank better." He goes on to say, "This is something you do for your readers and publications. Doing them may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content."

So I think this comes out as part of the whole or a consequence of the whole EEAT conversation, experience, expertise of authoritative and trustworthiness. Sometimes that conversation comes off like a couple of checklist items you need to do to show EEAT. We talked about this Lee Ray on the podcast previously, that is not the case. So one of these checklist items is be, oh, have an author byline, check. Got it. Now I have EEAT. When, again, EEAT is very holistic. It's a concept. It's really about the user experience and the content quality itself.

Now, if I want to read into what Danny's saying a little bit where he says "Publications, doing them, meaning adding the author bylines may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content." I don't want to put words in his mouth, and I'm speculating a little bit here when I say this, I wonder what Google does is something like this. Yes, it's not looking at the author byline one to one, you have one, you rank better. But Google is assessing quality of a page in a little bit more conceptual, holistic way. And in assessing this quality picture, quality content, quality user experience, holistically if it's factoring in, what's there on the page, what speaks to the quality of the page and perhaps the user byline.

I keep saying the user byline, the author byline. Perhaps the author byline, if Google does look and say, "Okay, holistically speaking, if we're going to assess quality, this does maybe say that there's a little bit greater sense of focus on quality and transparency on this page, and it may factor into the overall quality valuation, quality experience of that particular page." So it's not direct, it's not even indirect, it'd be like secondary, secondary, secondary, but in a very holistic way having the author byline in there might be part of the overall very holistic quality evaluation, quality experience, quality picture that Google's looking for.

Either way it doesn't really matter. It's really good for users to have it there, so have it there anyway, which is what Danny is saying. There is also the argument, I'll bring it up very briefly, that having the author byline can create a semantic connection between the author and the topic being covered. I'll put that into English. So let's say for example, Barry Schwartz writes an article about SEO, not for Search Engine, seroundtable.com, but for a website that he doesn't usually write for.

And Google might be able to say, "Oh, there's a connection here. We know who Barry Schwartz is, Barry Schwartz is Mr. SEO. He talks about SEO all the time. In fact, that's all Barry ever talks about, is SEO. He's writing an article on whatever website. This helps us better understand or contextualize that this article is about SEO. Or let's just maybe have greater trust in the fact that this article is going to be talking about SEO, because we know Barry, we know he talks about SEO, we know he talks about SEO in a really quality way. So here's Barry again writing an article on whatever website, we can make that connection and whatever that means for ranking is whatever it means." I don't think it means much. Maybe in some cases, I don't know.

But leaving the ranking equation aside for a second, I do think, obviously that Google's able to make those semantic connections, is able to connect the dots. Oh, we know who this author is, especially when they're a well-known author. We know what they generally write about. We have a pretty good understanding of what this person, who this person is and what they tend to write about, and we now see them writing here. We're able to make that connection and whatever that means for rankings, probably not too much, in most cases, they're able to do so. That's the entity based argument for having author bylines on the pages.

Again, the real main thing is that it does just make sense for your users. It builds trust and so far may keep them on the page longer, which can factor into things, especially you're following the DOJ trial and all that stuff. And again, it might align to the overall, be encompass in the overall quality picture of the page itself, which I think is maybe what Danny is alluding to. Anyway, that's it for this week's snappy SEO news

Coming full circle, by the way, when I say wax poetic, I immediately think of wax paper and turning it into origami. That's my association to waxing poetic.

Crystal Carter:

Interesting. I think-

Mordy Oberstein:

Isn't that a weird association?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I don't know. I think of Walt Whitman.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. That makes, that's a normal association.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

I'm like, "Oh, captain, my captain," and then 'Dead Poet's Society', and then-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, it makes total sense. My warped mind thinks, oh, wax poetically, let me turn wax paper into poetry.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. All right. That's cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. That's weird. Anyway.

Crystal Carter:

Thanks for sharing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sure. You know who's not weird?

Crystal Carter:

That was your best pivot ever. Mic drop. That was your best pivot.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know who's not weird? Montse Cano, she's fabulous. She's always sharing great information about SEO on Twitter, SEO information you can rely on, not snake oil SEO information, but good, reputable SEO information. She's just also a shining light, a wonderfully nice, friendly, accessible person, which also further solidifies SEO's reputation as not being snake oil. So make sure you follow her on Twitter X at M-O-N-T-S-E-C-A-N-O, and we'll link to her profile in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

She's fantastic. You absolutely can follow her, because she's wonderful. She's super smart and she's super kind-

Mordy Oberstein:

So nice.

Crystal Carter:

And she's really active in the community, so she does podcasts, she does speaking, she does writing. She just loads of great stuff,

Mordy Oberstein:

And she's active on social. It's like a good person to follow, because they're actually active on social. So give her a follow. That's what we're saying. I'm glad that we can help SEO with this reputation problems.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. We all got to do our part, really. We all got to do our part to just try to make sure that people know that we're doing good stuff out there.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm now immediately going to share a hockey stick graph on social media.

Crystal Carter:

Just with no context, and the hockey stick went from like zero to seven.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, that's a great idea. Just show the chart and literally tweet nothing but the chart. You, one time, they dared me to do something like that when AI was first coming out as a whole big thing. Like, "Oh, Mordy, just tweet AI with nothing," and I did. And I got tons of engagement.

Crystal Carter:

You literally wrote AI, ChatGPT, Bard.

Mordy Oberstein:

It worked. So thanks for that. I got a couple of nice comments and replies. It was wonderful.

Crystal Carter:

Cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Thank you. And 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 the new episode as we dive into user behavior and SEO. What's changed? Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub wix.com/seo/learn Look to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.