Take your SEO off life support

Mordy Oberstein:

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

Aloha, Mahalo, for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who rekindles fires across the internet, the one, the only head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

I am the fire starter, the twisted fire starter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, 'cause I was wondering who burned down that lovely-

Crystal Carter:

No, no, no, that wasn't me. No. Sorry. No, no, no, no. Sorry I didn't start that fire.

Mordy Oberstein:

I really liked that place.

Crystal Carter:

No, no… different one. No, it's just like shout out to the [sings]. People know that song, right? Am I that old? It's that bad? Do you know that song?

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway though. The Serb'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 resuscitate and revitalize your SEO workflows with checklist, cheat sheets and more found on the SEO Learning Hub's resource Center over at wix.com/SEO/learn, but this time /assets, as this week, we're here to help you if your SEO strategy and performance is on life support. Get tips and how to revitalize your SEO as we look into how to hunt down new organic opportunities, how to get your content cadence going again and the risk reward of trying something new for your SEO to help us.

Sterling Sky's Carrie Hill will pop into to share how she revitalizes a site's SEO after a search marketing hiatus. Plus we'll explore a tool that can help you find new ideas. You probably already have it, but you don't even know that it's there. And of course, we have the snappies of SEO News and who you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So somebody called 911 and started singing, staying Alive in Your Head as episode 86 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you resuscitate your SEO back up to 100 or to 120 beats a minute. You know that trick by the way you're doing CPR [singing “Staying Alive”]. And that's how you do the compressions?

Crystal Carter:

No, I did not know that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, that is some good life skills there.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's some life skills right here on the SERP's Up podcast. Great episode of the office that talks about that also, which I'm not going to go into here. But yeah, it helps you do the cadence for the compressions. That's the reference. That's why I talk about the Bee Gees.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, I see that. I see that. I think that makes sense. That makes sense. So we're talking about how to reignite, resuscitate even, the SEO if it's gone kind of flat. And I think that this happens essentially when people take a break from content creation and/or when people sort of maybe forget about the website. There's a lot of times where there are clients who are so busy managing the website and maybe it's a business that isn't a direct to consumer business and maybe it's more of a brochure site. And what will often happen is that businesses will carry out their business, they'll do their day-to-day, and they might not even look at their website very often. They put up the core information about the business, but they might not look at what's on the pages there. And oftentimes if you look at that, then the SEO is kind of flat, right?

Might be the same sort of number of traffic for years, months, weeks, certainly months and years. And I think that when you have a situation like that, even if you have blogs, even if you have content, if you are doing some of the sort of SEO best practices that people talk about, things like optimizing images and optimizing Meta descriptions and optimizing even the content that's already there, you might still see that your website is still kind of flat. And if your traffic is a little bit flat, but my general advice is that it probably means you need to do something different. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, if you're doing the same thing, if you've got the same amount of content, then Google will give you the same results. So if you want to reinvigorate your website, if you want to re-engage Google with your website, then probably the best bit of advice I can give to someone is to start making new content.

And this might mean that you need to create new blogs. It might mean that you need to create new other pages on your website, but chances are between the last time you updated your website and now things have changed either for your business or within your industry, certainly within the last 18 months with all the AI that's going on, I think most industries have seen some impact from that, for instance. So there's almost certainly something that you can contribute there. But that does a few things. First of all, recency is a consideration when Google is thinking about new content and when Google is thinking about indexing content. Second of all, if Google is seeing that your site map, your site map will say the last time that your content was updated, and on a dynamic site map, very often the most recent content will go to the top of that list.

And it's the case that the top of that list says that the last time your content was updated was in March the fourth, 2022, then they're going to go, "Well, we don't need to crawl this again. We already crawled this between now and 2022." So when you update content that says, "Oh, we should refresh this crawl because this site is new." They've done new stuff, they've got new things. The other thing that's great about it is it also gives you another opportunity to share content across different socials, which also will get crawled. It also gives you an opportunity to connect with more folks via backlinks, email, et cetera, et cetera, and to get a burst of traffic coming to your site when you're doing new content.

Another great tactic that I've seen from folks, particularly agencies who are doing great work with content and websites that have sort of flatlined a little bit, is to not just do it in dribs and drabs, not just do one blog and then a month later, another blog, and then a month later, another blog, but upload 20, 30 blogs at the same time or 20, 30 pages at the same time, because that gives Google lots of new information about what's going on on your site. And when you link all of that up, that also gives lots of information to Google about the connections across it and all of that sort of stuff. I can see Morty wants to jump in here.

Mordy Oberstein:

At the same time, if you haven't produced new content, you have another problem, is that your audience thinks you're dead. So if you're going to put out one, "Okay, I'll get the SEO going. I'll put out a new post every month," and over time, "I'm not in a big rush." Let's say you're not in a big rush for whatever reason. I don't know why you wouldn't be in a big rush, but you're not in a big rush. "I'll take my leisurely time ranking again." Fine. You will miss out on all of that potential on your brand for people to realize that you've revitalized, you've been resuscitated, you are still alive. And that can also lead to helping your SEO, because once your people see that your brand is back, they'll share content on social, they might link to your content, all of that momentum, all of that digital light and cadence you'll benefit from if you think about it from your user's point of view. I hate being cliche, but if you think about the user's point of view as well.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that's a great point. Since Covid, because a lot of businesses changed during Covid, and I think that one of the things that I find particularly with bricks and mortar businesses is that I will go to their website and their website might say their opening hours or might say what's going on or where they are or what they do, and then I'll go to their social to double check whether or not they're still there. Because it's been a couple of times when I've gone to go to a business that I haven't been to in a while and they're not there and the website says that they are, but their social says it or not. And I think that it is really important from the fad, that SEO perspective to say, "I'm still standing stronger than I ever did as it were."

And I think that that's really, really important for Google and for users. And I think that it tells people that you're still on top of the conversation, whatever the new conversation is, particularly if you're a knowledge-based business, it tells people that you're still part of the community, if you're a local business. It tells people lots of things about you. Getting the content going, and it might even be updating some of your old pages as well. If people leave your team and you have a team page, update the team page. If Sarah's not working there anymore, then Sarah shouldn't be on your team page. And we wish Sarah well, I'm sure she's going to do a great job in her new role or whatever, but just update the page. That's fine. That's totally fine. And I think that that is something that Google will reward you for. And also trimming the fat is really useful as well. I think people overlook the fact that getting rid of content is sometimes updating content as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was just talking about this with Carrie Hill, who is our actual guest. I think our webinar with Sterling Sky, I think she mentioned the same thing. It's a great point.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So the way I like to think about it is cutting T-shirt, right? If you cut a T-shirt, you're actually cutting content out, but you're still updating the content at the same time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or it's like when you need new shorts, you just take old pants and you cut them to make shorts. So now you have shorts.

Crystal Carter:

New content.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the '80s again, we're wearing cutoff shorts.

Crystal Carter:

And it makes a new content because the other thing is that if Google's coming to your website and they're seeing lots and lots and lots of old content, that is irrelevant. Let's say you had a charity fun run or something, and Sarah again, who left the team, did the charity fun run.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sarah, who's been convicted of stealing from charities.

Crystal Carter:

Now Sarah's a nice person. She's making jewelry now doing.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's no longer in charge of the charity run.

Crystal Carter:

She's doing something else. So let's say, and no shade to Sarahs, I know lots of lovely Sarahs, but

Mordy Oberstein:

My wife's name is Sarah, so what are you...

Crystal Carter:

Hey, I'm sure she's great at fun runs. No shade to Sarahs, but I think that if she did a charity fun run, and you were like, "Hey, we'd like you to donate to Sarah's charity fun run." Guess what? They can't donate anymore. That was seven years ago. We don't need that page. Gone. Delete. Doesn't need to be there. It probably isn't ranking anymore. It's probably not getting you loads of traffic, but it is clogging up your crawl.

So if you can cut those pages, that will also help revive things because Google will say, "Oh, okay, somebody's looking after this site. Somebody is pruning things and making them look good." Similarly, literally like pruning, if you see a tree that's all overgrown, or if you see a hedge that's all overgrown, nobody's looking after that, right? All of the stuff that's hanging over the side of the road. If you see some fantastic topiary, which is a great word, then you're going to say, "Oh, somebody's looking after that." And even though it's shorter than it would be if it was overgrown, you can tell that someone's looking after that and it's better for that reason. So I think make sure that you're pruning your content coherently as well, because that should also be part of creating a revived SEO presence.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a lot of the times when you're revitalizing your SEO, you're also revitalizing your business. So I'll give you a good example of this. I was reading an article about how Nike wants to revitalize its brand with the Paris Olympic Games, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you actually look at Nike's organic traffic, it's pretty stagnant over the last few years. And in the article they're saying because they feel their sales have stagnated, they've flatlined. I mean, I would take Nike's flatline any day of the week, but they want to grow up. You're not growing, you're dying kind of thing. And a lot of the times when you're revitalizing your content, because you're talking about revitalizing content, and a lot of the times your content is your brand, your content is your business.

So when you're revitalizing your SEO, it's an opportunity to pivot your entire... If your business is stagnant, it's a good time to pivot. I was talking to Ryan L. Smith, who will be a guest on this podcast in a few weeks just yesterday on a different podcast. And he was saying he had a client where they sold wedding cakes. And as they started really creating that identity around selling wedding cakes, people started to ask them about, "Hey, can you do my anniversary?" Or, "Can you do my birthday?" And they saw that as a good time to start pivoting.

If you are creating, you should be opening new doors of opportunity for yourself. If you're alive, you should be creating new doors for opportunity for yourself, and you should be using it to, if not pivot, expand on what you do as a business. And that's a great time to start expanding on what you do for SEO and the topics that you're now able to focus on.

I will say, and we were talking about this earlier today, and then when you do that, sometimes as you're expanding your offering or you're pivoting your offering, both for your users and for search engines, you need to make sure that you're taking it step by step. Before you sold baseball jerseys and now you're selling, I don't know, you sold hockey sweaters and now you're selling actual sweaters. You need to somehow slowly make the move from selling hockey sweaters to actual sweaters and creating that perception and the content that supports that over time, which may mean you're creating content or pages that are not meant to rank or pull in conversions, but then help you make the pivot so that you can eventually pull in the traffic and pull in the conversions.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it's important when you're doing that to think about the core of your audience, people who know you, people who like you, your warm leads, your friends, like your internet friends, as it were-

Mordy Oberstein:

I only have internet friends.

Crystal Carter:

... you're not throwing them out of the window.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let’s gloss right over that!

Crystal Carter:

Right. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. Morning. It's all good. We'll do a whip round as it were. I don't know. We'll sort you out. So a prime example of this is Old Spice, right? I remember when Old Spice revived their brand, so there's Old Spice original, then they had that big campaign, this is probably 10 or 15 years ago now when they had the guy and he was like, "Look at your man. Now look at me. Now look at this." Do you remember those?

And they did some great stuff online. They did some great stuff on YouTube, and they really revitalized the brand. It got people really interested in it, in the brand, because this was a brand that everybody knew and loved. It was old faithful, just like peanut butter and jelly. Everybody knew Old Spice and what it did. It was solid and it's a perfectly solid brand, like Nike's, totally solid brand, all of that sort of stuff. And then they were just like, "Let's do something fun. Let's do something fun and interesting." And now they've got lots of different kinds of styles and stuff, and they've got really interesting names.

Mordy Oberstein:

They were very, I would say bland. They were like old man a little bit.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it was totally fine. But that was kind of their brand. And they were like, "Let's get crazy." Now they've got scents called Night Panther.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hell, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And they're just getting a little bit interesting, but they're building on the brand that they have there to expand that out.

Mordy Oberstein:

But that's a really good point. One of the things that helps you revitalize your SEO and all the things in this case for your brand, in the case of Old Spice, and I think by the way, that Nike needs to do the same thing, you're kind of going against the grain or against what you were doing before. You're going against your instincts or reference back to a Seinfeld episode. I'm not a big Seinfeld fan. Anyway, but there's an episode where George kind does the opposite of whatever he would normally do, how he would normally react because things are not going well for him. Do that. Pull a Costanza, do the opposite. If your brand is a little bit old man, a little bit boring, if you're Old Spice, go a little crazy with it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think it comes from a point of confidence as well. So old Spice for instance, we're just going to stick with this for a minute. The thing about them is people know that that's a solid brand, that they know how to make sure that you don't smell the way that you don't want to smell or whatever. We know that they know how to do that job, and we know that they're consistent and we know that they're a solid brand, they're a solid team, they're dependable, all of that sort of stuff. So this extra thing that they're doing is something that where they're like, "Hey, we're trying this new thing. It's kind of fun." And it comes from a place of comfort. It's like you want something that same but different.

Mordy Oberstein:

Same but different.

Crystal Carter:

And for instance, I went to a wedding and they had fish and chips. I'm in England, but they have fish and chips, but in a single serving thing, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, right? So it was like a cone, a handheld cone, and it had one bit of fish and a couple of chips and a little bit of peas at the bottom or whatever. And that was fun. "Oh, it's fun." But if they were like, "Oh, we've got fish sticks covered in jelly," that would be weird. That's too weird.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, that's too weird.

Crystal Carter:

You don't want to go too weird. You don't want to go too weird. You want to go to something that people recognize that's from you. That's not like Old Spice straight away went into doing something completely different. They said, "We have different scents." That's kind of really where they went. And that's fine. So I think when you're thinking about your branding, you're thinking about your blogs, think of what's in the neighborhood of what you're doing, but is building on it. So it might be that you're talking about the same topic, but to a slightly different audience.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or in a different way or a different take. And if you have been producing a lot of content and you've stagnated, this might be the strategy for you, do something different. If you're being very methodical about A, B, B, and C, A, B, B, and C, of course you have two, Bs, of course B is the most important letter in the alphabet.

Crystal Carter:

Obviously.

Mordy Oberstein:

Then try something different. If you're trying X in your title tags and it's not pulling in clicks, do the opposite.

Crystal Carter:

And also when we say creating new content, it could be new blogs or it could be your same blogs in a different way. So you could take your blogs and make them into YouTube videos. You could take your blogs and make them into newsletters. You could take your blogs and make them into Twitter posts or infographics or whatever, what have you. And then that doesn't need a new content writer to do all of that. That's just the same information in a different way. But it will get your information to a new audience. And if you're doing something like a podcast, for instance, let's say you interviewed someone for a blog and you could maybe make them into a podcast or maybe you're discussing an event that you did in a podcast, for instance, podcast, again, have another distribution model that will also bring in traffic to your website. So same but different. It's the same content but in a different guise, for instance. And that can revitalize, but basically you need to do something new.

Mordy Oberstein:

You need to break the cycle of stagnation. To help you understand how she does this, Carrie Hill from Sterling Sky and LocalU is here to tell us how she goes about helping SEO clients who have stopped their work, but need to revive some faltering search performance and come back to SEO and search success. Here's Carrie.

Carrie Hill:

So what do we do at Sterling Sky when a client comes back after suspending their SEO? We're going to make a few assumptions here because this can be nuanced. So let's kind of create a story and then I'll kind of tell you how we'd handle it. So this person has paused SEO. They have done no work on their website, no SEO in this time period that we're going to talk about. If they've hired another company that's coming in and done some things, or they've tried to do it in-house, we're sort of looking at a different scenario. But let's just say for this first example that nothing's been done on the website since they "paused" SEO. If they were Sterling Sky client, they paused SEO and it's six months later and they've come back and said, "Okay, we're ready to start up again." It's likely we can pretty much start back up where we left off.

If it's been more than six months, we're probably going to have to take a step back, do some more evaluation, do a bit of an audit, kind of look at the keywords and the competition and what's going on in their market before we move forward. If it's been six months or less, we're pretty confident that what we have done to date and the research we have to implement to date is probably pretty good. Now, there are things that will have to change. Tactics that worked six months ago might not be working today. Things that didn't work six months ago might be working today. So there's always a bit of reevaluation that you have to plan for when you restart SEO. But if they've left us and then come back to us with no work in the interim, we can pretty much hit the ground running, keep implementing our tactics and moving forward.

Now, scenario number two is they suspend SEO and it's a year later and they come back to us. For the most part, we're going to treat them like a brand new client. More than likely we're going to audit them, which is sort of like the baseline of where everybody starts with Sterling Sky. We pretty much don't take on SEO clients if we don't have an audit done first, just so we know kind of where we're starting from, what's there, what's working, what's not working.

Quite frankly, a year can make a big difference in search volumes, keyword trends, et cetera. So we're going to sort of start, I don't want to say start from scratch, but we're going to pull back a bit more, do a bit more research before we then start implementing and probably, let's be perfectly honest, making changes to the website because what keywords worked a year ago probably aren't going to be working now or maybe not working as effectively. Maybe some new phrases or new services that they've added in that year could come into play that we have to plan around as well.

Now, the third scenario I'm just going to mention is if they've paused SEO and they had a different SEO company previously, or they did it in-house previously, they've not done anything for a year and then they hire us. That's a new client. We're going to start them with an audit. We're going to do our own keyword research with their input of course, and start with making sure that their architecture and technical SEO is on point as we start moving them forward into all of the tactics that we use to ensure that not only do they rank well, they convert well.

So that's kind of our process for bringing people back into SEO when they've been on hiatus or sabbatical from the whole SEO realm for a bit of time. Now, if it's been a month or two that they've paused, maybe they ran into a cashflow problem or something, we're probably just going to start right back up again and jump right back into it. But if it's been a bit longer, we kind of pump the brakes a little bit, make sure we have all of our ducks in a row. All of our research is still fresh and looks good to continue implementing as we move forward.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Carrie. Make sure to give Carrie a big follow over on Twitter at Carrie Hill, C-A-R-R-I-E H-I-L-L. Link in the show notes and follow all the good folks over at LocalU and Sterling Sky. It's a good point by the way, where you have a new client who's kind of been a hiatus, and they're coming in from somebody else who's doing some SEO work for them. And you have to start from scratch with an audit. It's always a little bit funny. Now you got to go back to the client and say, "Okay, well, you did some SEO for a while, but we're going to start from the beginning. We don't know what that other agency or consultant did for you, and now we're going to start from scratch." The client's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Start from scratch? We've been doing SEO."

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, but I think the other thing is that there'll be some scales and there's some things you can build on. You can tell a website is very janky from a technical point of view. Which is why Carrie very rightly mentioned auditing over and over again. And I think that that's super important and is definitely a process in restarting, is that before you restart, you wanted to make sure that there aren't any technical reasons why it's flatlined. And it could be that maybe the industry has moved on and this website has not, and that's something to do. So auditing is super important to make sure that there aren't broken things or things that are out of date. For instance, if there's a schema thing that they haven't implemented, but since they last updated the website has become a standard practice, for instance, that might be something to you think about, or Google Merchant Center or something. Maybe they never didn't sign up for Google Merchant Center or whatever it may be.

So I think that that's super important. The auditing is really, really important and is absolutely crucial. And I think that it can be very tricky for clients who want to get started, and when you're like, "We need to do an audit," and they're like, "But I don't want to audit." It's like, "Yeah, but the thing is, if we don't do an audit, then I'm going to have to audit as I go along, which is going to take me twice as long as if I just do an audit from the first instance. And then I can tell you all of the things that are wrong or all of the things that we might be doing, and then we can make a decision as grownup human beings. So why don't we just do the grownup thing and do an audit, please."

Mordy Oberstein:

Another grownup thing that you could do is, and we're talking about getting your SEO off life support, and we're talking about new content opportunities, is use this SEO tool as we dive into a segment we haven't done in a while called Tool Dive.

So when I used to work at Semrush, one of my biggest hills I would die on is the content marketing tool, topic research tool, in the content marketing tool set is the best tool in the whole platform. And no one uses it because it's not in SEO, it's under content marketing. But it was my favorite tool. And when I would do advocacy about the tool set, that would be the tool I would always use. And I always try to showcase, "My baby project." Getting people to understand this tool is awesome and you should use it, but it's not a keyword research tool. It's a topic research tool, and we're talking about getting your SEO off life support and finding new topics. I recommend this tool among others. Also ask as well.

But this is a great tool and what you can do with it is, so let's say I'm a local SEO and I'm working with, I don't know, a doctor in Tampa, Florida. So you could put things in like doctor and Tampa Bay and see what shows up and understand what topics other doctors are ranking for or showing or whatever it is. So for example, I get back urgent care, type 2 diabetes, internal medicine, family medicine, board certified, quality care, specialty care as topics. So if I'm trying to revitalize my SEO when I'm a doctor office in Tampa Bay, Florida, then I probably want to talk about urgent care. I probably want to talk about what I specialize in. I probably want to talk about the quality of my care. I probably want to talk about, it talks about here family physician or different types of other medicine.

If you specialize in one of those areas, you want talk about that. What the tool basically do is put out all of the topics that are relevant to... And you need to kind of work through because some of them are not relevant to you or shouldn't be relevant to you, and work through what is relevant and what's not relevant to you. And if you're trying to revitalize your SEO, you're probably going to find topics in here that relate to what you do that you have not been focusing on. And there's actually a mind map built in.

And what's cool about this is so you can see all the topics. First off, you can dive into questions about the topic. So let's say for example, I choose high blood pressure, so I can get a whole bunch of questions about, as a doctor, have you ever given the wrong diagnosis about blood pressure? What are the best blood thinners? All the different subtopics or questions that your users have about blood pressure and being a doctor in Tampa Bay. But what you can also do is you can put it in a competitor website and the mind map will highlight in blue or green, I forget which one, which of its subtopics your competitor that you entered is ranking for. And you can focus on those first so you can find new topics and at the same time, see not just by keyword but topically which topics or subtopics your competitors are already focused on.

Crystal Carter:

And I think they've split it out in a really interesting way. So one thing that I was looking at was I was looking at Negroni's and people aren't familiar, Negroni is a trending drink.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, very familiar.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I went out with people and everybody was like, "I wanted Negroni." I was like, "What is the deal? It's like Pinot Grigio." Like 10 years ago, everybody suddenly got into Pinot Grigio, and at the moment people are really into Negroni. Anyway, so they have trending topics within it and then they break it into high resonance with audience. So it'll tell you that Negroni cocktail recipe has a lot of backlinks, that there's a lot of backlinks for that topic, which is really interesting. It gives you the search volume across lots of them and lots of different topics as well. It also breaks you into related searches, which Google will do. So that replicates the user journey for people looking at that topic.

So I can see headlines. So it says headlines like Negroni recipes, like top Negroni recipes, classic Negroni recipes, related searches, best of vermouth for Negroni. So I if I had a drinks website, a cocktail recipe website, then that might be something that I'd want to include there. Or if I was a spirits seller, for instance, that'd be a great blog of the vermouth, the ingredient that goes in that particular drink.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why I always like the tool because the tool does, it kind of gives you a very holistic understanding of what's included in the subtopic. First, outside of breaking up the subtopics, it breaks down the subtopic, the further subtopics like you're saying here. And it lets you kind of figure out... And what's different about this and versus a keyword research is you don't pick the question. You're taking a look and thematically analyzing what kind of topics or subtopics should I be talking about? You're a vermouth question. Maybe there's other kinds of mixers that need to be factored in that you should also... It should just raise questions about like, "Oh, snap. I never thought to take the topic from that point of view."

Crystal Carter:

Right. Similarly, they're talking about rock glasses, the types of glasses that you would put that drink in.

Mordy Oberstein:

I never would've thought of that.

Crystal Carter:

Orange slices. Then I like the way they split out the questions because they go into what, how can I, like why so can you make it with Campari, for instance, is one. And then they go into can you make it without sweet vermouth? Things like that. So I think that it's something that goes into it and it goes into it in a lot of different ways. I think also for a different perspective is that if you are feeling like you're SEO is a little bit stagnant, using different tools is a great way as well. So if it's a tool that you haven't used or a different part of the tool, because I completely forgot about this. I've used this tool before, but I completely forgot that this was here.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not in the SEO section. They should put it in the SEO section.

Crystal Carter:

Right. This is our call to you, Semrush. And I think that using a different tool, using a different tool set, there are other tools that do this kind of thing as well, can give you some good ideas on where you can get new topics and also get yourself enthused. I think sometimes what happens with topics is that you have talked about the topic and you're like, "Oh, I talked about this so many times." My great aunt who's dearly departed was really, really lovely and she told me the same stories whenever I saw her, but when I introduced her to my husband, she told him all these different stories that I never heard and I was like, "Aunt Sonia, why don't you tell me this?" She was like, "I don't know, I didn't feel the need." So I think sometimes when you get new tools, you get new things out of them and maybe it helps you revive the way that you feel about your content even, which is a great thing to do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. All the time. I do that, by the way, you know there's something to do with this tool, but if I go on LinkedIn and the collaborative questions and I don't like the articles or whatever, but I like seeing the question. It helps me think like, "Oh, how would I answer that? What's my take on that?" So getting a fresh look at something is a great idea. By the way, in the tool here itself, in the Semrush tool, you can filter it by trending topics. It helps you see what's hot, what's what's current event or news-y kind of thing. So you can sort of break down the topics that way as well.

It's a great tool. Have a look at it, tell them we sent you, I guess, I don't know, we're not getting a referral out of this, but just want to show the love. Anyway, check out the content marketing tool inside of Semrush. It's a hidden gem to borrow an SEO term. You know what's also a hidden gem? Barry Schwartz is a hidden gem.

Crystal Carter:

He's not hidden at all.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, he is. You ever see him out and about? I never seen him out and about. He's hiding in his SEO cave. He's a hidden gem.

Crystal Carter:

He has thousands of followers. He comes out sometimes to give out baseball cards. Well, to talk about baseball cards. Or were they basketball cards? Basketball cards.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I have seen him play hockey in his driveway, so he comes out for that also.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Actually I am on BarrySEOMemes.com, I ask in my FAQ about Barry, "Does he play hockey?" And I have a link to the tweet that shows him playing hockey. He does the slap shot a little bit wrong, and everyone does this. The way that the slap shot gets momentum is when you first smack it on the ice or the ground, the stick bends backwards, and then when it hits the ball or the puck, like a slingshot slings forward. So you actually are meant to hit the stick on the ground before you hit the actual puck to get momentum. That's physics for you.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

How many people know that? I didn't know that growing up until I watch a video about this. Anyway, here's this week's Snappy SEO News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy news, three articles for you this week. Two from Barry Schwartz of course, and one from some guy named Mordy oberstein. Never heard of him before. Anyway, Mordy Oberstein wrote, or I wrote, on Search Engine Land three key observations about the March 2024 core update. So I got a hold of some big data from Semrush and went through sort of why it's hard to analyze the impact of the March 2024 core update. Basically due to the extended rollout, 45 day rollout, it makes looking at metrics like the peak level of ring volatility, almost meaningless to a larger or greater extent. Ran through some data on the impact of the core update at the top of the search.

So one ranking pattern that I saw throughout my analysis or just running through 300 manually researching some 300 different search over the course of the update, was that there was a lot of movement or ranking shifts between narrow around positions five through 10, let's say the bottom half of page one, what we call page one. But when you looked at position one through five, the more of that very top of the SERP, I didn't see as much volatility there. So one of the things we looked at in the Semrush data set was the percentage of new URLs ranking in the top 10 that prior to the update didn't rank top 20, meaning before the update, these URLs did not even crack the top 20 results on the SERP, and now they rank top 10. And what we see is there's around 9% of the URLs ranking after the March, 2024 core update came from beyond position 20 with the implication meeting that Google realized that they were under rewarding significantly these URLs.

If you look back at the previous core update, which was the November 2023 core update, that number is only around 6.5%. So that's a big increase in rank volatility and the drasticness rather of the rank volatility among the top 10 results. But when you look at the top five results, the percentage of new URLs that didn't rank top 20, even top 20, that now ranked top five after the March, 2024 core update is 3%. Back in November, it was 2%. Not as big of a gap. I would say marginal, but not notably significant, meaning a lot of the update across the web, and it's a very important word, across the web with the March 2024 core update, a lot of the drasticness of that big movement happened at positions five through 10, but not as much at one through five or not as much as you might've expected considering this was a huge update.

The March, 2024 is a huge, huge update. You might've expected to be far more movement or drastic movement among the top five results. But Semrush's data says that's showing that that does not mean that this update was not more powerful than other core updates. In fact, I believe it was. And that's why you need to not just look at the normalized data across the entire web, which is what that Semrush's data set is doing, but you need to look at it more vertically. You need to dig deeper into the websites that were affected, whether positively or negatively, and to the extent of which they were. If you look at, just like I show in the article a bunch of examples, how heavy-handed, I think this update might have been. Anyway, I'll link to the article. We can read the whole thing there on Search Engine Land.

Onto SE Roundtable, this from Barry Schwartz, "Google SGE, AI answers now cost 80% less to generate." So one of the big things that people were worried about with Google releasing the SGE, is it always going to cost them so much money. Now we're finding out that now looks like they've kind of perhaps handled that. Barry wrote quote, "I was never worried about Google reducing its costs to generate those AI answers." I agree. I was not really worried that Google was going to be able to figure out the money side of this or the cost to actually produce the results. I think the bigger question is, can Google figure out a way to actually make them, I think, fundamentally useful? To quote friend of the show, Mike King from iPoll rank, paraphrasing him, basically, "Have you ever read an SGE result and walked away feeling, 'Wow, that was incredibly unique and insightful?' Neither have I."

Onto the next article and our last article of the day from, again, Barry Schwartz on SE Roundtable. "Google search tests, custom filters and templates."

So there was a test, this was spotted by nine to five Google.com I believe. And what it basically is a test where you can now set custom filters and have them apply again and again and again and have them save. So I haven't actually used this, I can't see the test, but it looks like it's very similar to Advanced Search where you can set, let's say you want to say, "I only want results from these websites." You can now kind of save those to replicate over and over and over again across various keywords. So that's really interesting to me because we've been talking about a more personalized results page or Google results page for a while. Something like this would kind of limit what you're seeing, maybe create a filter bubble of sort. That's a different conversation for a different time, but it would result in a much more personalized kind of SERP experience, which is something that SEOs have been talking about forever.

If Google does roll out something like this in earnest, that would be very much a paradigm shift in my opinion. And that is this week's Snappy News. If you're looking for a daily dose of some snappy ish kind of news, please check out, It's New. Our Daily, well, Monday through Friday daily news series with the great Barry Schwartz, of course Crystal and myself and Greg Finn from the marketing Clock Team, where we run through all of the news or some of the news for each and every day. You can find it on the Wix SEO Hub. It's right there at the top. You'll see a little card for it, It's New. And also it's on the Rusty Brick YouTube channel. And now I'm officially done with the Snappy News.

Goal. Barry scorred a goal, the SEO News this week, didn't he?

Crystal Carter:

Did he do the Flying V? That's literally all I know about hockey.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Flying V.

Crystal Carter:

The only thing I know about hockey is what I learned from the Mighty Dicls.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was watching the movie with my kids and they're like, "Yeah, it's boring.' Like, "What?"

Crystal Carter:

Do you know what? My kids did the same thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, my God. And you know what? Watching as an adult now, it is a little boring.

Crystal Carter:

We recently rewatched the Sandlot though. That's so good, right? Please tell me.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids love that. My 7-year-old and my 6-year-old are talking about Babe Ruth now, and I'm trying to explain, he's dead. They're like, "Where’s Babe Ruth."

Crystal Carter:

The great Bambino.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, the great Bambino. I thought you said the great Bambi. Great. If you haven't seen this movie, absolutely watch this movie.

Crystal Carter:

You're killing me Smalls.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, killing Smalls – so good, forever. And also, check out our follow of the week, who's also a great find, Xlili Gonzalez over at Rickety Roo at Xlili, X-L-I-L-I. Link in the show notes to her X profile, an Wix SEO contributor. Little tease here, part of our Wix SEO course, which is forthcoming and a great person to get some ideas to revitalize your SEO strategy on social media.

Crystal Carter:

She's absolutely fantastic, super nice, and also really gets enthusiastic about great opportunities for clients. She did a great article on the Wix SEO Hub about Microsoft Clarity. She also appeared on the Microsoft Clarity website from Microsoft. I'm talking about this, and again, CRO is a great way to think about how to revitalize your content as well. We have the Microsoft Clarity app on Wix, and she talks about that in her article. And if you are trying to figure out what should we do? How can we revitalize this content? How are people using the content? You can look at a tool like Microsoft Clarity to go, "Oh, actually people are really interested in this part of the website. We should lean into that. This is a good place to start. Let's keep going." Xlili is a great follow for that.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you can access Microsoft Clarity inside of Wix with our integration with Microsoft Clarity. So double win. Follow Xlili, get Microsoft Clarity inside of Wix. Everyone wins on multiple levels. Boom. Goal. Score. Home run. Another references. Anyway, I hope you feel rejuvenated after this. Like a good IPA, you feel refreshed.

Crystal Carter:

I was going to say like a spa day, but whatever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, either because of all the IPA, not only do you feel refreshed, you also feel slightly drunk. So double win.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. There we go. There we go. Cool. How do you revitalize yourself after the getting drunk?

Mordy Oberstein:

Or they can drink that other drink you mentioned before, which I don't know what that-

Crystal Carter:

Negroni?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, maybe that's what it was. The topic research.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I only drink straight. I don't drink mixed drinks.

Crystal Carter:

You only drink whiskey?

Mordy Oberstein:

I drink whiskey straight. Don't even put ice in it.

Crystal Carter:

What's your favorite whiskey?

Mordy Oberstein:

Woodford Reserve.

Crystal Carter:

Wow, that was quick. That's quick. That's an American whiskey?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a bourbon. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, okay, okay. Right, right, right. Not scotch?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I like scotch too, but that's my favorite. I like bourbon.

Crystal Carter:

I live in the UK and the people are big on the Glens. If it ain't a Glen, we're not messing with it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Glenfiddich, Glenlivet, Glengoyle.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah. Et cetera, et cetera.

Mordy Oberstein:

Glen Gabe

Crystal Carter:

Glen Gabe needs his own scotch. Yes. Can we please arrange that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. We'll talk to him.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Single-Domain main malt? Single-domain main malt.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love it.

Crystal Carter:

Come on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, so good.

Well, thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week of the new episode as we dive into accessibility and SEO. Look forward wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning Hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content of webinars and resources and beyond over the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it. Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.