How to pick the right SEO tool for you?

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, head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fantastic, the incredible, Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications here at Wix.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people. Hello, my good friends online. Welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast with me and Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

You sound like me. That nasalness. I'm still sick. I can't shake this cold.

Crystal Carter:

I sound nasal?

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, you did a nasal voice there. "Hello, internet people."

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people. Hi.

Mordy Oberstein:

We come from Mars.

Crystal Carter:

That's a great movie. I love that movie.

Mordy Oberstein:

Great, great movie. Coneheads, we're referring to Coneheads Saturday Night Live skit turned movie.

Crystal Carter:

I was talking about Mars Attacks.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I was talking about Coneheads. I was doing Coneheads, fine. But Mars Attacks is also a great movie.

Crystal Carter:

Also a great movie.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also a great movie.

Crystal Carter:

These are great movies. Tune into SERP's Up for all of the best movie recommendations. We're also in IMDB. Did you know that?

Mordy Oberstein:

We are because we're-

Crystal Carter:

We're in IMDB.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because that's part of SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. That's part of SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Entity-based SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed, indeed. So do check us out there, as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep. Which reminds me. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, "Where we have the tools." Check out our site inspection tool, redirect manager and more and I say tools because in this episode we're talking all about SEO tools. Tools, tools everywhere and not a insight to spare.

Crystal, I was warning you, for the audience. I used to work for multiple SEO tools. I have the inside scoop on the SEO tools. Crystal, you're going to have to hold me back. Hold me back!

Crystal Carter:

Hold you back.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hold me back!

Crystal Carter:

Like every Saturday night when you were growing up, I'm sure you were like "Hold me back!"

Mordy Oberstein:

Have I gone too far already? Probably, and I don't care because tool, tools everywhere and not an insight to spare. So many tools, so many things, so little bang for your buck. I am so jaded. But that's because choosing a good SEO tool is not easy. There are a lot of tools out there and they are not all exactly equal and/or beneficial, which is why we're here to discuss the finer points of what you should consider when looking to use and dare I say spend money on an SEO tool.

Plus someone who knows a lot about SEO tools, Patrick Stox stops by to share what he thinks makes a great SEO tool. Plus someone else who knows a lot about SEO tools stops by to share his insight about SEO tools that actually implement as Wix's own head of SEO, Nati Elimelech joins us, and of course we have the Snappy News. We have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness so whiz, clang, bang and other tool noises as episode 24 of the SERP's Up Podcast is under construction.

Crystal Carter:

I got my hard hat. We're going to dive right in.

Mordy Oberstein:

I got my tool belt, snap.

Crystal Carter:

I love a tool belt. I'd love to have a tool belt.

Mordy Oberstein:

I've never had one.

Crystal Carter:

You should totally get one. Also, I really like the measuring tapes. When you pull out the measuring tape and then you let it go, that's so satisfying.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids like that, but I have to tell them, be careful, you can slice up your whole hand doing that.

Crystal Carter:

You can. I did that as a child, it was unpleasant, I would say.

Mordy Oberstein:

My kids don't listen, so they'll probably end up like you, in general, which is a great thing. But for the hand slicing, not so good.

Crystal Carter:

Not so great. Not so great. You can use the shovel to dig yourself out of that hole. That's a great tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have a spade in my tool belt.

Crystal Carter:

I'm kidding. Anyway, okay, so today we're going to talk about what you need to decide which SEO tools to use. And actually looking at this, I was thinking that a lot of this can be really useful for deciding for any sort of digital tool. And certainly in my time in consulting clients and consulting people on what to do on the web, I've very often been asked, what do you think of this tool we're considering? What do we think of this platform or this apparatus that we are considering adding to our MarTech stack?

Mordy Oberstein:

Good word.

Crystal Carter:

Apparatus is a good word, isn't it? One of the things that's really important is to have a deep understanding of what's going on. So you need to understand what you actually want to achieve, what the scope of the project is and how often you're going to need this tool and that sort of thing is really, really useful. So think about the thing you want to do and how you might find a tool to help you do that.

So a good tool that I use is the SEO Pro Tools Chrome extension for instance. That's a tool that I use really regularly and that tool helps me to get a quick snapshot of what's going on on a webpage before I do a deep dive. And that's a great tool because it's really handy for me and really useful. But if I wanted to do something bigger, on a bigger scale, I might need a different tool. So think about that.

The other thing that's really useful is thinking about what your capabilities are and what your requirements are as a team. So for instance, if you're a big business, you might want to think about a tool that includes an API capability that allows you to scale and integrate with other tools that you're using.

If you have a team that's really fast-paced and that's out and about a lot, you might want to think about something that has a mobile app, you also want to think about integrations for instance. So if your team is heavily reliant on something like Google Workspace and you're using Google Data Studio a lot, or you're using Slack a lot, or you're using Google Sheets a lot or something like that, you might want to think about tools that are integrating with those tools that you're using regularly.

Also, data portability and accessibility with a lowercase A there. So if you've got higher ups that need to see bits of data regularly, that's really useful. And also budget, with a big old B, the budget. So you're going to want to know what your budget is for what you're trying to do and where that goes. Then, once you've done all of that, you want to think about the actual tool itself.

So understand what the capabilities are and what the limitations are. So a really good example is thinking about, it's something that everyone's used, a tool that almost everyone in web has used, is tools for Core Web Vitals, for instance. So if you think about page feed insights, the Lighthouse tools versus CrUX, for instance, those two tools have two different sets of criteria that they're measuring, and they're both useful to help you understand what you need to understand about your page speed and your insights and things like that. But they have different criteria.

So it's very important to understand how the tool is assessing what you need it to assess or how it is helping you to get that information that you're trying to get. Crawling tools, for instance, will crawl in different ways and even within them, they'll have different defaults that you should consider, as well. So understanding the capabilities of the tool, understanding the limitations of the tool can make a really big difference to how you approach whether or not a tool is good for you and how it feeds into the capabilities and the requirements that you have as a team.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's really good. I'm with you.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you. Thank you. I saw lots of nodding along, especially when it got to the budget part.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, the budget is, sometimes you'll think, oh, that's too expensive or this one's not as good. It's cheaper, but it's not as good. It's not as good because it doesn't have this graph. It doesn't have the graph.

But sometimes, you know what, forgo the graph and go with the cheaper model because the graph's not really that important, which leads me to all of this. SEO tools love shoving graphs into things. They love shoving the same graph into multiple places, but it looks different, so you're not sure it's the same thing, but maybe it's different, but it's really the same exact thing. So they might have 400 reports, but only 40 unique ones, but they make you feel like you got to buy this thing, it's got 400 reports, but it only has 40 unique ones. So maybe you don't really need to buy that tool. You could buy the cheaper one that doesn't have all the things because it's really the one that has all the things, has all the same things. So don't get caught up in the shiny graph. But you do sometimes need to think about the shiny graphs because you have to think about the reporting. So this tool might have four million things that it can do, but its reporting stinks and the person you report to is not going to understand anything that you sent them.

Crystal Carter:

And those graphs can be really overwhelming for people, particularly if you're talking to decision makers, business owners or the C-suite and things like that. If they're looking at 25 different graphs and they want one piece of information, that is too much information.

And that turns people off and it can make people not trust the data that you're giving them because they can't interpret it themselves.

Mordy Oberstein:

What you might need to do is go with the tool that's a little bit simpler, with a little bit better reporting. And if you really need the extra capabilities of the other tool, then all right, maybe you want to spring for a second tool, but understand where your money comes from. And that's usually from a client or an internal person. So be wary.

Crystal Carter:

And I think this goes back to the integration part of it. So for instance, there's a lot of tools that have Slack integrations or Data Studio integrations and things like that. So if you have something that's fairly simple, you can easily export it into certain things. So I know there was a nanny app, Little Warden for instance, that has a Slack integration and they will ping you in your Slack channel when there's an issue on your site. That's really useful. That's really, really useful. It's not like that particular, I think there are whizzier apps, it's a great app, tool, but I think there are apps that do more, but that particular one does that. And that can be really useful information. And if you're deciding between that one or another one, but the app in question maybe is less fancy or has fewer graphs but has an element that makes it more actionable for you, then that's going to be really, really useful. And I think that's something to consider.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, speaking of accessibility of the data, here's something that no one talks about and that no one considers. Are you ready?

How easy is it to migrate the data out of that platform should you choose to cancel that platform? Because having worked at one of these platforms, they are not all equal. Some of the platforms may get incredibly complicated to take the data out and import it into a new tool and they do it on purpose because they don't want you to have to leave. Yes, they are spiteful, some of these SEO tools. So you need to be careful and ask, if I ever decide, heaven forbid, to cancel my subscription with your amazing tool, am I screwed?

Crystal Carter:

And also even on a day-to-day basis, if you need to make the information liquid, if you need to export it, if you have limited exportability capabilities, then that will limit the value of the tool. So Screaming Frog is something that is a tool that almost every SEO uses, or particularly for technical SEO. And on that tool you download it and it's on your local device, it's not a cloud tool, but you can export the data to Google Sheets really, really easily. So somebody can say, oh, can you crawl this? And I can say, yes, crawl it, export it. So within a couple of minutes I can export it to someone, which can make it really, really easy.

There are some tools where it's a lot more difficult to export the information about a site and that means that that puts a lot of barriers to making the tool accessible to the wider part of your team. So yeah, if you can't get your data, let's say that the tool says that they can give you historical data for going back, I don't know, five years or something like that on our website, but they won't give it to you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Big problem, big, big, problem. Because one day you will need it and you will not be able to get it and it will not be there. And they'll be like, whoa, well whatever, you're canceling anyway. We don't care.

Crystal Carter:

These things are very tricky. So I think that, yeah that's something that you should consider and sometimes you can find workarounds, sometimes you can export on a regular basis or something like that. But if that's the case, then you've got to make allowances for that. And also I think that you have the time to learn the tool because that's the other thing. There are so many tools and there's so many tools-

Mordy Oberstein:

If there's a demo. My recommendation is take it. Because I've seen this a million times, you think you understand the tool, you're an SEO expert, you're wonderful, you're amazing. But the people who develop the tool are an expert on their tool. And sometimes these tools could be a little bit layered and you don't know what exactly is in there. So go for the demo.

Crystal Carter:

And there's so many, there's tools that I use all the time and then somebody's like, oh, there's that part of it. I'm like, what are you talking about? I didn't even know that that was, what?

Mordy Oberstein:

Literally, when I was at Semrush, I'd do once a week. I'm like, here, let me show you something about the tool you probably didn't even know existed.

Crystal Carter:

And they add things all the time. I mean at Wix we add SEO capabilities all the time. Just this month, and we're recording this at the beginning of the year. And then we're a few weeks into 2023 and we've had three or four different updates to just the Google Search Console site inspection tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

I went into a meeting late, my bad, I got caught up in another meeting. You all know how that happens. Forgiveness please. And I missed an update. So even I didn't know what was going on in one of the tools, so I saw it in another meeting someone was using, I'm like, wait, when did we add that?

Crystal Carter:

Right? Precisely. So if that's happening just on one platform imagine of all the tools that you're using across the different things. So we have an updates section, SEO updates part of our website that helps you understand.

Sitebulb is renowned for their release notes. They add a lot of color to their release notes. So they're a good one to keep up with. But if you have a tool that you use regularly, that is something that your marketing team, your SEO team relies on, it's worth keeping track of when their updates are rolled out. We did a whole webinar on our 2022 releases at the end of 2022, which is on YouTube, which is great. And I know a lot of other teams do similar things as well. So take some time, grab a cup of coffee and tuck in so that you know more about your tools.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now you'll be asking, why do I care? Here's why you care because you're going to buy a tool now. You're locked in, let's say for a year, two years, whatever it is, or even monthly, whatever it is. Let's say you're locked in, you get a better deal that way. If the tool is not constantly developing, then that's what you're getting and that's it. If the tool you see has a log where there's adding new reports, adding new things all the time, then you're paying the same amount but you're getting more.

Crystal Carter:

Having an active and engaged tool team is really, really important. There's a couple of ways to tell that, again, the release notes, like you're saying where they're constantly updating, but also how responsive they are to user requests. So for instance, on a lot of tool download things like on Product Hunt or on Google Chrome, Chrome extensions things, and even in our Wix app market, we have places where people can leave reviews and the people who've built the app can respond to the reviews. Google App Market does this as well. And if you're seeing that the team, even if they're work in progress, even if they're early days or even if they're still leaning forward, if you can see that they're actively responding to user requests, user comments, and things, that's a good sign of a good team. A lot of teams will also be very active online.

So Slack for instance, when they first launched, they were really active on Twitter and people were going, I wish I'd had this and I think it should have that and that sort of thing. That's really useful. The team from Candor, the team from AlsoAsked the team-

Mordy Oberstein:

Offered by Candor.

Crystal Carter:

Offered by Candor, they recently were "what sort of updates should we be making to AlsoAsked let us know, please tell us what you think". At Wix for instance, we're constantly asking people what things do you need? And we have a request thing. And when the requests are filled, we say, we've filled this, this has been updated.

Chrome does this as well. The Chrome team will say this was an issue and they'll say, we solved this. This has been resolved. You can now see this. And that's really useful. So having a team that's actively engaged with keeping the tool performing well and performing for you helps you make it, means that it's more value for money. Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now my last point, which I agree with all of that and if you see there's nothing dynamic about the tool and how they were communicating, that's a signal. It's like an empty Google business profile. Do you really trust that?

Crystal Carter:

Bring your Toyota Camry over there and just, yeah it'll be fine. It'll be great. Maybe they'll be open, maybe they won't, but it'll be fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Probably not. So my last hot take today is if this tool doesn't let you use it for free in some way, shape, or form, do not use it.

Crystal Carter:

Do not use it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do not use it. Let me rephrase this because that's a little bit of a hot take. Do not pay them money.

Crystal Carter:

Do not. Okay. So what are we-

Mordy Oberstein:

We're talking, usually a tool will either let you see it through a demo or they'll let you, let's say try a couple of keywords. Like AlsoAsked, so you got I think three free searches a day so you understand what this thing is. The main SEO tools offer a freemium model. Or like Summers has the freebie model. Ahrefs lets you have free access to their site audit tool.

Crystal Carter:

Mazda has something as well where you can see a lot of stuff before you have to get to-

Mordy Oberstein:

Or the Explorer. You can run a bunch of searches. So most of the tools, they won't let you do everything, which makes good sense because then you're going to pay for it. But they'll let you look at what's underneath the hood, just a bits. You get a sense of what this thing is. Because if you don't know what this thing is, you should not be giving them your money. And it is impossible to understand what this thing is from a blog post.

Crystal Carter:

But the blog post looks so good, Mordy, the blog post tells me that it'll solve all my problems.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, repetitive analysis like you've never seen before and you'll never see again once you buy it.

Crystal Carter:

Like look, I saw the battle cards and there's like tick, tick, tick for all of the things that I need. And it says that it'll work.

Mordy Oberstein:

All the things that they want you to see they've ticked all the things that they don't want you to see are not even on the list. I am so salty about this.

Crystal Carter:

Why would they not show me all of the things?

Mordy Oberstein:

Because these are the same people who are trying to sell you links.

Crystal Carter:

No they're not. I think that there's-

Mordy Oberstein:

I've gotten too far. I told you to hold me back.

Crystal Carter:

I didn't. I'm sorry. I instigated that. I'm an enabler. What have I done? I think that most all of the tools that I absolutely love and adore and I love Screaming Frog. I adore the SEO probe Chrome extension. There's tons of other tools that I use all the time that I really, really love and adore. And they all let you have a certain level of-

Mordy Oberstein:

A week's trial, three day trial, whatever it is.

Crystal Carter:

And what I do find is that sometimes in my experience that if the team wants you to have a demo of the, let's say they don't have a neat freemium mode. For instance, AHrefs recently launched a freemium version of AHrefs, which is actually really cool and you can see a lot from it. Marie Hans, when it first launched, she did a nice deep dive into what you can get on the free AHrefs and it's really solid. And I would say that before that it was a little bit more behind the scenes. And I would say that if you were really interested in a tool that you can sometimes just ask them. So you can sometimes ask the team, you can say, hey, if it just says, oh, get in touch for a demo, you can sometimes ask them, can I have a one-month something or other? And they'll give you a voucher or something somehow like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

I've done that multiple times.

Crystal Carter:

That'll let you log in and then they'll check in and see how you got in. So as well as that, and I would say do check in. And I have definitely been someone who has, there was a tool that I'm not going to name, but sometimes I've definitely done the thing where I've done the one-month trial and set an alarm to make sure that I finished.

Because sometimes when you're doing stuff for clients, you need this one thing. This one time I think it was something that was like, yeah it was like an influencer or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's fine, because if you needed that down the line again, now you know that that would be a great solution for you.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also as a consultant, if you're consulting clients or if you're working across an agency or if you're doing a sort of technical overview of different tools, sometimes being able to have had a look around and assess it for yourself and be able to do write up on whether or not the benefits or the drawbacks of a particular tool can be really, really useful and can also help you to understand other parts of the tools that you use more as well.

So it's always good to keep up with the different capabilities of tech. There's a diagram from MarTech Alliance that talks about some of the different MarTech tools that are available. And it grows every year because there's so much. And I think that in the last few months we're starting to see an explosion of AI tools at the moment, for instance. So I'm sure it will grow even more in the coming days. So being able to understand how you pick a tool and how you spend your time with those tools whether or not they give you the demo.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go.

Crystal Carter:

It's really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, speaking of artificial intelligence, we have some real intelligence for you. I'm just kidding. We have human intelligence as AHrefs own Patrick Stox is here to tell us what makes an SEO tool a great SEO tool.

Patrick Stox:

Tools are just there to save you time and kind of make your life easier. Imagine how much time it would take to find broken links on a website. If you had to go through every single page on the site and click every single link. On larger websites, you could have multiple people staffed that would just do this every hour of every day for weeks at a time and you may not get through everything. Whereas you can run that same site through a crawler and probably in a matter of minutes or hours, you're going to have the answer to what links are broken and so much more information. Or if you're creating content, you can write the things that you think people are searching for or you can look at the data from these tools and actually see what they're searching for. Having the data like that is kind of like having a superpower, you cut right to it, you know exactly what your audience wants, you know exactly what you need to write, and everything is kind of prioritized for you.

So all you have to do now is start writing rather than trying to guess and see if this is actually going to resonate up with my audience. Is this something they're actually looking for? It's all just laid out for you. With the tools you're also going to get bigger data. We used to do a whole lot of manual processes. We do a bunch of different searches, a bunch of data gathering. It was a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of work just spent getting a fraction of the data that modern SEO tools provide.

The tools are really just making this data more accessible to people. The people that can't really build their own tools or don't have time to go through all those processes to get all that data. The modern tools are really just like, here's the answer, here's all the data, do with it what you will. Here's the answer to any of the questions that you have. And they're really just trying to have whatever data that they think people are going to need, ways to get that data out, ways for you to slice and dice that data in the tool and really just have all the features that you're probably going to need to really be successful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Patrick, I know you're listening. I just want to say you said that so well.

Crystal Carter:

So well.

Mordy Oberstein:

And one of the ways that you do want to create a metric for yourself is does the tool make it easy to do what I want to do? It's a great basic foundational way of base lining that.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. Why are you spending time on tools that don't do what you need them to do? Sometimes tools are like, we can do this and we can do that and we can do that and we can do this and we can do that. And it's like, mate, I need it to do one thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make my life easier.

Crystal Carter:

So get the tool that does the one thing rather than the tool that does 45 different things.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the beauty of automation. Now, you know who also likes automation, a good friend of ours. So I'm going to give a little introduction first. He does love automation, by the way, Crystal, he's so into it. It's his thing.

There are so many SEO tools that focus on analyzing and monitoring things like rain tracking or crawling. There's a ton of tools that do that. There are, I guess less tools, fewer tools that do implementation itself. I know Edge SEO is becoming more of a thing, so that is becoming more of a mainstream kind of SEO tool universe. So I thought it'd be really cool to pick the brain of somebody who's a well smart individual who oversees a massive team of other well smart individuals to talk about what makes a good SEO tool, but from an implementation point of view. So join us as we talk to Wix's own head of SEO, lover of all SEO automation, nati Elimelech, as we move across the Wix first.

Speaker 4:

3, 2, 1 ignition. Lift off.

Mordy Oberstein:

So welcome to the SERP's Up Podcast, Nati. How are you?

Nati Elimelech:

I'm good, thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Crystal. How are you two?

Mordy Oberstein:

We're good.

Crystal Carter:

Fantastic. And I'm more happy now that you're here Nati.

Nati Elimelech:

I do not buy that, but thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wait, you don't believe that about Crystal or myself?

Nati Elimelech:

So I would believe that about Crystal. But judging by your Twitter profile, I wouldn't believe you if you said it.

Mordy Oberstein:

My Twitter profile does not represent who I actually am.

Crystal Carter:

To all the listeners who follow along with the ongoing Nati and Mordy like SEO hip hop peeve like-

Mordy Oberstein:

We're like brothers who never wish we were brothers.

Crystal Carter:

The dance I can report from internal, the dance is like legit. They're the bands never stop. So it's authentic. I'm just letting people know.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think Nati put it the best. You're both on Twitter, which you are in real life. It's the same thing.

Crystal Carter:

Really. To be fair to both of you, you're both brilliant as well. So this is also true.

Nati Elimelech:

Ah, thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

So today we're talking about SEO tools and we're talking about SEO tools to actually implement versus track and monitor and so forth. Because there's so many tools that do that. But there are so few tools that actually let you implement something and Nati he runs an entire team of people who create tools that let you implement stuff. So we figured what a great thing. What a great time to bring you on the podcast. I've been meaning to bring you on for a long time, but I finally found the perfect topic I think.

Nati Elimelech:

Yeah, yeah. I think we finally found it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Found it like nailed it. Nice. The question is to you, what goes into building tools the right way? Or when you are building these tools that implement, what goes into the process? What goes into your mindset? What goes into it all?

Nati Elimelech:

So that's a good question. So when we're talking about tools or features in an SEO product, we're talking about the enablement. We want to give users the ability to change whatever they want or change the configuration when it comes to SEO, right? That sounds simple, but as usual reality is a bit more complex than that.

Almost everyone with a website or with a business behind it cares about SEO or at least recognizes the importance of SEO as a traffic channel. But we're talking about a very, very wide range of different levels of knowledge or proficiency. Some of these users are novices. They know SEO is important, they kind of know how to spell it, they've heard some stuff about it, but that's where it stops.

On the other hand, there are seasoned professionals. They know exactly what they want to be able to do and they have very clear expectations about the features they expect a platform to have. So that means that when you create an SEO tool, because SEO is important to a lot of types of users, there are many considerations you have to take in order to make a good tool.

In general, I think the first consideration is what do people expect you to have as a platform? It's not necessarily what Nati wants, or our great product managers want or our UX or engineers or our tech SEOs. It's what about what the user wants. Now the simplest example is being able to edit your title tags or meta descriptions. This is a basic action that's applicable to all types of users, but more professional users expect you to have a more robust and advanced set of features.

So the first consideration is what do people expect you to have as a platform? The simplest example is being able to edit your title tags or meta descriptions or any other SEO tag. This is a basic feature that applicable to all types of users. Both beginners want to edit their title tags and obviously professionals when they want to optimize certain pages.

But the more professional users expect you to have a much more robust set of features. For example, editing robots.txt, those professionals, they will also probably know what to do with it. But most of all they're aware of the dangers of misusing robots.txt and the implications of making such a mistake. Like blocking certain pages from crawling or God forbid, an entire site. The beginners are definitely not aware of that and they could potentially cause self-harm. So after you've considered everything that users expected to have, and those are different levels of features that will require different levels of proficiency, this leads us to the next consideration. How do we make sure users who aren't proficient or don't know much about SEO practices aren't shooting themselves in the foot. After all, we want them to succeed.

Crystal Carter:

We want them to be on both good feet. We want them to start off on a good foot.

Nati Elimelech:

Super important.

Crystal Carter:

Super important.

Nati Elimelech:

There's an average of 1.8 feet per person in the world. So I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Mordy Oberstein:

About a bicycle. They started off rolling on wheels.

Crystal Carter:

We don't want them to get a flat tire?

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Nati Elimelech:

I don't actually know how to ride a bicycle. I have to-

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you really not? I'll teach you next time I see you.

Nati Elimelech:

No, it's more because I don't want to know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, in that case I'll definitely teach you next time I see you.

Nati Elimelech:

So tackling this is a bit more complex. You need to have built-in safeguards. How do you safeguard the user whenever there's a risk of users making mistakes that could lead to an undesired outcome. You want to try and protect them as much as you can, but you also don't want to take away that ability to customize the setting. Meaning that if it puts your beginner in harm's way potentially, but your advanced user, your professional SEO knows what to do it with it, you can't just take it away. So there are a few ways to tackle that. I like to call this the self and protect methodology without the negative connotations of being police.

Crystal Carter:

We don't have that just so everyone's aware. If you're using Wix, you don't get Nati with the hat going, Nina, Nina, what are you doing?

Mordy Oberstein:

If you wanted to-

Crystal Carter:

You can't.

Nati Elimelech:

But if you want to vote for this feature-

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, you really break down the unique consideration of implementation because wait until you're in a tool like Semrush or DeepCrawl, there's nothing you're really going to do that's going to screw up your website if you misuse the tool.

Crystal Carter:

It's more of an analysis tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you missing our tools, you could theoretically really screw up the website.

Nati Elimelech:

Definitely the worst you could do is misinterpret a report, but that's not going to do anything to your website.

Crystal Carter:

But I think that probably one of the best examples that I can think of. You mentioned robots.txt and in Wix you can edit your robots.txt. But before you do that, it says, do you want to do this? Do you know what you're doing? And you also have an option to restore to default, which is something that just like, let's say you do make a pig's ear of it, let's say you do mess it up, you can just restore to default to the thing that is correct and you can try again. You can liquefy to another day rather than losing all of that code again.

Another one is with the structured data presets, we have structured data presets for lots of different types of pages, but the syntax on all of that is correct, like fully correct. And it will help you with rich results. If you want to optimize it in a different way, if you want to add new properties or types or whatever to your skin and markup, go for it. Cool. If you make a pig's ear of it, you can restore it to default, the default is always there and you can always go back. So that means that, yeah it's like you said, you're giving people the option to grow, but also supporting them in that journey as well.

Nati Elimelech:

Yeah. So you touched on two different ways to safeguard users. Basically when you spoke about the robots.txt, what we do is introduce friction. That's first. Basically friction can take many forms, but what you do is you have a feature but you maybe make it less accessible or you kind of really need to dig to find it or you have to make a couple more clicks or read something. And that's definitely one thing we're doing with robots.txt.

But there are other things we do and you need to do when you are safeguarding users when it comes to a platform. Let's take another example, we are very data driven, so we looked at the data and we discovered that after changing the slug for an existing page, only 4% of the users added redirect. Basically you change a URL, only 4% of all the URLs that were changed had redirect in place.

Crystal Carter:

Why didn't you do the redirect Nati? Like whatever, who cares? It's not a big deal.

Mordy Oberstein:

First world problems.

Nati Elimelech:

So that's crazy though. Obviously there are cases which it doesn't matter if it's a fresh page and you just messed around with it. But if you have a page that Google knows and maybe tracks and you have signals and you don't redirect, then you lose all of it. So what we did was we introduced auto redirect on slug change. Now in most places when you change your slug, we'll give you the ability to redirect. It's on by default and you can even opt out. Another example of protecting the user but not taking away the ability to choose what to do. You may have a good reasoning for not wanting to perform a leader.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. And that's up to you. You might be like, you know what I'm throwing caution to the wind, I don't even care. But-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's interesting because a lot of the things that we're doing or you in particular are doing and you and your team are doing, it helps on one, protecting the user, but at the same time you're also automating things for advanced users, which is really interesting to see how that plays itself out in terms of implementation.

Nati Elimelech:

I think that's a very, very important aspect of how people experience a product, how it fits into their workflows. How many clicks do they have to perform to do a certain action, how repetitive detection is. So yeah, we definitely take that into account whenever we can, but it's not just about saving them time.

Crystal, you brought up structured data markup and that you can restore defaults. So what if you use structured data markup or use a schema that isn't valid, that isn't validation, or you are missing a comma or a parenthesis?

Crystal Carter:

You're using the wrong quotation marks, which is my favorite ever.

Nati Elimelech:

Exactly. So then it won't even validate, it won't let you save it, for example. So there are many, many, many ways.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's amazing by the way.

Crystal Carter:

That is one of my favorite features because there's a lot of things that will give you an open field where you can add in whatever schema you want, but it doesn't tell you whether it's valid or not. And then you have to go to an external tool and validate it. Whereas within the Wix SEO, your panel, you could add in your schema and it will tell you like, nah, you missed something try it again, do it again. And we also have it in Velo as well. So if you got schema using the Wix SEO API, then it also tells you, no, not yet. Try it again one more time until-

Mordy Oberstein:

You're this close.

Crystal Carter:

You get it right.

Mordy Oberstein:

We used to make it so-

Crystal Carter:

So close and you're like, where-

Mordy Oberstein:

You're like this close, you're almost there. Keep going. Try one more time.

Crystal Carter:

Spot the difference. You're like, where did I miss? Please send me help with-

Nati Elimelech:

Yeah, so we have many more examples of how we save our users. When you manually add the redirect and we can see, we could calculate, it will cause a redirect loop then we'll warn you. So there are many, many, many things you could do about that for advance users and for beginners. I think those, even though there are many directed at beginners, they serve everyone, which is great. You make it safer for the beginners and you make it more convenient and efficient for your professionals.

But we also touched on having good default settings. A lot of users, a lot of people won't even touch your SEO settings. They don't know enough, especially early stages to decide what's right or not. So we do what I call kind of SEO activism, which we do look at everything and decide what the proper default is.

For a product you have the default, structured data markup with images and everything you need and we'll update it as needed. And if you haven't touched it, then it will be updated as long as we do that. But we also do stuff like no index blog tag pages by default because we know that for most users with tiny blogs, that's not usually a high quality page. So we also take into account, no, not only how would users use our tools and how we can safeguard or make it more efficient for them, but what do we need to do when they don't use our tools? We automatically generate stuff. So even if they don't know what to do or intend to do, stuff kind of works without them having to know that. So that's a big aspect I think of safeguarding the user as well. It's not just about the actions they take, but about the actions that they don't take.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also that onboarding is something that's really important with regards to using tools generally. And I've been in a lot of discussions with the SEO team about how we think about the onboarding process for when people get involved with the Wix SEO tools. So it says, you know should probably have a keyword in the old homepage. And it's like, no, I think just, nope, you should probably have your business name on your homepage as well. And I think that that onboarding process is something that sets people up for success. I know that the team thinks a lot about that and reviews it regularly. And I think also, I don't know if you can touch on a little bit about the testing. You talked about some of the stats that you use, but I know that there's a lot of testing and refinement. I don't know if you can talk quickly about that before we wrap up.

Nati Elimelech:

So yeah, we do a lot of testing and refinement.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. Is it helpful?

Nati Elimelech:

It is helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is great.

Nati Elimelech:

Okay, so one other thing we haven't touched on, you did touch on it, but you spoke about onboarding, but I think, and UX writers will agree, and our product managers will agree in product education is super, super, super important. You need to educate on why it was important. You need to educate on how to use specific features. And most important, I think all tools, especially reporting tools, need to read that one, do not overpromise. And tools tend to do that. If you do this and that, then you'll rank higher. And users believe that and they take that to heart and that's not always the case. So we always try not to oversell or overpromise and make sure users understand that SEO is a process and not just a set of checklists to complete.

And that there isn't usually one specific action or a set of actions that will lead you to the promised land. Tools without educations are just tools. Now if I give you a drill Mordy you'll probably know how to use it without having to use a manual.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not a clue.

Nati Elimelech:

Yeah. I gave you way too much credit here. If I give you a fork Mordy-

Mordy Oberstein:

These hands are so smooth. They're so soft.

Nati Elimelech:

Yeah. So if I give Crystal a drill, she'll definitely know how to use it. But if I give her a massive power tool that can take down walls, she'll need to go through the manual, I guess, and through a wall, apparently. So education is super important. The more advanced feature you have, the more potential impact they may have. Education becomes even more important. So it's about, if we sum up, because we don't have time, and Mordy's making face, nevermind that Mordy's regular face.

But if you want to wake up first, give users the feature they want, then protect them from what they don't know or the ways they can misuse your features and all the time teach them how to use those features, teach them why those features are important and teach them when to not use those features. I think that those are the main pillars of making a good SEO product. There are many, many nuances, but we try to take everything into consideration here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nati keep pounding the table on that. Just literally keep pounding the table because it's going to make our post-production of this podcast way easier now. Thanks Nati.

Nati Elimelech:

You're welcome.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's an honor to have you here, the head of SEO at Wix developing so many products. It is amazing the work that you and your team have done, and particularly over the last, I would say, three or so years. If you're looking to follow Nati, follow him on Twitter at netanel, N-E-T-A-N-E-L and we'll link to his profile in the show notes.

Again, Nati, thank you so much for coming on, man.

Nati Elimelech:

Thank you, Crystal. You're welcome Mordy.

Crystal Carter:

You're so welcome Nati.

Always a pleasure.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye bye.

Crystal Carter:

Bye.

Nati Elimelech:

B-bye.

Speaker 4:

3-2-1 Ignition. Lift off.

Mordy Oberstein:

He has a way, you know that Billy Joel song, "She's Got a Way"? Nati has a way.

Crystal Carter:

He has a way. When I first joined Nati, Nati was like, check this out. And showed me the scorecard that he uses to helping reduce siloing across SEO performance across the massive Wix team. And it's literally, it's a thing of beauty and it's incredibly considered and incredibly effective for helping to drive SEO innovation. So as well as leading an incredibly efficient team. So the team at Wix are like, I love it when we add a new feature to the tool because everyone is so hyped about it. They're like, we added a search feature on the Google Search Console dash.

Mordy Oberstein:

Slash the emoji spot.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And people are like yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Motorless Slack channel-

Crystal Carter:

You can search the URL.

Mordy Oberstein:

Always surprised me. I didn't know we had that emoji,

Crystal Carter:

Right? They're just like, oh my God, you can search URLs now. Everyone is so hyped. And I'm literally so hyped and go on Twitter and I'm so hyped. And literally it's true. We really hyped about making the tools better for everybody.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to share the Slack, all the different emojis on Twitter one time.

Crystal Carter:

All of them literally, so there's like fire signs and mic drops and literally everybody goes crazy because we-

Mordy Oberstein:

Goes bonkers, it's bonkers. Emojis are bonkers.

Crystal Carter:

I know. But everybody's really about it. And I think that that's brilliant and I think that that's what you need. When we were talking about teams that are engaged with their tool, that's what makes the difference is the people behind the tool want to make the tool really, really good. And Nati's not only fantastic at running his team or leading his team, not running, leading his team, but also is very, very good at nurturing talent and helping the team and the people in his team to do cool stuff, which I think is really, really great.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's absolutely amazing. What's also amazing is what's going on in the news this week. Well, let's dive into the Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Sick of news about AI writers and search. No. Great because both of this week's stories are about AA writers and search because like the Depeche Mode, I just can't get enough.

Number one, Sundar Pichai confirms Google is working on AI's search feature users can engage directly with per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Or as a movie phone guy would say, this time it's for real, as there has been much speculation about Google's plans. However, this time officially, CEO Google Sundar Pichai said quote "in the coming weeks and months, we'll make these language models available starting with Lambda so that people can engage directly with them. This will help us continue to get feedback tests and safely improve them. These models are particularly amazing for composing, constructing and summarizing. They will become even more useful for people as they provide up to date or factual information. Lambda, by the way, is a chat interface technology that will let you have a conversation with AI in order to find the info that you otherwise probably would've gotten through search."

I'm curious that he mentioned that you can compose content with the AI writer. That's interesting to me. I think that probably would be best qualified by somebody over at Google, because anyone can take that and run with that, which I don't advise to do. Also, from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Microsoft Bing's chat, GPT interface spotted in the wild. Or again, as movie phone guy would say, this time it's for real, as we've heard Bing is going to do this. But now we see that they're doing this test show a chat interface on being with a prompt ask me anything. Which sounds like a recipe for disaster. Ask me anything. That has never gone wrong on a date before, ask me anything. However, it is really interesting to see that Bing is testing this. It would obviously be a safe assumption to say this is coming to being searched in the relatively near future. And then I'll do it for this version of this snappy news.

All right, so before we leave you, as we always do, we have to share with you who you should potentially be following out there on the social media to get more SEO awesomeness. And for this week we have Chris Johnson who's at defaced on Twitter, that's at D-E-F-A-C-E-D on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

Chris Johnson. In my first ever podcast, I interviewed Chris Johnson when I was doing a podcast for Optics way back in the day. And he is fantastic. He builds his own tools all the time. On his website Defaced he has a whole collection of things that he's built. He gets involved with SEO but also considers himself to be something of a technologist and is incredibly creative and inventive with the kinds of tools that he makes. And I think that that's one of the things that's great about the SEO space is that you can see a need for a tool and make one. And he's somebody who does this a lot. So when there was lots of stuff going on with Core Web Vitals, I was interviewing him about a Chrome extension that he made for Core Web Vitals things. And also about his tool that he made for being able to visualize cumulative layout shift with a gift, which was really great. And he continues to build it and always does.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's amazing. Sue Ross.

Crystal Carter:

That's awesome.

Mordy Oberstein:

So make sure to follow him over on Twitter again at defaced. So I'm all tooled out.

I'm exhausted. I have so much of that, like pent-up energy.

Crystal Carter:

I think you really nailed it though with the-

Mordy Oberstein:

My hammer out. Bang. Nailed it.

Crystal Carter:

Nailed it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nailed it. Well, thank you for joining us on the Serfs Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into, do not let PPC kill your landing pages. Oh my goodness. That is such a hot take right there in the title itself. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review over on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.