Site focus? Should SEOs stay in their lane?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast to bring you some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm your host, Mordy Oberstein. I am joined by she who always drives very carefully, never swerves out of her lane, and if she does, puts on that signal, checks her mirrors, carefully moves over, and then carefully moves back when passing that slow person in front of her, headmaster of communications here at Wix Studio, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello. I hope all the listeners today are keeping their hands at 10 and 2 and are making sure that they are paying attention to what they're doing while they are listening to this podcast transmission. If you're listening in your vehicle, then I hope you are minding the rules of the road and staying in that lane.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what the worst is? When you have a merge and the merge just suddenly happen, they don't put the actual lines there. Because by the way, I'm from America originally and they're pretty good about doing that. That's not true in all countries.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It makes me angry. Why can't you just put a merge, slowly merge?

Crystal Carter:

I don't like when the merge is too short when you're getting on the motorway or on the freeway or whatever and it's too short and you're like, "Okay, I'm just going to pray for the best here."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. You're just like, "All right, here we go."

Crystal Carter:

Right. Then sometimes people don't let you on. It's like, "Let me on the freeway. You don't own the freeway. Let me on, man. Get over or something. Let me on the freeway." Freeway, freeway. Come on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Of the freeway.

Crystal Carter:

Freeway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Free to go my way.

Crystal Carter:

Honestly, I mean you knew. Did you drive when you were in New York?

Mordy Oberstein:

I used to love driving in New York. Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Because you have to drive, if you're in a city, the driving is very different.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Once you accept that, I found driving in traffic in New York, because I used to drive all over New York City as part of my job, so relaxing.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's because you just take your opportunity. You're just like, "I'm going now. Just do it."

Mordy Oberstein:

I go. If there's traffic people, I'm like stuck in traffic. I'm not going to freak out. I'm just not going to try to get around the guy. I'm just going to go.

Crystal Carter:

Just going to go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Going 10 miles an hour, fine. I got a sports podcast to listen to. We're good.

Crystal Carter:

Driving in LA is mad because the streets in LA are the sizes of freeways in other places. If you're going down Sepulveda or something like that, it's like five lanes going north and there's five lanes going south. If you're all the way on the one side and you need to make a left-hand turn and you have to, my aunt does this, the light would turn green, she'd floor it and then swerve over five lanes and then get over a bit. Sometimes it's what you got to do, I don't know. On the freeway, you have to wait. You're like, "Okay, go, go, go swoop" to get into the next lane.

Mordy Oberstein:

You can't see what Crystal did. Like moving your hand, swoop. That's great.

Crystal Carter:

Right. It's like double dutch.

Mordy Oberstein:

Double dutch.

Crystal Carter:

You got to time it and then get in there.

Mordy Oberstein:

God, I never do double dutch.

Crystal Carter:

I'm okay. Adult. It's been a long time. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel like now we're going to go down a whole jump roping Wormhole. The SERP's Up Podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Have we strayed?

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you Wix Studio, where you can use our SEO assistant to make sure your opinions are optimized and focus on the one true path for ranking success. As today we're talking about staying in your lane and path for SEO success. How far is too far? How far is not far enough, and what are the parameters for staying or not staying in your lane? Lavall Chichester chimes in on how to pivot that content strategy of yours, and of course we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

Pardon me as I go full New York on you. What the (beep) are you doing? You can't see there's (beep) laying there. You (beep) moron. Go back to Jersey with that stupid (beep) jug handle (beep). (Beep) lanes are painted right there and this (beep) can't stay in his lane, on episode 120 of the SERP's Up Podcast.

Crystal Carter:

That was a fantastic introduction. However, it did contradict your previous statement of feeling relaxed whilst in traffic. Just saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm from New York. You still scream at people when they do something stupid.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's just, it's very cathartic. It's all part of the process.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is what you do.

Crystal Carter:

It's what you do.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not angry. It's just what you do. I don't know. When someone steps on your foot, you say, "Ouch."

Crystal Carter:

That's true. This is true. Do you know what? I had to curb the road rage. I used to be a little shouty a little bit. I stopped being shouty because I became a cyclist at one point and I was cycling and was also being shouty as if I was in my own little container that's a car.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, no. You're very vulnerable on the bike.

Crystal Carter:

You're very vulnerable. I was on my bicycle complaining that somebody had cut me up, and to be fair, they had. They were bad. I was like, "I can't believe you did that!" And I was like, "Oh, is that Jeff? Oh, hey. Oh, hey Jeff. Hi. Hey, my bad." That sort of thing. You got to be careful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, yeah. You don't want Tony who's driving that Ryder truck that's probably filled with things that are not legal to actually hear you say what you just said about the way he's driving.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because Tony has no neck and he looks very scary.

Crystal Carter:

This brings us to my point about staying in your lane. We have strayed very far from the lane of this podcast

Mordy Oberstein:

We have done the complete opposite. Okay. Been on a soapbox about this all the way back at SMX in like 2019. Actually, ironically, George Winnar, a writer of the SEO Hub, actually wrote an article about this talk that I did.

Crystal Carter:

Wow.

Mordy Oberstein:

Way back when. Yeah. That's when the first time George had to edit me.

Crystal Carter:

Memories.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Anyway, I was talking about if you sell Derek Jeter jerseys, Derek Jeter's a baseball player, I always talk about baseball and I use examples, you can also sell baseballs. That makes sense. Signed Derek Jeter baseballs, fine. You can't sell garden furniture.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google's going to figure that out at some point. You got to stay in your lane. Back at the time we were talking about Google just being able to start to do this algorithmically, now fast-forward to now in 2024, we're seeing manual actions against sites like big websites who are getting hit on those sections of the sites that are talking about garden furniture when all they do is sell Derek Jeter jerseys. Google's saying, "Stay in your lane. We do have algorithms that kind of see where you're supposed to be. I'm not saying you can't expand and branch out, but you need to stay in that lane." Here we are now in 2024. Five. We're in 2025, sorry.

Crystal Carter:

I think that this whole thing has been such an interesting journey, particularly over the last year. Essentially, if people haven't been keeping up with it, there's been this whole discussion around Parasite SEO, around big websites using their domain authority to set up shops and set up content that's not really relevant. I think probably one of the best examples was Rolling Stone selling microwaves and doing big things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's my favorite example.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think that it comes down to when you're thinking about whether you stay in your lane or whether you don't stay in your lane, if I can take the, for devil's advocate, just keep it spicy, keep it interesting, if I can take the side of straying out of your lane.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, so you're okay. No signal. Go ahead. No problem.

Crystal Carter:

If I can take that side, to my mind, there's a certain element of don't hate the player, hate the game. Where if it works for a little while, and if you're not expecting it to be your be all, end all, your core thing for forever, and if you are getting that traffic. Before the algorithm or whatever catches up with you, there's an argument that you can make that money while you can. Get those clicks while you can and then just slash and burn it, which is what we've actually seen from a lot of these websites. Some of these websites who were using this as a tactic basically just like de-indexed, deleted, took that content off. They still keep their domain authority, they're still authoritative sites and they made money at the time, but they just nixed that for the minute. There is an argument that if it's getting clicks, then why would you look a gift horse in the mouth?

Mordy Oberstein:

I understand what you're saying and I hear what you're saying and I validate all the things that you are saying. Your voice is important to me.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

But if I could be Jiminy Cricket for one minute and be your conscience. Also, if you ever swerve out of your lane like that again, I will give you the business like there's nothing else. Double fingers everywhere.

Crystal Carter:

That is a risk. That's a potential risk. That's true.

Mordy Oberstein:

That actually, all jokes aside, that's kind of the risk. That's where I'm saying be cautious. Because yes, from a performance side, that is totally true. What you're saying is absolutely true, but there's a few things on the more marketing strategy side that would say maybe don't do that. One of them is eventually the bill's going to come due and how do you deal with that and do you want to deal with that? Leaving that aside, I have one of these sites in mind. I'm not going to say the F word on the podcast, but that's the site that I'm talking about.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

People have been, what's the word I'm looking for? Defecating on that website for years. Yes, they did get clicks and they did get that, but they lost a lot of brand efficacy and brand sentiment and brand power from that point of view, and they'll never be able to get that back. Now that they've lost their performance, they're really left with nothing to assert anything, because they lost that brand, at least in this space that we're talking about.

The other issue is, and I think this is a bigger issue, is that when you do things like that and you get out of your lane, it's a slippery slope. Because if you have established core identity, we have a certain mission, certain values, this is what we're doing and we are about this, then that should be your guide. If it's out of your lane, you don't do it. Now you could stretch that definition a little bit and you can play around. Fine, I get that. I'm not saying you can't expand the lane, repaint the lines, make a one-lane road, now it's a two-lane road. Fine. I don't know if that analogy actually works, then you would have to transfer the lane. Whatever, you know what I'm saying. You made the lanes wider.

Yeah. I'm not saying you can't do that, but when you don't make that core mission identity the guiding light, it's easy to start chasing all sorts of things. Some of those things may end up performing well for you and some of them may not. By the way, I'll give you an example of what I mean. You see brands doing this with AI all the time. Oh, AI, let's chase that AI thing and that AI thing and that AI thing and that AI thing. They don't know yet if they actually are going to be fruitful or not. Maybe some of these companies are just chasing the latest, greatest AI thing and they'll make a lot of money with them, but a lot of companies may not. If they had that aura of, "I know who I am, I know what I'm doing, I know what my mission is, I'm not going to steer away from this" they wouldn't have chased that latest, greatest AI thing, spent all that time, all of that money doing it, ended up with nothing. That's the counter argument.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, I see what you're saying there, but I also see that there doesn't necessarily have to be, even if you take that short-term gains for a potential risk. Basically with any business decision, you have a risk versus reward. When you're thinking about whether or not to stray out of your lane, you have to think about those risks and rewards. If you take it from a full on, let's just stack that paper perspective, you can weigh up the potential risk versus potential reward for that short-term gain. I think there's also, even when you stray out of your lane, there's also potential for low risk and not necessarily unethical sort elements.

Ahrefs has an example. They've got a blog on Parasite SEO and they talk about how it's not always bad. They use an example of Moz doing something that they call gray hat or whatever, and Moz doing something where they're talking about a blog on SEO services for instance, and that's essentially talking about something that kind of works and they're using their brand authority to leverage things. Lots of people do lots of those sorts of things. You see people, we talked about microwaves, you have, I don't know, Panasonic or whatever has a best microwaves thing. They're using their brand authority to boost their brand and they're of course going to put themselves as number one on that.

Now when you think about straying out of your lane in a low risk kind of way, sometimes you can mitigate those risks in a couple of different ways. For instance, you can put it on a subdomain. If for instance, it's like you said, you're selling Derek Jeter t-shirts or whatever, maybe there are Derek Jeter... What was it?

Mordy Oberstein:

Jerseys.

Crystal Carter:

Jersey. Okay, Derek Jeter jerseys, which are completely different from t-shirts, obviously.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

You're selling Derek Jeter jerseys. Let's say it's game day, and let's say you are a physical shop. On game day, let's say you sell water bottles, because you're located near the stadium.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's fine.

Crystal Carter:

That's not your core business, but that is relevant to your audience.

Mordy Oberstein:

Correct. Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Even though it's not your core business, even though it's not what you normally do, it's still relevant to your audience and your audience will immediately connect with why you're telling them about that thing right there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. Totally agree with you on that. My only thing though with that though, is if you do that too often. I'll call that a neutral moment. I am selling water. It's a great example because water is neutral. It's a neutral form.

Crystal Carter:

It's not an acid, it's not a base, it's neutral.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. It's neutral.

Crystal Carter:

Science. We're getting scientific people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Neutral moments are fine, but too many neutral moments is actually a negative. If you have too many of them in aggregate, when they compound on themselves, you lose that like, "Oh, I forgot, are they the water bottle place or are they the jersey place? I can't remember what they do." That's my only concern sometimes.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. No, I think that that can be the case. I think that sometimes I think that at that point, in terms of straying out of your lane, you need to decide whether or not you need to make a new lane. We see this with businesses all the time where they'll start in one space and then they'll go, "Oh, actually we should actually define this as a separate entity for its own thing." For instance, I don't know if you think about Nike, Nike also has Air Jordans and Air Jordan is its own space within. It has its own space, it's still part of Nike, but it's its own space.

Sometimes, again, risk and reward. You have to look at whether or not this warrants, whether your water bottle sales warrants you putting that effort into that. In those cases, I do think it's worth because that can help your business grow. Sometimes straying out of your lane can be like your litmus test, if we want to keep going scientific on you guys because that's how we are. If you can take that as a litmus test as to whether or not you can expand your business into a new area. Sometimes your audience will go, "What is that?" Let's say instead of selling water bottles on game day, you're selling, I don't know, tiramisu or something. That's not a-

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're going, "Oh, more science" there needs to be an element in the compound.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. You're going to that shop on game day to get the jersey that you can wear and go, "Oh, I showed up to the game. I didn't get a jersey, I looked like a fool. I'm going to get a jersey." That's the same intent. That could be the same intent as the water bottle leaving. I'm readying myself to watch the game. Just making that up. There's the old thing you're doing and the new thing you're doing, there's an element that string... It's string theory. Yeah, going full-on quantum here. It strings it together. If there's no string, you end up like Jaguar, which is like, "What the hell are you even doing?" There has to be a string that connects what you were doing to what you are doing now so the audience is not like, "What in the world just happened?"

Crystal Carter:

This is the reason why the microwaves on Rolling Stone doesn't make sense, because it's not an instrument. I don't know if Beyonce has a new line of microwaves. I don't know what's going on with those things, but that's why it doesn't make sense. Rolling Stone isn't going to open up a microwave business anytime. They're not selling home appliances. That's not what they do, so that thread doesn't work. However, if they were reviewing musical instruments, that would make sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

That would totally make sense. Absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

If they were reviewing stereo equipment, that would kind of make sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. That's a good natural evolution of the brand.

Crystal Carter:

You have people that like music, you can be like, "Hey, you like music? You might like a thing to play your music on." That makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's next step. That's not bonkers. "What are you doing? Yeah, you don't sell microwaves, dude."

Crystal Carter:

I think that when you're thinking about your lane, I don't think it comes down to don't stay in your lane, don't go out of your lane. So many things with online marketing come down to is this relevant to your audience? Can you justify that this is relevant to your audience? As Google likes to say, "Is it genuinely helpful?" On game day, the person who come in to buy the jersey, it is helpful to give them a water bottle if they are thirsty. It is a person and they're going to be at a baseball game all day, it's going to be hot, it is helpful to give them a water bottle. It's not helpful to give them a tiramisu that they have to eat with a fork because you're walking when you don't have time. You're moving. It's not a knife and fork situation.

Mordy Oberstein:

You should have a core, don't stray away from that core. It should naturally move, naturally evolve, and that core can move along with you. There's a core there. If you start telling microwaves when your core is music, that makes no sense. Do you know who can help you pivot?

Crystal Carter:

Who's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're looking to pivot to your content strategy, Fractional CMO, Lavall Chichester. Here's Lavall Chichester on how to pivot your content strategy.

Lavall Chichester:

When it comes to targeting topics for your website or web page, how far should you go out of your lane? I think my advice straight off the bat is that you have to really own a niche and then branch out from there. When you look at what Forbes and Rolling Stone and even The Wall Street Journal are able to do, the reason they're able to rank for all sorts of terms like CBD oil or anything like that, credit cards, is because first they started with news. When you're covering news and those types of things, even lifestyle topics and entertainment topics, you're covering a broad range of topics. Something new with CBD, something new with this, something new with that. From the beginning of when these sites were created, they were able to cast a broader net because news is just broad lifestyle things, is broad.

Then what they did was they were able to expand with experts. Forbes and Rolling Stone rolled out their councils, and if you look at their councils, they contact experts to actually write articles and create content for their sites. Then they also find expert writers, and they've built armies of writers who are experts within CBD or auto and those types of verticals, and they have very detailed author pages. They're tapping into EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. They're tapping into EEAT because on especially Forbes, you'll see their articles, so you see the expert who actually wrote the topic and their credentials, and then you'll see that it was also reviewed by another person. This sends the signals to Google that two people have actually reviewed this type of content and that's why Google allows it to rank.

What's interesting to me is Google came after About.com, which used to rank for everything years ago and hit them pretty hard. About.com actually, I talked to one of their lead SEOs. They had to change into a subdomain strategy to actually protect their sites from getting hit. This was years ago, but now you see Forbes and other sites really leaning into this and being able to tap into this.

Then again, Wall Street Journal, the way they did it is they launched a brand within a brand, so they launched Buy Side. Buy Side is their sort of product recommendation email type of thing. It's an affiliate play where people, when you go to that site, you know that they're going to recommend products and a bunch of lists. That's headphones and gadgets and all that kind of stuff. That's a different way, but again, focus on owning a niche. If you are a FinTech company, you shouldn't be writing about hot dogs. Own your niche and then go and branch out from there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks so much Lavall. Really appreciate your insights. Make sure you give Lavall a big old follow on LinkedIn and wherever else he is present across social media. Link in the show notes. Speaking of great people to follow.

Crystal Carter:

Yes?

Mordy Oberstein:

Look at that pivot. Our follow of the week is none only than Preeti Gupta who is sharing stuff all over the place. She's on Bluesky, she's on LinkedIn. She's sharing news articles that you should check out on Aleyda Solis' SEOFOMO news website, which we can link to in the show notes if you want to check that out. She's one of the people always sharing news there. Preeti's a great follow too. I just saw it pop up literally on my Chrome extension. She just shared Google on losing a link fast, submitted by Preeti Gupta.

Crystal Carter:

She's really active and in the Women of Tech SEO community as well. She's a really active and interested and engaged SEO, and it's somebody who very much stays in the lane of SEO and makes sure that she's keeping up with what's going on. Yeah, she's a great person to follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, well that's it. Thanks for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. I know you're going to miss us. Not to worry, we're back next week with a new episode as we dive into are marketers flying Blind with their GA4 data? Look for it wherever you can consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Look into more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO.