How to train your SEO team

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've put out some groovy new insights around what's happening, SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, the spectacular, the magnificent, the marvelous head of communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that fantastic introduction, Mordy. That was magnificent, and marvelous and...

Mordy Oberstein:

Not as easy as it sounds, is it?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's hard. You make it look really easy. But, I mean, you are a wordsmith. Are you not, Mr. Oberstein?

Mordy Oberstein:

I pretend to be one on TV. On the internet, I pretend to be one.

Crystal Carter:

My favorite thing is Mordy's pretty cas most of the time, but Mordy's got some $5 words in the bank there. I'm just saying. And every now and then, we'll be in a meeting, and he's just like, "Don't forget. Don't forget. I'm educated over here." And I don’t mean. I don’t mean. I hope that you can…

Mordy Oberstein:

But what you can't see on my other screen is the digital thesaurus.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay. Okay. I see. I see. Back in the day I thought a thesaurus was a type of dinosaur.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's great.

Crystal Carter:

I was like, oh, yeah, there's the Brontosaurus, the Ichthyosaurus, the thesaurus, obviously.

Mordy Oberstein:

Obviously.

Crystal Carter:

I was like, why-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the thesaurus. It's the biggest one of all, the thesaurus.

Crystal Carter:

I was like, why they got this book about dinosaurs next to the dictionaries? They keep putting them in the wrong place. What was that about? And so, anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Remind me later. I have a great story about something similar to my brother, but it's not for this podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Right. Got it.

Crystal Carter:

That's SERP's Up plus plus.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's plus plus, right. That's the after hours SERP's Plus Up, whatever. This SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, searchlight over wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, which you can get it delivered each and every month into your inbox, which is also part of our wider SEO learning hub, which is a great place to stay up to date on SEO, maybe join a webinar, maybe even access a resource to help, I don't know, train your SEO team. Who knows? The possibilities are endless over at wix.com/seo/learn, as today we're talking about training your SEO team. Get it? That's why I did that plug.

Crystal Carter:

I see. I see. That makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

Pat on the back for the pivot. We're talking how you train your SEO team. That's right. Today, whether you're an agency or an in-house team, or just want some tips for yourself, or maybe if you want to see perhaps how your boss is looking at things, we're here to help your team. Where to start when training an SEO team? How much is on you to train your team and how much is on them to train themselves? How do you train different types of people doing different types of SEO all with different levels of experience and then actually get your own work done? To help us bring our SEO pedagogy up to standard, Sterling Sky's VP of Search and Local University faculty member, Professor Colan Nielsen will be joining us in just a few minutes. Plus, we sit down with the true educator, Henry Collie, Wix's own curriculum developer, to talk about what goes into creating a strong learning program. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media.

So open up your lesson planners and put on your spectacles with a little rope thingies attached to them as episode number 59 of the SERP's Up podcast helps you find your teacher's voice. I want the audience to know that Crystal has those spectacles with the stringy thing.

Crystal Carter:

I do.

Mordy Oberstein:

And every time she wears her hair up. I'm like, "Oh, my God, you're giving me teacher vibes and I'm having a lot of anxiety."

Crystal Carter:

This makes you wonder, were you called into the office a lot back in the day? Like, oh, Mordy won't confirm nor deny.

Mordy Oberstein:

Who knows?

Crystal Carter:

I think your silence speaks so loud.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was difficult in high school, for the time I spent in high school. It's a totally different story for a totally different time.

Crystal Carter:

For SERP's Up plus plus.

Mordy Oberstein:

Plus plus. Right, the after hours podcast over away. I think just to give a quick, quick, quick background on this before we bring Colan in. You have an SEO team. Let's say, you're at an agency, you have all types of SEO folks. You have seniors and juniors and all types of different people, and whether they are SEO experts or they're new to the SEO game, there's always some kind of training that has to go on. Whether it be SEO training or even beyond SEO training. How do we speak nicely to our clients so they don't leave and they keep paying us every month? You might be a great SEO, but you might not be great with clients. There's a lot of education that continuously has to happen no matter where you are in any profession, but I think particularly when working inside of an SEO team, whether in-house, at an agency, which is why we have, as I mentioned right here, live with us, the VP of Search over at Sterling Sky. Welcome to the SERP's Up podcast, Colan. How are you?

Colan Nielsen:

Wow, Mordy. Thank you very much. That was a wonderful intro and a tough act to follow. Crystal's right, you are indeed a wordsmith. So I'm going to do my best to follow that incredible intro. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's our honor and esteemed pleasure. Okay, quick plug. Sterling Sky, Local U, what do we got?

Colan Nielsen:

Blue Mountains, Ontario, which is this beautiful city just north of Toronto. It's October 13th, which means we're into that time of year where trees are changing. It's beautiful, and this is probably one of the best places in all of Ontario to be at that time of year if you like the changing of the seasons and seeing these beautiful trees change color. So we're right nestled in this mountainous valley. This is our first Canadian Local University events, I believe, in the history of Local U, so it's very special to us. A lot of our team members, including Joy, the founder of the company, is from Canada. I'm from Canada. We're bringing all of our US team to Canada to be here with us for it as well. So we're super excited. Amazing speakers, amazing location. I can't say enough about how excited I am.

Crystal Carter:

It looks amazing. I'm looking at it and again, idyllic is the setting I would give. Just absolutely idyllic. Just frolicking in the beautiful leaves and-

Mordy Oberstein:

You're dropping the words now, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

But also, the lineup you have here. You're by himself. Darren Shaw, amazing. Claire Carlisle, absolute legend. We've got Matthew Hunt. I don't know him just at the moment, but I will find out and I'm sure he's fantastic. Jan Tomaso, also amazing. Darren, again. Joy, who is such a fountain of knowledge, and Marie Haynes also repping for...

Mordy Oberstein:

Also.

Crystal Carter:

... Canada there. So yeah, what a lineup. What a great day.

Colan Nielsen:

Yeah, we're excited. And what's really cool about Local U night before networking events, that's, in my opinion, is almost at the same level in terms of the value you're going to get out as the day itself, where you're listening to speakers and presentations. That night before you get to interact, talk business, make connections. So it's all worth it.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's a great pivot into our topic because I think that sometimes folks think, oh, I'm not sure if we have money to send the junior team members or learning team members to something like Local U or another marketing conference, for instance. But being in the presence of people who are top of their game, who are really passionate about their topic, who are exploring new and interesting ideas can be really, really inspiring and can be really good and to help sort of kickstart someone's learning journey. And I don't know if that's part of your training sort of thing when you guys are getting new folks through the team, but I'd love to hear more about it.

Colan Nielsen:

It absolutely is. We do our best to try and ensure that certainly as many people from our team can attend these events as possible. Certainly, newer people to the team. We'll get to this in a little bit, but there's certainly an approach we have with hiring people is typically around hiring people that come with experience and knowledge baked in. But we also hire people that are newer to SEO that this is perfect for. Another thing you made me think of there that was really cool, if we're thinking about these different avenues for new people that are new to SEO, getting into training and where do I go? So there's events like Local University, but then something that's kind of connected to Local University is the Local Search Forum. The reason I bring that up is, well, A, it's a totally free resource.

Anybody can go sign up. You can ask client questions. You can ask general SEO questions or hiring questions, training questions. And I've been finding for the last couple of Local U events, there are members of the Local Search Forum that are now attending the Local University events to sort of just level things up and then you get to meet those people in person. So it's like this really nice circle that gets completed between the forum and the events. So definitely check out the forum as well. It's a wonderful training resource for sure.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, forums are particularly good for helping training. I think also because... And maybe we'll get to this, but sometimes in a team... And I think that that's the important operative word there. A team, is that sometimes in a team you need someone to do something. Maybe it's not the first thing that they want to do necessarily, but you're like, we have this new project that we're doing and we need you to learn how to prompt the AI efficiently or how to use this new tool or how to train everyone on this thing, or whatever it may be. And sometimes you might be the only person in the team that knows that skill or knows that tool, or something like that. And sometimes the forum folks will be the folks that you know that you can talk to about it. There's like the Google Business Profile forums and things like that. How much do you find that as a team, do you need to point people to resources like that forum?

Colan Nielsen:

So we actually have... Let's say we allocate budgets each month, time, resources, whatever you want to think about it to people on our team to make sure that on any given month they have time to go to the Local Search Forum to either participate, to create threads, or simply just to go through and answer threads that other people are asking. I think that's one of the best things you can do, especially as a beginning SEO. But even as time goes on is go to forums, find problems that people have and just volunteer your time and troubleshoot them and answer them. And it's really just sharpening that knife. It's a free, wonderful way to sharpen your knife. And then there's all those other benefits like the networking and meeting new people and all that stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I want to piggyback on that just a little bit because about time and make sure everybody is able to do all these things, but you as someone who is training other SEOs, it could be a lot. You have your full-time job, and then you have all the training that you need to do. How do you sort of balance both? And I'll sort of piggyback another question on top of that. And you kind of mentioned at the beginning. How much is it on you to teach and how much is it on them to go figure it out and learn?

Colan Nielsen:

Yeah, it's a great question. So we definitely take a lot of time, care, efforts as an agency to ensure that we're continually training, and as time goes by, this becomes even more time. When we started in 2016, there was about three people on the Sterling Sky team. There was a part-time team member, Joy, and myself. I think we had one other person at the time. We're now approaching 40 full-time team members. So training is something we've really, really integrated. And so just to give you some examples. We kind of break things up in a given month. We'll have general training meetings and we'll break these into some very strategic categories. So for instance, every month, we have a strategy team meeting, and the people that are going to join that meeting are people that are responsible for client strategy. So that meeting is really about performance at the end of the day. It's about training on how to get better results for our clients as far as whatever performance metrics.

But then we also have account manager training meetings, which are equally important, but instead of those being focused around client performance, they're around client relationship. Making sure we're doing the things that we say we're going to do, that we're communicating effectively, efficiently, all that kind of stuff. We then also have specific, let's call them, team meetings. So we have link building specific training meetings, which just the link builders are going to be a part of that. The other meeting that I would say for us being a Local Search agency, that's a really, really important meeting to have is we actually have a very specific set Google Business Profile strategy meeting. And the people on our team that join this meeting are, well, anybody that's doing Google Business Profile strategy, which I would say is a little bit higher level than somebody who's just say, optimizing a profile.

This is like a level up from there where you're now building strategies, you know how to fix duplicate listing issues, stuff like that. We have a specific strategy meeting for that, where we'll discuss new issues that have come up with Google. You may have saw recently, Ben Fisher tweeted there's this big change coming to the...

Mordy Oberstein:

I saw that.

Colan Nielsen:

... reinstatement process, which is huge. So we'll talk about stuff like that. The other thing that's interesting, and I think this is really important I would say for any agency or anybody learning is if you are an account manager working in Local Search, you also should be striving towards being a Google Business Profile strategist or experts, because that is the one thing that we've found that if you're on a call with a client that is paying you to do Local Search and you're not able to answer some of those important questions they have, where it's more like, let me get back to you about that and check with the team. If you can avoid those and build that knowledge of the account manager up, especially on the GVP stuff, that seems to go a long way as far as training goes.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's really interesting the way that you're breaking it down into so many different layers of learning. And I think that that will also really appeal to the different ways that people learn. So the different learning styles and qualitative, quantitative, that sort of stuff. Mordy has a degree in education, so he can probably break them down into more of them than me, but there's lots of different learning styles there, which I think is really interesting. I think the other thing that I find fascinating about this approach to team learning is that it helps to reduce skills gaps and it also helps to improve the dissemination of information with regards to a particular topic. So for instance, like Google Business Profile, there's lots of different changes. There's lots of different iterations that you'll see if you're working in a restaurant space, you'll see one type of Google Business Profile.

If it's a hotel, it's another one. If it's a shop, it's another one, and things like that. I don't know how you organize your clients', but it might be that you have your clients organized by everybody who's in a restaurant is with one person and everybody who's in a hotel is with another person. Or it might just be that whoever's free, whoever has the time gets the next client. Different agencies work different ways. So if you have a meeting where you're discussing the broad trends that you're seeing across a particular platform or a particular approach, then that helps to reduce some of the gaps so that even if your account manager hasn't necessarily dealt with that particular issue personally, if they heard about it in the meeting, then they can say, oh, well our team has seen this or that, oh, I can get you the report that we saw from, we did that with this other client, that sort of thing.

And I think that that also helped reduce some of the tacit knowledge that you sometimes lose in agencies when it's in everyone's head. Can you talk to us about how you disseminate the information that you get from some of those team collaborative training spaces?

Colan Nielsen:

Yeah. Well, typically if it's something that's, say, mission-critical, like this suspension change, where the reinstatement process changed or Google's making some other crazy change, which they constantly do as we all know. Those types of things will certainly filter themselves up to our monthly team meeting. So today is actually, in about four from now we have our monthly team meeting and this is our all hands on deck meeting. So all 40 people will be attending this, and we break that team meeting up into a similar style as to how I just mentioned we kind of break up those individual training sessions. But anything that comes out of those meetings that is important for everybody to know then makes its way into that monthly team meeting and we discuss it. Some of the other things that seem to be helping with that over time. And then also touch on something you mentioned, Crystal, about just meeting people's styles of how they would like to train. It's an evolving process, and something we've started to do a lot more recently is incorporate more shadowing, for instance.

Because I think at the end of the day, if you're training an account manager or a sales role, let's say, there's only so much you can do by standing there and telling somebody, these are our golden rules, these are the things that you have to follow and you got to follow up within two hours and this, that and the other thing. Right, that's fine. People need to know that and they need to be listed somewhere so you can reference them and know rules. But I think what's more important and what we're experimenting with a lot more lately is getting into other styles like shadowing. So for instance, we've just started on the sales side of things. We actually don't have a sales team at Sterling Sky. I talk to clients. I don't have a sales background, but people on the team who love SEO and love talking to people are really good at selling. So that's kind of how we do it. And now we're having more people shadow. So I'll jump on a call with a prospect, I'll have somebody else from my team join, they'll take notes, they'll ask me questions.

Maybe next month I'll have them join a sales call, I'll join with them, take notes, give them feedback. And that seems to be a really effective way to do training as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

So it's really because one of the way it sounds like, through a certain extent, is that you're doing a lot of the training as part of the actual workflow. Something new came up in the SEO industry, you got to know about this, let's have a meeting about discuss, now you're educated. But it also seems like you're trying to address gaps with the shadow. There's always two parts of the educational process. Okay, I'm going to teach you A, B, C, and D, and I when I was a teacher back in the teaching fourth graders, just like teaching SEOs, you have, I'm going to teach you X, Y, and Z today, but when I'm done teaching you or even while I'm teaching you, I also have to address the fact that you might have gaps at the same time. So it sounds like, on the one hand you are driving the conversation forward, we're updating a SEO knowledge on a constant basis and we're also trying to address the sort of gaps by having a shadow work with you so that you can ask your specific questions and get what your actual educational needs are satisfied.

Colan Nielsen:

100%. It's amazing what types of things gets, let's say, revealed, for lack of a better word, during a shadowing process. Often things will come up that you didn't even think about. Or maybe the trainee, the person who's receiving the training, they didn't even think to ask or think that it was maybe a gap. Then you do the shadowing, hey, here's this little thing here. I think we have an opportunity to take this to a level 10. Maybe we're at a level six or something right now. And then where that leads to sometimes, another thing that we're, I'd say, relatively new starting to do is we will then have people on our team who are now wanting to do training of things that they've learned new training, which I think is probably the ultimate form of learning something, is taking something that you've recently learned and then teaching other people on the team that thing. I don't think it gets better than that. And for instance, my teammates, Becky on her team here is doing some training this month.

It's very specific, but really cool training about something she's become really good at and it's about featured snippets. So she's become this pro in our team of, I refer to it as seizing, featured snippets. And she's gotten so good at, that she's now training the rest of the team on best practices for capturing featured snippets for our clients.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's awesome.

Crystal Carter:

That's fantastic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let me ask you sort of a different kind of question I've been wanting to ask, because I do a lot of training not in SEO. It was totally different industry, and one of the debates we used to always have is, which is better? To hire somebody who knows nothing about whatever it's that we're doing, it's actually property management, whatever, or you can train them the way you want them to be trained? They know nothing about the industry, they're getting all the information from you. They're going to see just by default a lot of the things that they're going to be dealing with the way that you want them to be seeing it. Or do you want to bring in somebody who already has a lot of experience, more experience, who you don't have to train as much, but they may not see things the way that you see things as it pertains to, in this case, SEO?

Colan Nielsen:

Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd say, for us 90% of the time, certainly over the last six years or so, we are hiring experienced, really smart people that come with presets SEO knowledge. It's pre-programmed into them. They've been doing the SEO for, anywhere from five to 10 plus years. And I don't think that's necessarily the best way to do things, but I think what it really comes down to is what type of SEO service is it that you are providing? What is the perceived value of your service that you want to kind of implant into your potential customer's mind? So when I think of value, there's different things that are drivers of value. One of those is perceived likelihood of outcome, those types of things. And I think if you're building a team of say, all stars or a green team or whatever it may be and can deliver a much higher quality of SEO, it just means that you are able to charge more for your SEO because you're delivering better value at the end of the day.

Now, that's not to say there's anything wrong with building a team of people who are less experienced them up. There's a place for that. I just think it might be working towards serving a slightly different product, let's say, or service for that client. So 90% of people who hire definitely come with experience and knowledge. And then what we do here is that for those people that we hire, a lot of the training will then be on Sterling Sky specific SEO tactics that we test, that we have then turned into our processes and tactics. So they've got the base SEO knowledge. That's all taken care of. Now it's like, welcome to Sterling Sky, here's some other really cool things that we have figured out over the years that we now do for our clients, and then we're training them on those specific things.

Mordy Oberstein:

So you have the dream team over Sterling Sky. I just want to know which one of y'all is Charles Barkley?

Colan Nielsen:

You know what, Dave could be Charles. It's a-

Crystal Carter:

I thought it was Noah. Yeah.

Colan Nielsen:

Could be. Dave's a big basketball fan. I actually have a big poster on my office wall here that Dave sent me, and it's all the caricatures of the big players from the '90s. So he's a big basketball fan.

Crystal Carter:

Sorry, to go back to what you're saying, I thought it really interesting about all of the different iterations of just being very bespoke with your training and being very attuned to the person that you're with. I think that's really important. So tuning it to somebody who's maybe into basketball. Certainly in my time, whether I'm training clients, because that's often very, very much the case, where you're training clients as well on maybe something that you're handing over to them or something, or juniors, where you sort of try to talk to them a little bit so you can figure out which kind of metaphors you can use with them to try to help make sure that it fit. But I think also how do you identify when somebody needs to do some more and are you able to identify sometimes before they do? Does that ever happen?

Colan Nielsen:

Yeah, definitely. And I would say that is extremely important to be able to do is figure out, to see that metaphorical train heading for the crash long before it happens. So this, again, is an evolving process, but we're continually trying to introduce new checks and balances along the way all while trying to balance that with not being too overbearing or micromanaging or whatever it may be. So we have started to do things like pre-mortems, regular meetings. So, say, as part of our that monthly strategy meeting that we have, we've recently started talking about very specific clients and then that gives opportunities for people to bring up issues that they're having, which could be a training issue, could be performance, could be progress related to that client. That would be one thing. For account managers, for example, they're more focused on client trust and happiness. So we have triggers in place where every single month we're doing a qualitative feedback to answer the question: Is the client happy and do they trust us?

And depending on those answers, we track that over time. If we start to see something going down or dipping or whatever the problem is, it will trigger process here that we refer to as a red flag process, which then goes into a system of if it's a performance issue, okay, it's a strategy red flag. If it's a relationship issue or an account manager issue, it goes into more of a progress red flag. The other way we start to figure out these problems before they become real problems is through assessing via these shadowing type calls that we do and just giving that feedback as quickly as possible, and doing it regularly. And so far that seems to be working well, but it's definitely something that it's almost weekly is evolving. There's a new step, there's a new iteration of it.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if folks are having their own issues and looking for their own iteration of SEO education, they want to contact you, how can they find you, Professor?

Colan Nielsen:

My email's open. So colan@sterlingsky.ca, and for those who don't know, my first name's got a bit of a weird spelling. It's Colan, still pronounced like the traditional Colan. Long story there. But I think my parents had SEO in mind when they named me. Because it is wonderful for the old name search on Google. I think I covered the first two pages, so thanks mom and dad. That's good. So colan@sterlingsky.ca. I'm not very active on Twitter, that's probably where I share most things. You can find me at the Local Search Forum where I'm an administrator, very active there. If you come to the Local Search Forum and ask about specific problem with your client or whatever it may be, you very likely will see myself or certainly, one of the other Local U faculty members or one of our amazing guests.

Mordy Oberstein:

Awesome, and we'll make sure to link to all that in the show notes and definitely check out Local U. There's amazing knowledge from all sorts of amazing SEOs. It's at localu.org. All right, Colan, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you out there in the SEO ether.

Colan Nielsen:

Thank you so much. This was really fun. We'll talk to you soon.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.

So you may not know this, but we at Wix have a slew of courses and tutorials to help you do anything from master the Wix and Wix studio platform to learning how to use Meta to grow your brand and know how to create a site aligned to accessibility standards. And one of the great folks who does help design these curriculums and courses is the one, the only Henry Collie. And he's someone who Crystal and I have worked with directly. Spoiler alert, we're in the earliest stages of our SEO certification course that we're working with Henry on. So we thought it would make sense to talk about training teams that we should talk to Henry. So let's go across the Wix first and welcome Henry.

Automated voice:

3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey Henry, welcome to the SERP's Up podcast.

Henry Collie:

Hey, Mordy. How's it going?

Mordy Oberstein:

We're good. So first off all, what's it like to work with Crystal and I on courses? Must be wonderful for you.

Henry Collie:

It's dreadful. It's awful. Yeah, a trial by fire. No, actually it's been really great. I mean, you and I've worked together now on and off for about a year, I think.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And a few courses, but this will be the first one that actually comes into fruition.

Henry Collie:

Yeah, the first one that actually gets over the finish line. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

There we go.

Henry Collie:

I think that's the thing that people forget when they go into curriculum is that most of the stuff you make probably won't make it to the end for various reasons. It could be to do with production reasons or differences of opinion.

Crystal Carter:

And you've worked in curriculum for lots of spaces. I think what I find really interesting is that as the idea of education, of creating courses, of creating curriculums has really expanded. I think that maybe 10, 15 years ago it was mostly schools that were doing courses and things. And now, really if you've got a brand, if you've got a complex product, you probably need an education arm. And there's people who are really good at hula-hooping who are putting together courses and things like that. How have you seen that change and grow?

Henry Collie:

Yeah, so first of all, when I started, I actually started off as a copywriter. So I was simultaneously acting and copywriting, but I was mainly copywriting for educational materials. So one of my first jobs was with Freeformers, making a product for Facebook to teach soft skills. And then I kind of fell into it that way with a mentor. And I think there's a danger to what is happening right now with education online and in the tech space. It's amazing the opportunities are there, and there's a huge marketing value to having educational content. But what often happens and what's happening more and more is we're getting this superficial education like thing because we must have education, so we must make an education thing that looks like education, but we never... Well, I do, to my detriment. But it's really important to make sure that it's actually providing the outcomes that people are expecting. And often it doesn't, because we're making these pieces of education for an agenda that doesn't align with education. So it's really important to keep that in mind, I think.

Mordy Oberstein:

I find that these kind of courses, ya know, people think it's like writing. They go -  I speak English. I write English. I can write. I can write whatever, just because you know how to write doesn't mean you can professionally write. Just because you want to have an educational course and you are going to do this and you feel you need to do this doesn't mean that you actually know how to do this. Because teaching, as someone who has a master's degree in education, is its own art form and it's its own thing and there's own consider... And there's things that you just don't think about when you are naturally speaking or naturally transmitting information that you do think about when you're more formally transmitting information.

Henry Collie:

Yeah, absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it's something that's interesting because a lot of people, there's a thing that people say, which is if you can't do teach. And people say that as an insult or something, which it is not, because I think the thing is that if you are somebody who's like, I don't know, David Beckham or something, and you rolled out of bed and you were like, I know how to do football off the top of your head, you never had to learn football. If you're somebody who you were like, I really love football, but I can't quite get that thing to do the thing that I want it to, then you learn how to learn that and therefore you can convey that. If it's just instinctual, you don't even know how to articulate it because it just came naturally to you. But if it's something that you have to learn how to do, then that's something that works really, really well.

Henry Collie:

Well, right. And there's also a very well-documented expert bias and experience bias where even if you have had to learn it and you have had to go through that process of learning, you are so far into your journey that you've forgotten what those particular things where that you learn from. And even if you have remembered all of those, let's say you took a log of every single educational step that you've passed through every single point of understanding, that log is special and specific to you. It's not necessarily something that's broadly applicable. So you can't simply just be an expert and then go teach. And what you often get when you have an expert who's way up here. I'm making gesticulations.

Crystal Carter:

Hand gestures.

Henry Collie:

Just so you know what can't see.

Mordy Oberstein:

His hand is way up high right now.

Henry Collie:

So just so everybody knows, my left hand is currently up around my eye level and my right hand is down around my neck. So if you're up here, then you can't see what those people down there need to understand. And you often fall into that trap of trying to tell everybody everything that you know is important. But sometimes you also need to leave things out. You need to lie to people a little bit so that later on you can reestablish the truth, because otherwise they have no framework of understanding to build on.

Crystal Carter:

It's like with kids, you tell them C is for cat, and the C word, that C makes a cah sound. T is for tall and it makes a tah sound, except for when it's in notion, then it makes a shah sound, except for when it's in that and it makes the th sound, and there's all these sorts of things. But you just need to get them to understand that the letters work in the first place and to get them forward before you tell them all of the I before Es, which I can never remember.

Mordy Oberstein:

You see that all the time. In sports, you have professional athletes who now go into broadcasting and they're terrible, because they know all about the game, they don't know how to talk or they don't know how to transmit the information into a way that I can understand it, because not a professional athlete. But if we can zoom out to a different question. So great, we're going to do this course and now we need to figure out how to do it. But what makes you decide legitimately whether or not you should or shouldn't be doing when to begin with?

Henry Collie:

Right. So it's a really important question. It depends on the situation and it depends on who you're dealing with. But the first step is to understand what value you're going to add. And I think that's, again, going back to the superficial superficiality of a lot of edutainment...

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh.

Henry Collie:

Ooh.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a shot. Shots fired.

Henry Collie:

Is that, we ask what are we going to cover? Will people watch it? Will people engage with it? Which really aren't the most important metrics. The most important metrics is... The most important metrics are, rather, will they gain value from this? What value will they gain from it? And then if you can actually measure what that value will be. And there's ways of doing that. For example, with SEO, we're creating this SEO course at the moment. We know that our partners, our freelancers, our agencies will gain measurable value from being able to offer these services and to be able to offer them to a high level. Now of course, that value is completely stripped if we make an edutainment course with a funny little badge that they can put on their LinkedIn that nobody caress about, so it actually has to deliver those educational outcomes or it's completely pointless and it's just wasting their time.

So first of all, that's how you figure out whether it's worth doing. You have to measure what that value will be. And then secondly, you need to break down what those services, what outcomes are into their smallest constituent parts and then see where those people are right now and get them to where they need to be to either emulate or even surpass people who are currently operating in that way. I think that's probably the long and short of it.

Crystal Carter:

And how dynamic would you say that process is? I certainly know that when I've done an article or done a video or something, or even when we do our webinars even, people are like, yeah, but what about this? What about that? How dynamic is that process? How often do we need to revise, do we need to amend, do we need to adjust a course?

Henry Collie:

Constantly. There is no point at which it's completed. There is no point where like, oh, now we're making curriculum and it's now finished and it's done. You constantly have to reevaluate. And actually that's something I harp on about this all the time, so stop me if it's rambling, but I actually hate the word educate and education. The reason being I think it's an aggressive act, is to educate and it also focuses on the teacher and what the teacher is imparting and what the teacher is enforcing into a student. Whereas, learning I much prefer rather than educator is to focus on learning, because that focuses more on what the learner is getting out of the process.

And in order to do that, now you are enforced, just by that linguistic change and that reframing, you now have to not evaluate the student necessarily, which you do, but you actually have to evaluate how well your work is reaching your promises. Because you are promising somebody something. Education is a product. It's not just random thing where we cover topics, and to kind of circle back to what my main point is, is you can cover things and say, that's all covered. We have talked about this. We have talked about that. We have covered this. Why don't you understand you silly student? Well, because you didn't... Actually, you covered it and you checked off the box, but you didn't audit whether what you covered imparted any value to me as a learner. Oh, sorry. I feel myself getting angry.

Crystal Carter:

No, it's true. I've definitely had a situation where I've done a certification, I won't name which one it is, but I can think of exactly which one it is in my mind. And I've done a certification and you go through all the things and you tick the boxes, because they've told you that you have to do the certification again. And so I would call that, I guess, education, because I studied the things or whatever. But I didn't actually learn it necessarily. You don't really learn it.

Mordy Oberstein:

You do become part of your scheme, how you think and how you operate as part of your outlook and part of your knowledge base, just because something I like it's somewhere in my brain, but I have to recall it, I guess.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I think to learn something, you kind of have to do it. And I think you mentioned mentorship and mentorship is really, really important as part of that, and learning as you go, which I think is one of the reasons why we add that into the product.

Henry Collie:

We also need to define what learning actually means, because I think we often say learning education, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not one thing. Learning involves loads of cognitive steps, loads of cognitive processes. It's a constant pathway. We constantly have to evaluate to see where we are in that process. And there are innumerable learning theories, instructional design methodologies, but when you break it all down, they're essentially all saying the same thing and providing various ways of achieving the same objective, which is you the learner in one state, and at the end of this process you should be in or at least, close to another state of being.

And it's not just about rote learning or saying, I've covered this or I've talked about this and now you can tell me what the capital of X country is. You can learn what the capital of X country is, but do you know why it's the capital? Do you know how it became the capital? Do you understand the social aspects of that country that created that situation in the first place? Now you don't just know that it's the capital. You now understand that it's the capital. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's so Piaget dude.

Henry Collie:

When I was young.

Mordy Oberstein:

So as time ebbs away from us, where can people learn about you?

Henry Collie:

Ooh, I'm pretty quiet, to be honest. I don't really do social media.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh.

Henry Collie:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's odd for us, personally.

Crystal Carter:

You run an educational course though, yeah?

Henry Collie:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Where is the course?

Henry Collie:

Oh, you mean separately from Wix? No, I don't.

Crystal Carter:

No. On Wix.

Mordy Oberstein:

On Wix.

Henry Collie:

Oh, on Wix. Oh.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because they can learn by osmosis. They can see the course, take the course in...

Henry Collie:

Right, right, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

... and then learn who you are. Almost like reading a poem and understanding the poet.

Henry Collie:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Right. Well, if they want to find anything that I've done, they can check out Wix Learn, which they can find the e-commerce course on there. Also, the accessibility 101 course, which I highly recommend. It's extremely important. It's extremely important for design, not just for accessibility and for-

Crystal Carter:

Also important for SEO.

Henry Collie:

And extremely important for SEO. And then by probably the end of this year, we will have the new SEO course out where they won't directly see me as a human, but they will see-

Mordy Oberstein:

They will feel you at every step of the way. I guarantee it.

Henry Collie:

They'll feel my presence.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Henry Collie:

My ominous presence.

Mordy Oberstein:

Your aura. Hum. You should leave like a Easter egg in there somewhere.

Henry Collie:

Oh, should we? Should we just put in little like my favorite books?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Or like the screenshot should be like... We're talking about the SERP, it could have a screenshot of like who is Henry?

Henry Collie:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Just be a photo of you in the background in a frame or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, look for Easter egg.

Henry Collie:

Do you know, I think there was a time... I think it's gone now, but I Googled my name and I had a little knowledge profile and a little buttons.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, oh, I don't have social. You have a knowledge graph. Look at you. A knowledge panel.

Henry Collie:

I think they've clocked it though and gotten rid of it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I got Google that.

Crystal Carter:

That's cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

There was a movie called Henrique. Someone does movies that's also named Henry Collie. But your picture shows up right there when you…

Henry Collie:

Oh yeah, no, that's me. I used to be an actor.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, so there you are. Okay, so where can they find you? They can find you in movies.

Crystal Carter:

IMDB. That's funny.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, well, look for Henry in our SEO certification course that's coming up or in the movies.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks Henry.

Henry Collie:

Cheers guys.

Automated voice:

3, 2, 1. Ignition. Lift off. Lift off.

Mordy Oberstein:

So thank you so much again, Henry, it was fascinating to talk to you and looking forward to keep working with you on our SEO course. Spoiler. Spoiler. Spoiler. Now since we are talking about learning, you know what we can do to help you learn more?

Crystal Carter:

What can we do, Mordy?

Mordy Oberstein:

We can quote Barry Schwartz a bunch of times as we get into this snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Snappy news. Three articles, two updates for you, or two articles about two updates for you. First one from Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal. Google completes rollout of October 2023 spam update, which means you can now resume spamming. I'm just kidding, you should not resume spamming. You should never be spamming to begin with. So if you're utilizing, you have been utilizing spammy practices across the webs, you may have seen a significant loss of rankings. If you have not been engaged in spammy practices, and 99.9% of the listeners of this podcast have not been, this update should not have really impacted you. What might have impacted you is the October 2023 core update. And one day before Google announced the completion of the spam update, Google said, per Barry Schwartz, over at SEL, Search Engine Land, Google October 23 core update rollout, now complete. They're both complete.

This one may have impacted you. This impacts sites across the web. Have a look at your rankings, see what happened. The update is now finished. There will be data on this, meaning as the recording of this podcast, of the news section, we have not seen the data come out from the tool providers. I know because I do send Russia's data. So have a look by the time this episode does come out over at Search Engine Land, look for Barry's article, Collecting Data from Across the Tool Providers to see the nature of this update and how, perhaps, how impactful it is sort of, kind of, maybe, that's a different story for a different time. But you'll get some data that points to some things about the core update. Lastly, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. Got to make sure Barry gets all the links to all of the different blogs and websites that he has.

This one's over at Search Engine Roundtable. Barry writes, Google search generative experience may link to paywalled content, but here's how to block SGE. So if you have content behind a paywall, say you have to sign, enter your name and email address to access the content, Google said they can link to that content in their Search Generative Experience, the SGE, as I like to refer the AI box, where Google, you enter a query, Google spits out a whole AI answer with a couple of links. Google also said, and they updated their robots meta tech documentation to show or to say that they will respect robots meta tag directives with the SGE. Meaning, if you say, "Hey Google, I'm going to implement a no snippet robots meta tag. I don't want you to quote me. I don't want you to show a snippet of my content on this webpage on your SERP. That includes all of the SERP, which also includes the SGE Box.

Also, similarly, if say, for example, you say, "Google, you know what? You can show a snippet of my content from this page, on your webpage, on the SERP, rather, but I don't want you to show a ton." So here's the number of characters you're allowed to show is called a max snippet robots meta tag. You can also implement that and Google will respect that in the SGE for Wix users. It's very easy to implement any of these robot meta tags. Simply go to the SEO panel on any particular page and you will see a checkbox where you can tick off, which robots meta tags you want in the advanced SEO section of the SEO panel. And with that, Barry now has all the links, and that's our version of this week's snappy SEO news. Thanks to the learning Barry. Each and every week Barry brings us the SEO learning. Each and every day, in my opinion. I check it out all the time, every day.

Crystal Carter:

It's true. It's true. I contemplated sending him something today that I saw, but I'm sure that somebody else has seen it already. But you got to roll the dice. If you don't get involved, you can't win.

Mordy Oberstein:

The best thing to do, as I told you, Crystal, is let the article go live with somebody else, and then as soon as it goes live, say, Barry, is this new, and find your own example and then he will include you in it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Oh, of course. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's my hack. I've never done that, but I should.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know anyone who would do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. Everyone has different standards for how they go about their lives. We're not here to judge anybody.

Crystal Carter:

Some people are doing their best, and we're just doing our best.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's not new. That's just how life goes.

Crystal Carter:

It's something you got to learn.

Mordy Oberstein:

So many little SEO jokes in there. You know what's no joke?

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

Following the right people on social media so that you get the right SEO learning. So this week's follow of the week is a family favorite, as in the Wix family favorite. Mark Preston, who you can follow over at Mark Preston, 1969. That's at Mark Preston 1969 over on Twitter, formerly known as X, scratch reverse. I'm still confused, but follow Mark. Mark does tons of training, tons of advising, and he's our follow of the week for training people.

Crystal Carter:

And he's so committed to helping people learn more, particularly about Wix, but also generally about marketing, about personal branding, and is somebody who is very approachable in that regard. He shares a lot of information directly on Twitter. People ask him questions, and he's so generous with his time, and a super nice guy as well. Like Barry, but really lovely when you meet him. So I highly recommend following Mark and checking out his podcast and all the other cool stuff that he does.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yep. So definitely give Mark a follow. Definitely, definitely give Mark a follow over on Twitter, X, whatever. You got it. We'll link to his profile in the show notes and hope you learned a lot this week. And then you can go out there and train your SEO team.

Crystal Carter:

Choo, choo.

Mordy Oberstein:

I choo, choo, choose you

Crystal Carter:

It was a train because training because choo, choo.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, now I get it. Wow, that went right over my head.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I hope the train didn't go over your head. That would be very uncomfortable.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unless it was a toy train, in which case it would just bounce off my head.

Crystal Carter:

That reminds me of a friend who had a kid and then the other kid was like throwing their Thomas the tank engine at the baby, and it's like, no, don't, don't do that, don't do that. They had to take it away.

Mordy Oberstein:

I remember throwing my Star Trek Enterprise toy at my little baby brother, but it was a metal and getting in trouble for that.

Crystal Carter:

Were you shouting engage?

Mordy Oberstein:

Make it so.

Crystal Carter:

No, no, don't, don't. Don't do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, thank you for joining us on this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss... Not to worry. We're back next week in the new episode as we dive into how to work well with non-SEO teams. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and newsletter on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.