100th Episode Special

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Serp's Up. Aloha Mahalo. Welcome to the Serp's Up podcast. We're serving up some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by insert adjectives here. Our head of SEO communications. Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

What's shaking all you hip cats out there on the internet.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yo, and I love those sunglasses. By the way, in case you don't listen to podcasts normally, usually I do a whole intro like the fabulous, the amazing, the incredible, the unparalleled head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter. I just want to say insert adjectives here.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he's run out of adjectives. And also maybe, I don't know. I do my best, but maybe I'm not as sparkly as before.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh no, I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you want me to run the intro again?

Crystal Carter:

No, it's totally fine. It's all you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are you sure?

Crystal Carter:

It's fine, it's fine. The pandering for compliments, Crystal Carter. No, no, I'm kidding.

Mordy Oberstein:

From now on. That could be like your ex name, handle thing.

Crystal Carter:

But yeah, 100 episodes is a long time to try to keep up that many adjectives.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a lot, it's a lot. It's a lot of episodes. We talked a lot.

Crystal Carter:

We talk a lot, and it's not even all the things we talk about. That's the thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, truth. She was behind the Hot Takes episode. The things we don't publish. Well, welcome everybody to a live special edition of the Serp's Up podcast. We're celebrating 100 episodes, and to do that, we're doing it live. We're doing it live, which is a deep cut because I'm old. So you basically get to hear me flub the intro 1,000 and see what actually happens, and how many times it takes me to get it. Usually two or three.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, we do our best. But to be fair, you've got that radio sound, which is second to none, really.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm living my dream. I've always wanted to be a sports announcer or radio host dude. Here I am.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, here you are. And yeah, the intro normally goes pretty smooth. Give yourself more credit than that.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, it does. It does. Well, let's see.

Crystal Carter:

The king of-

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll find out. Yeah, I don't have those plans, so we'll see how those go. Sometimes they don't go well, let's see. Well, so anyway, we have some amazing guests today. Chima Mmeje is here. Darren Shaw, Joy Hawkins, Eli Schwartz, Kevin Indig, and a very special rendition of the Snappy News with none other than Broadway Barry himself, who will be here later.

But before that, thank you for joining us and welcome. Here's how it's going to work. Okay, if you listen to the show each week, we have segments. Nothing changes. We still have segments, except this time there's a different guest or set of guests for every segment. During the last five minutes of each segment, we're going to take questions from you. So please, plop your questions into the chat. And to help us curate the questions... Yeah, plop is a good adjective for putting questions in there. Just plop them in.

Crystal Carter:

Just plop.

Mordy Oberstein:

Think about all the things that go plop. And to help us curate the questions is going to our head of SEO editorial George Nguyen. Mr. SEO Hub will be curating your questions, so throw the questions in. And by the way, let's give George a big welcome. Hi, George.

George Nguyen:

Hi. This is-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's George.

George Nguyen:

... the extent of my involvement.

Mordy Oberstein:

The podcast lives on the hub, and you're the hub, so it's appropriate to have you here, I feel like.

George Nguyen:

It is perfect. But more important than me, I want to make sure that everybody listening understands that the more specific you are with your questions, the more likely they'll be answered. And be careful because sometimes when I'm reading your questions, it doesn't match up to what's being said. And so if you leave out that context, your question will not be answered. So ask good questions, and I will do my best.

Crystal Carter:

So we want you to plop strategically.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

George Nguyen:

I know what that is.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make sure your plopping is optimized.

Crystal Carter:

Fully optimized.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, fully optimized plopping.

Crystal Carter:

High fiber.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and George does have an amazing donut-shaped Cushion. Jack, you're absolutely correct.

George Nguyen:

Thank you, Jack.

Crystal Carter:

That's true, he does. Also, can we just appreciate the locks? George doesn't normally have all the locks on show.

Crystal Carter:

He's going, oh, oh my goodness.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. This is getting too risque for our podcast, George.

George Nguyen:

Thank you for the show.

Crystal Carter:

This is the wrong kind of webcast.

George Nguyen:

Oh, it is, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. George, thanks so much, and we'll see you in the comments. Okay. Now, since we're actually doing this live, we're also doing the production live. I feel like saying we're doing this live is kind of obvious. We're here, we're live. It's not Weekend At Bernie's, we're alive. And to help with the production, they who always do our production Edge Media Studios or Site Strategics, those fellows are also here because we're breaking the fourth wall. The production that happens on the show isn't magic, it's Erin and Jacob. Mostly Jacob, I would imagine.

Jacob Mann:

Pretty much. Yeah. No, no, but I can't do that with my hair.

Erin Sparks:

Excuse me. I thought we booked this room for Edge of the Web. I'm sorry, did I get my calendar confused here?

Mordy Oberstein:

That is appropriate, because I go on your podcast and pitch this podcast, so kudos to you.

Erin Sparks:

Exactly. I had to do it, had to do it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I just want to say thank you. You guys do a great job with the podcast every week, and it's very much appreciated.

Erin Sparks:

More than welcome, guys. And been proud to be able to do 100 episodes. Let's go for another 100.

Crystal Carter:

Yay, thank you so much for all of your help.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sounds good.

Erin Sparks:

You're more than welcome.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so let's get right into it. Well. Oh wait, wait, I didn't do the traditional Wix line, the Serp's Up podcast. See, there's a flub. First flub of the day, first flub of the day.

Crystal Carter:

Who's counting?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm counting, that's one. The Serp's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix Studio, where you can only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, but where you can also be on the lookout for a new SEO course that's coming with folks like Aleyda Solis, Andrew Optimisey, Debbie Chu and so forth. But it's also where you can push your SEO and marketing further with native tech and apps built together with Google, Bing, Amazon, Mailchimp, Meta, Tickety Toc and more. Look for integrations inside of the Wix Studio, SEO and marketing dashboards and in the Wix Studio app center.

As today, we're going all over the SEO universe. We're getting 100% fresh squeezed SEO insights. Nay, I say knowledge schemes as we look into, is SEO still the same powerhouse it once was? Are there new local ranking factors you may not know about? The answer obviously is yes. Could you imagine? We did a segment, and all it was was no, there's nothing new. And will AI get you across the finish line? Plus, the Walter Cronkite of SEO and source of many SEO memes, Mr. Happy Camper himself, Barry Schwartz, will be joining us for what is sure to be a Carnival-esque version of the Snappy News. Because on this episode of the Serp's Up podcast, we're keeping it 100.

It takes me a while to figure out that last line. What should it be? It's like I spend most of my week figuring it out.

Crystal Carter:

Hey man, you just got to make it land. Just stick the landing, like whoosh.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's 100. Bam, sound effect. All right, let's get right into it. SEO has changed a lot over the past, I don't know, three seconds. There's been a lot of talk about how effective SEO is, whether or not it's still entirely its own discipline, it's overlapping the marketing in all sorts of new ways. Let's explore the efficacy and boundaries of SEO with a deep thought with Crystal, Mordy, and special guest Chima Mmeje from Moz. Welcome to the show, Chima.

Crystal Carter:

Hi.

Chima Mmeje:

Hi, Mordy, hello.

Mordy Oberstein:

Box number two, Chima. Box number two. I forgot, we're doing it live. There's a sound effect that we have to do.

Chima Mmeje:

I know. Okay, should I speak about the sound effects? Do I wait for the sound effects to finish?

Crystal Carter:

It was very loud, wow.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I should have brought you on after the sound effects. See how good I am at this? I've only been podcasting for 1,000 episodes.

Chima Mmeje:

This is a big budget production you guys have got in here. I have to come in here, they haven't-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, what are you talking about? You have the Mars pod now. I saw you brought that back in studio.

Chima Mmeje:

No, but-

Mordy Oberstein:

Check that out.

Chima Mmeje:

But this is fancy. This is really fancy.

Crystal Carter:

Well, this is why we have such a fancy guest. Thank you so much for joining us.

Chima Mmeje:

Of course, of course, of course. I am glad to be here, and congrats on 100 episodes. That is insane. I think we did 20 episodes of MozPod and I was like, "Oh God, do I want to do this again?" You guys have done 100, giving up at 20, you've done 100. I need to step up my game. I need to step up my game.

Crystal Carter:

We've recorded a few more as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do a lot of talking, a lot of talking.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So let's get right into this. Well, Google just finished rolling out the August 2024 core update, which we're going to talk about more later with Barry probably. And a lot of that had to do, a lot of the conversation that the narrative had to do with fixing the September 2023 helpful content update. And there's all these questions about is Google doing the right by small websites? Which leads me to this question, Chima. Is the SERP broken?

Chima Mmeje:

Look at my reaction. I feel like I've been saying this for years, and I've made several round posts on LinkedIn about it. In fact, I remember last year speaking at Brighton SEO a whole round about Google for 20 minutes. And I forgotten his name, but there was someone from Google that was literally going up right after me to do a presentation. It was awkward.

This is how much I am frustrated with everything that Google has been doing with the sales. The helpful content update, I'm saying this here live, is a farce. That whole thing is like one big PR. There's nothing helpful about that update. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. And this is me right now working on a content update on a website with over a million pages and spending hours on the SERPs every single day. There is nothing helpful about that update.

I'm on a forum where there are lots of SEOs and people who own small businesses, and many of them have had to shut down, many of them have suffered tremendously from this or... These are people that have been working hard to implement best SEO practices and are suffering, and there is literally no explanation why their websites are suffering. It feels like we are like coins or something just like, I don't know. And they're just like puppeteers just playing with us. It's very frustrating.

And the SERP is broken. The SERP has been broken for a long time. I don't know, we've just been blinded by all of this whole rubbish period that Google is self-serving and Google is helpful. No, they're not helpful. They are self-serving. They're a business that exists to make profit. So nothing helpful about the updates. Yes, the SERP is 1,000% broken.

If you even compare between the US SERPs and the UK SERPs, the distinction is insane. The US SERPs is cluttered. There's ads here, ads there, this here. They're trying to push something on you. It doesn't make sense. And then you look at the UK SERPs, cluttered, but it's not as bad as the US SERPs. And I'm like, "How does anybody even use the SERPs? How does anybody even use Google in the US?" It is insane. I will stop here, because I could do this forever.

Crystal Carter:

So you've got a lot of people chiming in the comments here. Wendy Mero saying the SERP's been broken for a long time, amen. And Simon Cox saying that he thinks you're skirting around the issue. Oh, did I say-

Mordy Oberstein:

Trust in Simon trying to stir things up.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hear you Simon.

Crystal Carter:

Yep, yep, yep.

Chima Mmeje:

No, Simon. I'm saying, Simon. Tell me, what is the issue? Look, you know what? I work at Moz now, so I have to be very diplomatic. If I was still working for myself, I would have probably been using a lot more colorful words than what I'm using right now. But I'm trying to be very, very diplomatic. But you can see how frustrated I am with the SERPs. I don't think they're going to release any update that is going to fix any of these issues. There are people who-

Mordy Oberstein:

There's no update. And I agree with it, there's no update. There's no one thing.

Chima Mmeje:

There's someone in there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Going back to plopping. Plopping Reddit all over the SERP was because they saw the content trends that... Okay, people are looking for firsthand knowledge, experiential content. And they looked around the web and they said, "We don't have any, so we're just going to throw Reddit there."

Chima Mmeje:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was a default solution, and it wasn't a long-term thing.

Chima Mmeje:

It was lazy. It's lazy to have Reddit on the SERPs. As content folks, as a rule of thumb, we don't link to Wikipedia, because Wikipedia does not have authors. Anybody can go on Wikipedia and write some information. It's literally the same thing with Reddit. Nobody uses their real names. Anybody can go in Reddit and put answers to questions, and then you see these answers populating in people also ask, populating in features and populating everywhere on the SERPs as correct information. It is dangerous at worst, and I don't even know what the best is. There's no best.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's no good solution.

Crystal Carter:

So I wouldn't say calling it Devil's advocate. But for argument's sake, do you think that one of the reasons why we've seen so much upheaval and so much so volatility in the SERPs, which I certainly agree with in the last year. Do you think part of it is lots and lots of variables, like lots of new features coming in? So the alignment with Reddit, the AI overviews, the SGE, more machine learning, do you think it is just too many things being thrown in at the same time and it messing up lots of SERPs as a result, or do you think it's something else?

Chima Mmeje:

Crystal, this is not playing devil's advocate. You are supposed be telling me why Google is better, or making a case for them not being a (beep) up child. You are basically just proving my points, releasing too many features that they did not test properly. Features that were rushed. SG did not even last up to year, and now they brought Google Overview. I still don't understand why we have AI Overview and future snippets on the same SERP. I feel like it's counteractive. Pick one, make a choice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that to me is the problem. I feel like a lot of the things are knee-jerk reactions. Again, your knee-jerk reaction to want first-person content. Throw the Reddit thing there. Knee-jerk reaction, we need to keep up with Copilot, and OpenAI and blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's roll out with what basically is a featured snippet, but it takes longer to load. It's just interesting. But okay, so at the same time then, you have all this volatility, you have things that you can't... What's in your locus of controls in SEO? None of this.

Chima Mmeje:

None.

Mordy Oberstein:

None of this is.

Chima Mmeje:

None.

Mordy Oberstein:

As an SEO, how are you supposed to do this? Listen, I'll say this. I've heard of things, that people are like, yeah, "I don't know what to do." I-

Mordy Oberstein:

... I'll say this. I've heard things to people like, "Yeah, I don't know what to do. I can't produce the kind of results that I've always wanted to." Can you still be effective as an SEO in an environment like this?

Chima Mmeje:

I am going to be honest, we are suffering as in we've been suffering for a while because the steps are so volatile that even when you do a technical audit, you don't find the reason why your traffic is tanking and the visibility you used to get on the SERP is lost. There's no reason for it. And I feel like I'm being honest here, I feel like we're just trying new stuff. Oh, okay, first person content. Let's try to see who can get more first person content in there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. You don't have enough data to even tell you that this is the right decision that you're taking.

It feels like we are trying our best with what we are seeing on the set because there's no clear guidance. And to be honest, a lot of us are playing a guessing game right now, and that is the best that we can do, if we're being honest. It's all a guessing game based on what we've seen one or two variables work. And this is not a long-term strategy if we're going to be realistic. It's not going to work in the long-term.

I honestly, I don't know what the answer is, Mordy, because I'm thinking about it now. And the way we used to do SEO that used to drive results, that was like mathematics, if you did this, you did this, this would happen. It's not working anymore because you're fighting against Reddits. How do you compete against Reddits? Nobody has figured that out yet.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, and it's not even consistent. I think the one thing that I think bothers me the most is a lack of consistency. So, Google will say, "Write content for users, yada, yada, yada." And it'll work in sometimes, in some cases. And then you'll go to another query and the same old schlock, "Five best ways to whatever," is still ranking. And you're like, "Okay, so I did what you wanted. It worked here, but it didn't work there."

And if you're somebody who's doing a strategy, it's hard to work at a strategic level when you don't have that consistency. And by the way, I'm not coming down like raining hellfire on Google for that. It's an algorithm. It's hard to get all of that right, but that doesn't take away from the complexity at the same time.

Crystal Carter:

I think it's a great conversation. I think though we have so many guests, we could talk about this literally all day long. And Chima, everybody in the comments, Gagan, Gotra, SerpSpotter Extraordinaire has said, "Thanks for saying it out loud, Chima." You've been an incredible guest. We've got our next group of folks coming on, so thank you so, so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Chima.

Crystal Carter:

Got to get you on for some more hot takes.

Chima Mmeje:

Thank you for giving me a space to rant. I really appreciate that. Enjoy the the rest of the show. Bye-bye.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye. Wow, that was the most honest take on that. I think I've heard in quite a long time now. So, not only, not only... If Chima's hot take was new, I got something else that's a little bit new for you as well, because not only do we have a daily new series on the SEO Hub with Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn, who Barry will be here shortly actually, called It's new.

We have an entire segment of this podcast named after the folks like yours truly who take to social media asking Barry, "Is this new and slightly irrelevant thing on the SERP new?" So let's take a look at what might be unknown in the local ranking factor space as Sterling Sky's Joy Hawkins and Whitespark's Darren Shaw join us for a local ranking factor version of It's New.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey. Hey.

Crystal Carter:

Good morning.

Darren Shaw:

Thanks for having us.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, thanks for being here.

Crystal Carter:

Hi, guys. Always a pleasure. I feel like I see you all both because I follow you on TikTok and you're always the first ones on my TikTok being like local pack thing. I'm like, yeah, local pack. Do it.

Darren Shaw:

I'm glad that my content is making it into your feed. It's not making it into too many people's feed, but you must have engaged with it at some point.

Crystal Carter:

The best about thing about that-

Mordy Oberstein:

the struggle is real.

Darren Shaw:

Yeah, totally.

Mordy Oberstein:

The struggle is real. But I see your stuff everywhere.

Darren Shaw:

I'm trying to be everywhere. I'm trying to be everywhere. Hey, is Darren Shaw, Local SEO tips. You want to hear some tips? I got tips.

Mordy Oberstein:

But between you and Joy, I feel like the local SEO space is killing it with social media videos for SEO.

Darren Shaw:

Yeah, Joy's videos are great too. She's doubled down on videos the past little while as well. It's the way. It's going to... Eventually, we're all just be making videos. No more text content. Who wants to read these days?

Joy Hawkins:

I still read.

Darren Shaw:

I know, I'm joking.

Mordy Oberstein:

I just read headlines and I just draw conclusions from that. Who needs to know the rest of the content? We were talking before the show, what should we talk about for this segment? And then through our various emails, I came up like, wait a second, there's a bunch of new stuff in the local space, in the local ranking factor space. So like, hey Darren and Joy, what's new?

Darren Shaw:

What's new? Well, yeah, there are some new things, and this is really my fault because I'm a year behind with the local search ranking factor survey. So, I usually put it out every year, but the last one was in 2023. And actually I partly blame Joy for this because it was like the week after I released the 2023 version, she publishes this post showing how services impact rankings.

I was like, "Oh, Joy. I just launched the local search ranking factors and we missed your awesome tip." And so I mostly just report the news, but we got to give credit to Joy for doing the research and discovering the actual ranking factors. I'm always like, "Oh, my God. Joy Hawkins blew my mind again because she discovered this awesome new thing." So, you know.

Joy Hawkins:

Same.

Darren Shaw:

It's effort here.

Joy Hawkins:

But Darren gets to tell it from inside his fridge. So, if you haven't seen his newest video, it's like you get footage from inside his fridge. Who doesn't like that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry, guys. … totally talk over each other.

Darren Shaw:

Yeah, it's hard. I know it's four people. Do you want to hear some things that are new?

Mordy Oberstein:

I mean, yeah, the name of the segment is, It's New.

Darren Shaw:

Okay. Joy, why don't you tell us about how services currently impact rankings?

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah, so there's a little services section inside the Google business profile dashboard that's easy to miss, but you can add anything you want in there. You can make your own, you can add ones that Google has. We've done a lot of testing on it and they do impact ranking, but I should clarify, it's like a small impact. So, usually we see it for longer tail queries that maybe don't match a category or things that are not super competitive. But if you're a plumber and you just go add plumber as a service, you're probably not going to rank for plumber if you didn't rank before. So, it is a small ranking factor, but still one that is worth filling out.

Darren Shaw:

So, this is the question that a lot of people ask. We know that if you go into the services section of your Google business profile, Google will suggest predefined services. And they're like little pills, you just click them and you're like, "Yeah, I do that. Yep, I do that. I do that." You just click the ones, right?

And so Joy's original research was focused on those predefined ones and it definitely identified that when you do put those on your profile, you now rank better for those terms, depending on how competitive they are, as Joy had mentioned. Now what about, there is a place where you can add your own custom services. Have you done any testing around that? Have you found that the custom ones that you put in there, haircuts for long haired dogs. So, you put some weird long thing in there and will you rank better with the custom services?

Joy Hawkins:

Yes. They both-

Mordy Oberstein:

Hold on a second. I'm just writing this down so I can figure out how to manipulate this later.

Joy Hawkins:

So, they both work. The one in custom services I think we talked about later. It was this year, and I think the other one was earlier. And I want to say, I'm trying to remember the keyword that Colin tested it on. It was something like super niche, like vampire facials or something weird.

Darren Shaw:

Oh, yeah. It was that.

Joy Hawkins:

I was like Googling, "What the hell is that?"

Darren Shaw:

It's weird, yeah.

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah, so really, really niche again. But he just wanted to know if there was any impact whatsoever. And there was, so again, good way to go after longer tail keywords that don't have crazy high search volume or aren't super competitive.

Mordy Oberstein:

Are you all worried about manipulation? I wasn't joking before. I'm writing it down so I can manipulate it because that's how you do local SEO, right?

Darren Shaw:

Well, I would say, I would not call it manipulation. It's basically optimization. Let's say you have a web page on your website and you wanted to rank for a specific term, but you never mentioned that term in your web page. Well, Google's going to have a hard time connecting the dots. So, this is the similar thing. With your Google business profile, you want to make sure that you're telling Google what you do. Tell Google what you do. It would be really helpful if Google can rank your business for the things that you do. And so that's basically what the services section provides.

And it's not a huge ranking factor, but it's just another step in the local optimization process. You should fill out your services, you should add any service that you have. And the fact that custom services work is really valuable and have a tip for custom services because customer services often get pulled into the local results as justifications. It'll say, "This business provides vampire facials," right? Well, did you know there's a vampire emoji? So, if put the vampire emoji in the title, so it's like vampire emoji, vampire facials, then in the local results you'll see a whole panel of businesses that all provide that service, but yours has that little vampire emoji, which will draw people in and help and make them click it.

They'll be like, "Oh, look at that one." It is just like a little eye-catching thing in the search results for more clicks, more conversions. And we all believe that if you get more clicks and more engagement, then that'll help you rank too. So, it's mostly a conversion tip, but it may have a side benefit of ranking boost as well.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also that's a really prime example of one of the things that I love about Local SEO and the Local SEO community is testing everything. So, testing whether or not that works, testing whether or not this works. Joy, your team are meticulous testers.

Do you have any recommendations for when to test a new feature? When something comes out new, are you straight in there? How does it work? How can I break it? How can I make it fly? Is that your general approach or do you let it marinate and then test it? What do you think?

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah, we've evolved this process a lot. We have about a hundred ongoing tests at any given time, so there's a lot. And it's hard because I don't have time to publish them all. So, the ones that I think you should prioritize are ones that you think are going to make the most impact. If you have a theory on something and you think it's something that you can widely apply, in our case it's lots of different clients, different industries, then we prioritize it.

So yeah, there's certain ones where I'm curious, but I'm like, "Okay, would we actually even do this?" We've done some tests on click-through-rate manipulation, which is something that I'm hoping to publish soon, and that's something that we'll never do. At this point anyways. I don't know, you'd have to really change my mind on why an SEO should do that and why it's not spammy, but it works really well, but it's not something that I'm going to spend hours and hours testing because it's not something we're going to do.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Whereas the emoji thing you might roll out, if you have a bunch of lawyers and you put in the little law scale thing or something, you can test that for lots of things, for instance, that might work.

Darren Shaw:

I was thinking of a different emoji for lawyers, but yeah, go ahead. That one's fine too.

Mordy Oberstein:

I wanted to swing around Darren, because you said you didn't release the 2024 local ranking factors study. Now maybe I'm reading into this or maybe just like, I don't know, you didn't want to do it, or you got busy or you're lazy. Whatever the reason is, there's so many reasons.

Darren Shaw:

All of the above.

Mordy Oberstein:

All of them. Perfect. By the way, if you do it, if you do put it out, could you please publish it in Mandarin. If you don't understand this joke, Darren posted something on LinkedIn, probably on TikTok also, in Mandarin, and I had Google Translate through the lens thing. It was an actual real post. It was just in Mandarin.

Darren Shaw:

Yeah. Yeah. I got to give a shout-out to my video editor, Nadia. She came up with the whole idea. She had seen someone do something similar. She's like, "Oh, I've got to do the SEO version of this." And so she just directed me, told me what I need to film and then put it together. And it was funny, it was a big hit. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it was great. Also, what's great is your ranking factor, but you didn't do it yet. Is that because, do you think that it's less concrete? What is working, what is not working or how to categorize it?

Darren Shaw:

Yeah, no, it was, you did touch on it. Lazy and busy. Busy slash lazy. So, that was really the only reason.

Crystal Carter:

Blazy. Blazy, is that the word?

Darren Shaw:

Yeah, maybe something like that. Blazy. So, I had a hard time just kind of squeezing it in. And then what ends up happening is that it's like, "Oh, well I wanted to do it in November, but then I didn't. And then I was like, "Okay, I'll do it in January, February," but then I didn't. And then he get so far into the year, you're like, "Well, by the time I survey people, finish the analysis, publish the whole thing, it's going to be October, and then it becomes the 2024 local search ranking factors for three months?"

So I'm like, "Nope, I'm just going to skip it. I'm going to wait for Joy Hawkins to publish all her new tests before I do the 2025 version. So, my goal actually is to put the survey out to the local search experts in roughly October, collect the data, analyze the data in November, December, and publish freaking January 1st. And then I got a whole year of the 2025 local search ranking factors. So, this is my approach. I left it a little too late to bother with 2024. And so now 2025 is just going to be twice as good.

Crystal Carter:

That'll be great.

Mordy Oberstein:

I shouldn't read into it. I shouldn't read into it.

Crystal Carter:

And if you want to find out some new things about Local SEO before then, I would say that you should come to the Local SEO or Local U event that Sterling Sky are organizing with Wix in New York, but it's sold out.

Joy Hawkins:

I know. I was like, "Sorry?"

Crystal Carter:

Sorry, not sorry. Should have got there earlier.

Joy Hawkins:

We need to find a bigger space for next year, Crystal. We'll have to talk.

Crystal Carter:

I know. I was sad. We actually had people emailing us. They're like, "Is there any way?" I'm like, "I can't squeeze you in. There's a fire code," but yeah.

Darren Shaw:

Right?

… video's after. Yeah. I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, for sure.

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah, we'll be doing another one.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to give you some questions though. Cool.

Darren Shaw:

I'm ready.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. This one is from... Oh, God. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. "So many GBPs are open 24 hours in Melbourne nowadays, and it's gotten way worse in the last couple of months. Thoughts on it and if Google will go after this bad practice?" If you're not familiar with this, there was a point in time where people realized, wait a second, if you say that you're open 24 hours, you rank better even though you might not be open 245 hours.

Darren Shaw:

This is Joy's question to answer, but I just want to tell a story before I pass the mic to Joy. She bamboozled me with this damn ranking factor. So, she invites me on this podcast, she's like, "There's a whole new ranking factor." And I'm like, I'm making all these guesses. What could it be? What could it be? And then she shows me this and I was like, "Dang it. This means that we have to totally change all of our software to make sure that we're tracking rankings at the right time." But yeah. Joy, what do you think about this question?

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah, it's a pain because as SEOs, you have to be so diligent about when your right trackers are running and if there's even a delay. I ran one the other day that-

Joy Hawkins:

... are running and if there's even a delay. I ran one the other day that took a while. And I ran it at 7:00 AM, but by the time it ran, it completed after 9:00 AM. That's a big difference. What you see at 7:00 AM before businesses are open, huge difference on what you'll see after 9:00. And I think the average business owner doesn't realize how different it is because it didn't used to be different, but as of last year, it's now a huge factor. And I'm calling it a ranking factor, I don't care what other people say. It influences how you rank, therefore, I'm calling it a ranking factor. But basically, the hierarchy is this. If you're open, it's the highest hierarchy, so Google prefers to show businesses that are open. If there's no hour set on the listing, they're not sure, so they'll put those ones in the second tier. And if you're closed, it's in the worst tier, so they actually push you down.

They want to show businesses that are open, so this is problematic for a lot of our clients who, let's say for example, aren't open on weekends. You might search for a dentist on a weekend but a lot of them aren't open, so what do you do? And it unfortunately comes out of this. A lot of people are going, "Well, I guess I'll just list myself as open." And personally, I think it's on every business owner to figure out how they want to answer this question, because I don't necessarily think it's lying if you say you're open, because you might actually have somebody answering the phone. And you could argue that if somebody answering the phone is there and available for customers, then your business is open. I think it's a vague term that you could kind of define differently, depending on who you are.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, like, "I'm open to new business."

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah. As long as you're actually responding, I think you can make a case that you're open.

Crystal Carter:

The thing is as a user, I hate this. I hate this so much because if I Google a business and it says that they're open and they are not, now if I see 24 hours, I just don't believe them. I just think, "I don't believe you."

Mordy Oberstein:

Your account is open 24 hours?

Crystal Carter:

Right. I just searched while we were here, lawyers in Los Angeles, and all the top say, "Open 24 hours." I guarantee you that-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's LA for you.

Crystal Carter:

Law firm is not open 24 hours. "I'm open at 3:00 AM." They're not.

Joy Hawkins:

But if you call them at 3:00 AM, a lot of them do have, I'm not saying all of them do, a lot of them do have after hours answering services. You will actually get a human being at 3:00 AM. That's what you should do if you're going to do this approach.

Crystal Carter:

I'm sure that law firm is a great law firm.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to get one last question in if we can. "Would love to understand whether..." This is from Lee, "Whether to accept or reject seemingly random service additions suggested by Google. Should I trust them because they're coming from people searching? Or is this potentially misleading just like when Google Ads' broad match is too broad?"

Darren Shaw:

I think if Google is suggesting it, they've gotten this idea from somewhere. Where are these coming from? Sometimes they come from your website, they come from your presence on the internet, on other sites, social sites, local directories, those kinds of things. And so Google thinks you do these services. Sometimes they're way off base. Another thing they'll do is they'll look at other competitors in your category and say, "Well, all these businesses do these services, so you probably do them, too." One of the things you need to be aware of is that when Google suggests services for your profile, they're already live. Google doesn't suggest anything, they just push the changes to your profile and said, "We added these to your profile. Do you like them?" And so then you can say, "No, I definitely do not offer that specific service," and you can turn them off.

And so having a system to monitor for these changes is really helpful. Wouldn't you know it? We have one at Wisepark, so we have a software system that will keep track of your Google business profile. It's only a dollar a month and it'll tell you anytime Google is adding any of this crap to your profile, and then you can just be like, "Nope, not today, Google," and you just reject it. And so having a system to pay attention to that is really valuable. But should you trust them? I think generally, but you should keep an eye on them. And you should keep an eye on anything that Google is suggesting on your profile because sometimes it's not Google, it was just some random dude on the internet said, "Ah, this business is closed."

And they'll mark you as closed, they'll change your phone number, they'll change your primary category. They'll move your map pin into the middle of the ocean and Google accepts all of these changes. Google's like, "Well, Bob on the internet said that your business is closed, so guess Bob is right." And so they actually trust the people on the internet more than they trust the business owners. And so paying attention to this stuff is really important. Can you trust the edits that Google is doing? I would say not really. Make sure that you're keeping an eye on this. Joy, any comments?

Joy Hawkins:

Yeah, I'll just add, make sure your services makes sense, what the word provides in front of them, because that's how they show up on Google. And so we have a divorce lawyer that has sexual assault constantly getting added to his listing. So it's like, "Oh yeah, he really wants to show, 'Provides sexual assault,' on his listing." Google just keeps adding it. We remove it, they add it again, it's been going on for years. It's super fun.

Darren Shaw:

Or, "Provides traumatic brain injury," that's my favorite. "This law firm provides traumatic brain injuries."

Crystal Carter:

Wow.

Mordy Oberstein:

And on that happy note, thanks so much for joining our podcast. That was a lot of fun. I hope we didn't leave anybody with a traumatic brain injury. Wow.

Joy Hawkins:

Thank you so much for joining us.

Mordy Oberstein:

Joy, Darren, thanks so much.

Darren Shaw:

It was a pleasure. Love chatting with you all. And yeah, see you next time.

Mordy Oberstein:

See you out there in the ether. Make sure you give joy and Darren a big follow on social media. Now, it wouldn't be a podcast if we didn't talk about traumatic brain injuries and lawyers. No, it wouldn't be a podcast if we didn't talk about AI. It wouldn't be an SEO podcast, it wouldn't be a marketing podcast, it wouldn't even exist. It'd be like the tree that fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it. Unless we talk about AI.

While there's been a lot of pushback about AI for content generation in the digital marketing space, professional digital marketing space, that's a little of a hot take, let's explore what's possible in the future with AI. Two brilliant minds will join us. Eli Schwartz, the author of Product-Led SEO, and the founder of Growth Memo will join us as we move into The Great Beyond.

Crystal Carter:

Kevin Indig.

Mordy Oberstein:

What'd I say? I didn't say Kevin's name? Kevin Indig. There he is, he made it.

Kevin Indig:

Call my name and I appear.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow, it was the AI. I was thinking your name and suddenly you appeared.

Kevin Indig:

That's how it works, it's like Beetlejuice.

Crystal Carter:

Who needs AI when you have KI? There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or Eli.

Crystal Carter:

Hey.

Mordy Oberstein:

We can't hear you, Eli. Your AI is not working. Also, your mic.

Eli Schwartz:

It all rhymes, here we go.

Crystal Carter:

So it must be true.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why we had you guys on the show, because we knew it was going to rhyme.

Kevin Indig:

Good planning.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Kevin Indig:

How are we going to top that now?

Mordy Oberstein:

I have no idea, I'm still trying to... I'm stalling to try to figure that out. How about search, read your mind? I'll ask ChatGPT, it'll tell me the answer and to eat glue.

Crystal Carter:

Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Both are enjoyable. Anyway, let's get into the whole AI thing. This actually started, Kevin had a post on LinkedIn that was very pro the AI and it got me thinking. Let me ask it this way, where do we currently stand with the AI? What can it do, what can't it do? Because I have a follow-up question that I think is a little spicier.

Kevin Indig:

Yeah, sure. Do you want me to chime in?

Mordy Oberstein:

I mean, that's why you're here.

Kevin Indig:

Oh, okay. I thought I was here to look pretty, but all right, cool. I'll say some words.

Eli Schwartz:

That's my job.

Kevin Indig:

Okay, Eli, I'll outsource to you and then I'll try to talk. Where are we today with AI? I think it's a critical question because you have to differentiate between where we are today and where we might be in six to 12 months, which is very, very different. And so today, to provide a snapshot, we're at a stage where AI basically has the capability to create content, analyze some basic data. It still hallucinates here and there and it still makes mistakes. I'm talking about AI broadly as in we have Google Gemini, we have OpenAI, ChatGPT, we have maybe a couple of other models. There's Claude with Sonnet, et cetera. And of course, we have Google with AI overviews.

And so I kind of put all of these in the same bucket for now. They make mistakes, but if you compare that to when this AI hype started in November, 2022, it's almost two years now and we've come a really long way. These models are getting exponentially better. And so that's what I'm saying, if we extrapolate to the next 12, maybe 24 months, I think we're in for quite the wild ride. And so the question is of course, what does it mean? And it means different things based on whether you look at it as a tool for yourself to make your work more efficient. And of course, what does it mean from an SEO perspective? How does it change search, not just Google, but also how people search? And I think these are all different questions that are exciting to dive into.

Mordy Oberstein:

So you're really hot on AI? You're a believer?

Kevin Indig:

I'm absolutely. I think it's not just a believer. I know what you mean, Mordy. I'm being pedantic here, but yes, I can totally see the benefits of AI also from a data perspective. There are studies that show that writers who use AI can be 40% faster and, quote-unquote, better. You have to define better means. There are studies that show that 17% now of users use ChatGPT to replace search. Pretty robust analysis. And there's more data showing that, for example, consultants are much more effective when they use AI as a thought partner or brainstorming partner.

There is a lot of objective data that indicates efficiencies and benefits from AI. There's also a lot of hype that promises a little too much about what AI can do. And so I'm generally AI bullish, but I'm not in the camp of AI is going to replace us all the next two years. I'm much more falling in line of you should use AI for certain cases right now, but don't think you can outsource your whole job to AI. I hope that kind of puts it a little bit in perspective.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, that makes a lot of sense. This is my follow-up, because I'm setting the stage here a little bit. Because while your LinkedIn posts are generally pro AI, a lot of Eli's posts are a little more skeptical about the AI-ness. So Eli, what do you think about what Kevin just said? By the way, for those who are listening or watching this, I'm pitting them against each other. They're friends and they do a podcast together, so it's cool, I'm good with it.

Eli Schwartz:

Yes, this is amazing. What an intro to say that we're supposed to argue with each other.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, sorry. We're not going to argue anymore.

Eli Schwartz:

Kevin, I'll do my best.

Mordy Oberstein:

Good, please.

Eli Schwartz:

I'm pro AI, I think AI is great. I think that there's a lot of great things you can get out of AI. Again, like Kevin said, it can be your thought partner. You can ask it questions, you can use it to learn. I'm anti AI in the way people are using it. And I don't think people have necessarily changed their behaviors, because again, it's almost been two years. Before the introduction of ChatGPT, what a lot of, again, people with producing a lot of content did with the outsource it on Fiverr and Upwork and they bought very cheap content, and now they're getting very free content. Then that's coming from AI. That behavior hasn't really changed. The challenge is that now there are more people that think they can copy them. I talk to CMOs all the time who are like, "I just let go of my SEO team."

A big company reached out to me recently. They wanted to gut check themselves after they already fired their SEO team, so can't really help there. But they're like, "AI can do everything SEO can do good." Good. Well, I'll see them in a year from now when they have whatever sort of penalty. And I think that's the challenge, is that AI is a very powerful tool. Any tool we have, a drill is a very powerful tool, but if you just hold it in the air and just let it go, it's going to make holes. But if you use it appropriately, it does the thing it's supposed to do, again, like every tool. And I think AI is one of the most powerful tools we've ever had on the internet and it can do a lot of great things, but it shouldn't run off on its own and do its own marketing.

I just think I'm seeing a lot of different sites use AI in many weird ways, so they'll do, an e-commerce site will write all their product descriptions, forgetting the fact that product descriptions are meant to actually describe the product so someone adds it to the cart. So until we get to a point where AI is going shopping for you and then reading these product descriptions, then I think you need product descriptions that appeal to the customer. There was a company in the job space that was doing the same thing. They're just aggregating AI written job descriptions, and then you hear about AI tools that can apply for all your jobs.

I even read a post on LinkedIn the other day about someone who was interviewing someone and they basically thought they were talking to ChatGPT in the interview, where the person was dubbing their own voice and they were getting ChatGPT answers. But at some point, someone has to do a job. So what we're going to do is going to get these AIs, they're going to talk to each other, but then they're going like, "You need that human." And this is one I haven't dealt with, I've only read about, but AI in dating. You figure out the perfect dating responses. You're on whatever sort of dating app and you figure out the right way to text, so ChatGPT tells you how to reel someone in with-

Crystal Carter:

ChatGPT.

Eli Schwartz:

Yes, but at some point someone has to go on a date and behave like a human. I think that's where we are with marketing in general, that there's all these AI that it's kind of moving the goalpost, but again, we're humans and we buy stuff. It has to come to a point where humans are talking to humans.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, the thing is, there are a lot of humans who don't behave like humans on dates, so let's just set that record straight to be begin. But I think that what y'all are alluding to is something that I've also seen from, I think PricewaterhouseCoopers put out a thing about the value of AI to the marketplace. They were saying that by 2030 it could add $6 trillion in productivity value, and for B2C stuff it could add something like $9 trillion. But what they also said is that where the gains will come from, right now they're saying most of the gains are coming from productivity.

The stuff like Kevin was talking about with being able to write product descriptions more quickly, being able to write lots of posts more quickly and being able to finish your things more quickly, brainstorm, et cetera. In terms of the quality, the quality is still not there. It's getting there rapidly, but it's still not there. And we don't expect to see really, really, really good quality until later on, which I think comes back to the point that you were talking about, Eli, where people were like, "Yeah, we'll just bye everybody, replace it with a robot." The quality's not there, you still need people with brains to guide it. Productivity, yes, but also brains.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's always been the thing with it. It's super cool, but when you actually apply it, does it actually work the way that you want it to work? My question is on the quality front, can it do all the things qualitatively that we think it can do or eventually will do? And I'm a little bit skeptical of that. I think there's going to be certain things that just the human mind can do, things that are sort of, I use a fancy word, ineffable. You can't put your finger on it. It's way too ethereal, it's way too abstract. No AI is going to be able to do that, it's superhuman. I don't mean in a powerful way, it's like a superhuman way of looking at things. And AI is just AI, it's not going to be able to do that. Or-

Mordy Oberstein:

... is AI, it's not going to be able to do that. Or I guess, Kevin, do you think it will be able to? All the things, it will be just like a human, but not as horrible.

Crystal Carter:

I mean...

Kevin Indig:

Go ahead, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

I was going to say there are definitely some things that are easier to do with an AI than with a human, like to be-

Mordy Oberstein:

Sure, like watch my kids? All this kind of stuff.

Crystal Carter:

But if you have a dumb question, you're not embarrassed asking the AI your dumb question that you probably should know. Whereas if you go onto something else, or onto a chat room or something and ask your dumb question, people go, "Oh my God, how come you don't know that?" Blah, blah, blah. And then you're just mortified and things. Whereas if you ask your dumb question to ChatGPT, they'll just go, "There, there, here's the information," and help you with that sort of thing. And so I think that sometimes like Eli was saying that you can use ChatGPT for learning and stuff like that. There's definitely sometimes where maybe you want to sort of quietly have your thought before you go and interact with other humans. I think that happens too.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, for sure. But you're developing it on marketing strategy or whatever it is, and you're really trying to qualitatively understand, really feel out where the audience is. Kevin, will AI ever be able to do that?

Kevin Indig:

100%. I'm 100% certain. It depends on the data that the AI has access to. But one of the beauties of large language models is you can bombard them with data, you can ground them with data. And anybody can do that today with a very basic laptop. Probably soon with their phone. That is not difficult and rocket science. And the beauty is ChatGPT can guide you into how to do this, if you don't know how to. But you can ground models and data, and then explore the data in natural semantic ways, with the chatbot. And that is a very specific use case you can already do today. And it would argue you can do it much, much better than when humans do it.

When humans have to catalog the data, interpret the data, there's a lot of room for bias and a lot of room for misinterpretation. And the benefit of AI or AI that we're using for this use case, is that it's very objective. I would even argue that the degree of hallucination has come way, way down. It's actually not that bad anymore.

Eli Schwartz:

Definitely true.

Kevin Indig:

I'm sure people come up with the examples of like, "Oh yeah, AI doesn't recognize how many r’s are in strawberry."

Eli Schwartz:

The strawberry thing. Strawberry.

Kevin Indig:

Strawberry. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I was going to bring up.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to say something about the strawberry thing. I bet you 97% of human beings can't spell strawberry, right. I know I'm being a little bit high, but-

Kevin Indig:

I think that's a good point also to make, right? Like, what are the mistakes that humans make? I love that comparison, for example when ….

Mordy Oberstein:

How much time you have.

Kevin Indig:

Right, yeah, of course. But when it comes to self-driving cars, right? Sure, AI they have accidents, but compare that to the accidents that humans make, and all of a sudden it looks-

Crystal Carter:

Or on their phone while driving.

Kevin Indig:

Right, exactly. By the way, Ford is integrating ChatGPT in their models, starting next year. Anyway, I think I made the point.

Crystal Carter:

No, I think that's great. Those are great.

Eli Schwartz:

This is why Kevin and I had a podcast, because we think alike. I was just looking up Waymo. So Waymo has been around since 2005. Tesla has been selling, so-called fully self-driving for the last few years. But I don't think we'll ever be at a point that we're at fully self-driving or fully autonomous on many of these things. And driving is much easier than searching, because driving, many people are basically autonomously driving already. They're just kind of sitting there, just following the road, following the cars in front of them, hopefully not texting, hopefully not talking on the phone, hopefully not yelling at their kids or whatever it is that they're doing. But it's a very simple process, because we do it almost automatically. People do it half asleep, people do it drunk. Most of the time they're safe, but this is something that computers can do.

Eli Schwartz:

We're not recommending it, of course. Wix is not responsible.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Appreciate that. Don't drink and drive.

Eli Schwartz:

Definitely don't drink a drive.

Kevin Indig:

Diet or by a link.

Eli Schwartz:

Don't smoke and drive. Whatever it is that you shouldn't be doing. But these are things that computers can do with AI, because there's rules. But when it comes to searching, this is my thing when I think about digital marketing. I don't think we'll ever be in a world where AI can fully understand you. Which is why I don't think the assistants, the Google assistants and Alexas have totally taken off, is because they only give one response. They don't give the 10 responses you see on a desktop or a mobile. But because you need to choose. Sometimes you want to click position one, sometimes you need to click position 11. It depends on what your intent is.

And there's a reason that there are multiple pages of Google, and it's not just one page or it's not just two results. And I really don't think we'll ever be at a point where AI knows everything about you. And I would, again, exactly like Kevin brought up, self-driving cars, it can almost get there. It will probably eventually get there, but of all of the innovations we're still not fully there, it still makes mistakes. And that I think is so much easier than reading minds and getting search right.

Crystal Carter:

And speaking of-

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, that was your Don's question. Right?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

With Apple and Google actively integrating AI into their core operating system, do you feel that more people will switch to AI within their home page interface for search, over traditional search engines for simpler queries or image search? Like ask and answered almost.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think so. And I think we have to end on that bombshell because we don't have very much time and we need to get...

Mordy Oberstein:

No?

Crystal Carter:

... Barry in as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have the news. We have the news. Eli, Kevin, thank you so much.

Eli Schwartz:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Indig:

Thanks for having me.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so, so, so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye guys. All right, so if you listen to the show each week, first off, big thanks to Eli and Kevin Indig. I know his name.

Crystal Carter:

To everyone. Everyone's so great. We can talk to everyone for the full hour.

Mordy Oberstein:

True. So if you listen to the podcast each week, we know we cover the SEO news towards the end of the show, we're getting towards the end of the show. And of course, most of the articles are from Barry, written by Barry, may the Schwartz be with you. So we thought it'd be nice for this 100th episode to get the facts straight from the horse's mouth in a very special edition of The Snappy News. The sounded is amazing. And we're live.

Crystal Carter:

Live from Channel 5.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

The Snappy News. Snappy News.

Mordy Oberstein:

Snappy News. Welcome to the show. Barry Schwartz, sorry, I called you a horse. I meant you're a workhorse.

Barry Schwartz:

Oh, that's okay. I didn't even notice. People have called me a lot worse, especially in the past couple days.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh yeah, you've been taking a lot of heat. Wow.

Barry Schwartz:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Taking a lot of heat for Danny, really, if we’re gonna be honest.

Barry Schwartz:

That's been interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, we'll get into that. Actually, let's get into that. So the article of the day is from Search Engine Land, basically written by Barry that the August 2024 core update is over, done. It is complete. Was it 19 days? Google Said it would take a month. Nope. Less time than that. It's complete. Did I summarize the article well, Barry.

Barry Schwartz:

It's done. I don't know why I'm here. I should just leave.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

But as part of that... Are you saying... Wait? I might kick you out.

Barry Schwartz:

Bye.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye. As part of the update, folks have been coming online, going after Search Engine Land, which Danny Sullivan used to be a part of, and taking it out on Barry on Twitter. I don't know why.

Barry Schwartz:

All the internet problems are my fault. So, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. But the best part of it was you're showing them the SEM Rush data on search engine. And the numbers are going down year over year over year. So the theory doesn't hold water.

Barry Schwartz:

Right. Their theory is that, basically we don't get hit by Google updates, because of Danny somehow. And yet we've been hit... I mean, I know Round Table has been hit by pre Panda stuff, by Panda, by core updates. Search engine Land has its share of issues as well. So yeah, just like every other writer out there, every single publication out there, we all have had our issues with Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Well, with this particular case, the issue with Google, folks who were trying to figure out, was will they see a reversal of their fortunes from the 2023 helpful content update, the September, 2023 helpful content update? It's a mouthful, to be honest with you. And my question for you, since you're here, did that happen?

Barry Schwartz:

It depends.

Mordy Oberstein:

Was the August update a reversal? It depends?

Barry Schwartz:

It depends. Depends on the site. So I think the number, I don't have the exact data, obviously I don't think anybody does. But I've seen examples of some very few sites see complete reversals. I mean, I don't know on a URL by URL basis, but their traffic was here September, here in the middle between September and now, and then after the August updates, back up to the same level. I don't know if it's on a URL basis where they're still running the same keywords. But vast majority of sites saw nothing or they're off than they were. There are a number of sites that saw maybe a 20% bump, a 30% bump, maybe a 5% bump. But very few sites saw a complete reversal, if you want to even call it that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yikes, not good. Or maybe it is, I don't know, it depends on who you are. But the internet was abuzz. The SEOs were abuzz. It wasn't fair, the sites should be doing better, I guess they're not going to be happy.

Barry Schwartz:

Again, everybody thinks their sites are amazing. I know my site's horrible, so when I see Google updates, I expect it to go down. But most people think the content that they write and the websites they have are great and that they should do well. I remember I got hit by a Panda update once and John was like, "Well, maybe you don't know your site so well, maybe you should ask your readers what they think about your site." So I took a Google... Back then they had a Google Consumer surveys plugin. So I added it to the website, I'm like, after a couple months of collecting data, I'm like, "Here Google, here's the results." And the people who read my sites, who are mostly people who are hit by Google, like my site.

So it's kind of biased obviously, but at the same time I've been through a lot. You can see from the hair. I've been through a lot of Google updates over the years, and it's sometimes sad to see the stories, but at the same time, if you keep at it and you are true to the content in your audience, generally you'll do well in the long run. Not every site. There's plenty of sites that have been hit, went out of business, and they couldn't come back. That's business in general. And things change, like seasonalities, and times change. If you're writing about the railroad business a hundred years ago and you keep writing about it today, there's not many people investing a lot of money in railroads these days. So I don't know, it's hard to read those stories, but not everybody deserves to go back to where they were. And then at the same time, Google's not perfect either, which is why they keep on releasing new updates.

Crystal Carter:

So, you mentioned previous updates like Panda. How similar do you think this particular helpful content update from September, how similar do you think that is to some of those big updates?

Barry Schwartz:

This is a weird one. So there was some updates, like the big Florida update in 2003, that demolished sites. Then we had the first Panda update. And that really went after SEOs creating low quality content really fast. Similar to the helpful of content update. And that really, really demolished sites as well. It was big, it was probably one of the biggest updates. But then we had the Penguin update, which every SEO after that was like, "Let's just throw a lot of links at our problems." So they built links, and then Google came out with this Penguin algorithm that attacked links that were being bought. And then I think that put a lot of SEO companies out of business who were buying links solely as their business.

How similar was the September helpful content update? It's hard to say. I don't think it was probably as big as the Panda update, but with Panda updates, we have many Panda updates after that, it was easy to isolate. Healthful content update, it's hard for us to isolate what that is. Although when the Panda update first was released also, it was really hard for SEOs to understand what it was about either. But eventually we'll learn, we'll write content that Google likes, and then Google is like, "Don't write content we like, write content that our audience likes," and then we'll go through this next phase. There'll be another update in a year or two from now that will demolish whatever we figure out that works. So it's just this cat mouse game.

Mordy Oberstein:

It sounds so doom and gloom.

Barry Schwartz:

It's the world we live in. Doom and gloom.

Mordy Oberstein:

Mr. Sunshine himself. Barry, thank you so much for coming on. And don't forget to check out seoroundtable.com, it's the first site I go to every morning other than Gmail, but that's not a real website. And it's new, our daily news series, Monday through Thursday.

Barry Schwartz:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Friday, Barry flies solo. It's new, it's fun, yada yada yada. Talk to you later Barry.

Barry Schwartz:

Bye-bye.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and that's it. That was a lot.

Crystal Carter:

That's it? That's a lot?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not used to all the button pushing, that I have to do on a live podcast. A lot of button pushing.

Crystal Carter:

I didn't realize I needed to have you on a clock, Mordy. You were like, "And another thing," I was like, "Mordy, we got-"

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no. I have it on the clock to go an extra 10 minutes. I built an extra time because it's live and there was stuff going on.

Crystal Carter:

All of this talking chitty, chitty, chat, chat.

Mordy Oberstein:

Really?

Crystal Carter:

Honestly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that what you think in general when I talk, talk to much?

Crystal Carter:

No. No. We have to let people get back to their day.

Mordy Oberstein:

We have to keep talking long enough for Barry's stream to upload.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

So there, there's a real reason why I have to talk now.

Crystal Carter:

Well, it's so nice to have so many friendly faces join us today. It's so nice to have so many friendly faces join us in the chat as well. Not faces I guess, but chat folks. So shout out to Jack Chambers Ward, and Yordan Dimitrov, and Gagan Gotra, and the incredible Simon Cox.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, James Thompson.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Tom joined...

Mordy Oberstein:

Wendy Morrow.

Crystal Carter:

... in the session. So shout out to everybody who joined us today, and everyone who tunes into our podcast every week. We will be back to our regularly scheduled podcasting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Next week we're back.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Episode 101. I'll do a-

Crystal Carter:

101.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. We're back next week with, are going to SEO and digital marketing conferences a waste of time? Are they worth it? With special guests, SparkToro's, Amanda Tibidon, and BrightonSEO's Kelvin Newman, which makes logical sense why they would be talking about conferences. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub, or go to wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to know more about SEO, check out all the great content webinars we have, over on the Wix Studio Learning Hub, SEO Learning Hub, at, you guessed it, that's flood number four, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify, please, please. And thanks so much for joining us live, and again, tune in next week. And until next time, peace, love, and SEO. Bye, y'all.