How to set SEO priorities

Mordy Oberstein:

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

Aloha! Maholo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who knows how to set priorities right, our Head of SEO Communications, the one of the only, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, Mordy Oberstein, the fantastic, incredible, amazing, stupendous, magnificent Mordy Oberstein.

Mordy Oberstein:

Your nose is growing.

Crystal Carter:

What? Mordy, who cannot-

Mordy Oberstein:

If you know, you know.

Crystal Carter:

... take a compliment, but is-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I don't do compliments well. I have a hard time.

Crystal Carter:

It's always fun to give Mordy Oberstein a compliment because you can just see him squirming so much.

Mordy Oberstein:

People are saying nice things about me?

Crystal Carter:

"Why are they saying them? I must say something. It's ridiculous to deflect from the appreciation that sat befalling me." I would like to encourage everyone who's listening to this podcast to send Mordy Oberstein a compliment on Twitter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah and CC Barry Schwartz while you're at it. Get two birds with one stone.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you. That's right.

Well, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also prioritize your SEO tasks on your blog pages and for your site overall with our SEO Assistant, which literally tells you which tasks are critical, which are high priority, which are medium, and which are low-priority SEO tasks because knowing what to work on and when, it's not always easy. Which is why today, we're helping you understand how to prioritize your SEO tasks.

Look how seamless the line about what Wix does and what we're doing today meshed together perfectly.

Crystal Carter:

It was flawless.

Mordy Oberstein:

I take compliments on that. I take compliments on my pivots.

Crystal Carter:

It was very good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you. Thank you That's right. Today, we're dealing with the reality that you got to start somewhere. You can't do it all at once. It's not Star Trek. You're not Scotty. You're beyond being a miracle worker. It's not realistic. We're diving into how to set SEO priorities. Are certain SEO tasks actually more important than others? How does limited time and resources factor into SEO prioritization? And how do you know if you are or aren't prioritizing the right SEO task?

Also, how does prioritization differ from an SEO agency to an SEO consultancy to an SEO freelancer? We get both sides of the coin as the CEO of Uproer, Griffin Roer, an advocate of all that is SEO freelancing, Nick LeRoy, take SEO prioritization from different corners of the SEO world. Plus, we'll have a look at what different search engines tend to prioritize in their results. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

It's all hands on deck for this code red alert or perhaps merely a yellow alert. Time will tell as episode number 56 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you set your alerts and your SEO priorities straight.

Crystal Carter:

There we go. We're just going to get into something and I'm going to start with something a little bit philosophical, a little bit intellectual because we like to go highbrow here on the SERP's Up.

Mordy Oberstein:

I can't do that. Get it?

Crystal Carter:

Maybe you could put it on a Play-Doh. I don't know. That's terrible. Anyway, so I'm going to start with something called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar with this, this is something... Yeah, Mordy's very excited about this.

This is something that it's essentially a framework on a theory of human motivation. It's created by a guy called Maslow and it talks about psychological stuff and things like that. I would pause it that this also applies to websites and priorities as well. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a simplified version of it, you'll generally see a pyramid and at the base of the pyramid will be physiological needs. Things like whether or not you have air and whether or not you have a good safe environment, food, shelter, et cetera. Then there'll be safety needs like personal security, employment resources, et cetera. Then there'll be things like love and belonging, whether or not you have friendship and family and a sense of connection.

Then there'll be things like esteem, whether or not you feel respected and have strength and freedom. Then there's self actualization, so the desire to become more than you currently are or become the most that you can be. This is the sort of general simplified idea of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar with this, I highly recommend checking out because it's something that's really, really interesting for general personal development.

You didn't realize that you were listening to a general growth hacking podcast, but here we are. Anyway, now when we talk about websites, I would posit that this also applies. When we're thinking about the physiological needs, this is essentially your baseline. This is stuff like your technical SEO and whether or not things actually work on the page. This might be as technical as whether or not you have site maps and whether or not things are working in terms of your robots at TXT and things like that. If you don't have this stuff working, if your pages are all blocked from crawling for instance, no amount of fantastic SEO content things is going to do anything if all the pages are blocked from crawling.

If you're thinking about priorities, always check out making sure that you have the sort of technical nuts and bolts things covered. One of the things we really pride ourselves on Wix is making sure that a lot of that stuff is covered for anybody who creates a Wix website straight off the bat. You also want to think about the sort of things are covered from a business point of view view, so does the website actually do what you need it to do in the first place? For instance.

If you have a bricks and mortar business, does it actually tell people how to get to your business? Does it tell people how to phone you? Does it tell people how to connect with you and things like that? Can people actually complete the sale on your e-commerce website? Is that possible? Are they able to do that? That's something to think about that. From a project point of view, this also means thinking about are you able to complete the task in a set amount of time? Do you know how much time you have and are you able to actually complete that task in that amount of time?

Because you could have a fantastic audit and do amazing stuff, but if you don't know how much time or what resources you have, then those fundamental physiological sort of actual nuts and bolts things, if you haven't taken care of those, it's very difficult to do anything else. That should be a top priority, is making sure that those things are understood and are working well.

Mordy, you're nodding. I don't know if you want to come in on this one before we get into the next one.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, no. You're on a roll.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, all right.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're on a roll. I'm good. Thank you for checking in on me. I'm just sitting back and enjoying.

Crystal Carter:

Checking to make sure that your needs are met. Okay, so then we go into safety needs. Now in terms of safety needs for a website, first of all, there's things like SSL. That's a standard security thing, but there's also making sure that you have things like EEAT. Within EEAT, which stands for expertise, experience-

Mordy Oberstein:

Experience, yeah, they added the extra E.

Crystal Carter:

... authority and trust from Google. They also talk about things, making sure that you're trustworthy. A lot of these things have to do with your trust score. Your website should also have safety needs that have to do with your trustability and how trustworthy you are. Where you have your SSL on your website, that that works, where you have return policies that helps users to know that it's easier for them to enter their credit card details and that it's a secure website for them to enter their credit card details, that they know that you know what you're doing, that you have certificates and that they know that you are an actual place. You have very clear name, address, phone number on your website. I always get a little bit sketched out if I'm on a website and they're trying to sell me something or trying to tell me something and I'm like, "Where are you? Who are you? Who are these people?"

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why I always have a sticky point with PPC people on the landing page idea of don't have any menu up there, just leave on the landing page to confirm. I want the context.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I want to know who you are. Who am I even talking to? So making sure You've got those sorts of trust things is also really useful. I've seen this from an SEO point of view and they tend to be pretty quick to implement. Both are pretty straightforward to implement, shall I say. The technical things, it's either broken or it's fixed. It's fairly straightforward to get those things going. The trust elements, particularly on e-commerce, Google will guide you on a lot of those things. If you're signing up to Google Merchant Center, they'll be like, "Well you don't have a return policy. You haven't done this part. We need to know what currency you're selling in. We need to know all of these sorts of stuff." Google will guide you with a lot of those things.

So think about that. And also, I always say with PPC, particularly with sensitive verticals, YMYL verticals, they will also guide you on that. If you're trying to do any PPC, look at what they expect for PPC for your vertical. If you're into medical, for instance they'll say "If you want to advertise for medical, you need to have this and this." Even if you're not advertising, you can look at the PPC requirements for that vertical to see what kinds of trust signals they need for that and it's really useful. Then from the love and belonging sort of place, this has to do with brand positioning. Is it clear that you know what's good about you? What are your USPs? What is unique about you? What is valuable about your brand, your product, your team, your service? Making sure that that's very clear. And also, are you able to show that other people think that as well?

Are you able to show your reviews that other people also think you're great? Are you involved in different communities and things like that? When we think about an EEAT points of view, this kind of speaks to sort of authority points. We're part of the Better Business Bureau, we are part of this association of marketers or things like that, and all our reviews are five star reviews. That shows that people appreciate us and we say, "Oh this is the thing that's great about our products." So those things, you need to know what those are and you need to convey those things on your website. Then when we get to esteem, this is where your blog can help you shine and your content can really help you shine.

Once you've got your technical things sorted out, once you've got all the safety stuff sorted, the trust signals, then you can get into being like, "Yeah, you know what, not only does everybody think I'm great, but I can share that knowledge with you." So I'm confident in my knowledge. I'm confident to be able to share this in a video, to share it in a blog, to share it in an infographic and to share it on social media, things like that. That can bring people to you. By the time they come to you, they already know that it's a safe place, that you know what your brand USPs are, that everything works technically.

Then after that, we think of a sort of self-actualization. So all of those things I think are sort of need to have things, and then you have your nice to have stuff. It's like right, okay, we've got a good blog, we've got a good working website, all the trust signals are there and then you can be like how can we stretch? How can we do some really cool stuff now? You can look around and you go, "Well these guys are doing some other stuff and we are not doing that. Could we do that? I think we could because we have all of these skills and all these great things that we can do." You can look at bigger competitors that maybe aren't even in your vertical but are doing something online that's really cool.

You could say "We could do that. I think we could start a channel. I think we could create some more stuff." I think that it might sound a little bit philosophical, but actually a good content audit, a good SEO audit for instance, will break things down in this way. You'll say, "What priority is this? High, low, medium. What is the estimated impact? High, low, medium." For instance, on a technical thing like priority, it might be like "Well this is high priority." Your page isn't getting crawled and then you can bring it down in the time estimation. You can say, "If you know what you're doing, this is going to take you 20 minutes to fix." So it's going to have a high impact and it's high priority, so you should probably do that and it can really, really help you to figure things out.

I think that thinking about it in the same way that you would think about how you would go forth in improving yourself, improving your life et cetera is really, really good when you're thinking about how to prioritize for your website.

Mordy Oberstein:

If we can get some music or a sound please, like clapping in applause. I think that's an appropriate time right now. I'll give you a little behind the scenes of this podcast. Sometimes we really sync up exactly where we're going to go, exactly what we're going to do. We kind of really plan it out. Sometimes "I got this, I'll take care of it. You got this, you got that." Crystal got this, and I had no idea what I was really in for today. I will tell you right now, first off, I'm volunteering you for a blog post on the Wix SEO Hub about the maturation process of a website because I feel like this conversation, I've had this conversation before about setting SEO priorities, and what you usually end up talking about is, "Okay, so if your page is not being discovered, if you can't get an index because you edited a no index tag," or whatever-whatever, then that's a foundational priority because that means that all the other things that you eventually want to do, you can't do now. That's a priority. But what you've done here is basically laid out how a website matures over time. How it should mature over time, and how priority really means doing the things that matter for the website at the current state of maturation that you're at right now.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's amazing, and that's where the clapping comes in, and that's where I figured you should write this up, because that was amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for the appreciate. I'm feeling some love and belonging right now. I'm feeling like that's really good, and It's really helping my self-esteem and maybe I will actualize that block. I think It's something that I think about as well. It's just sometimes people over-complicate these things, so sometimes they're like, "Oh, all this technical stuff," and I think a lot of people get lost in the jargon of it, but optimization is about making it better. You can't start from where you're not. You have to start from where you are. If you get better that's, great and then you can get better than that, and then you can get better than that, and then you can get better than that. You need to know where you're starting.

I think some people get tripped up on some of the technical stuff for instance, and so they just ignore it. But a lot of times you can't. But the good thing about the technical stuff is it's fairly mathematical. Like I said, it's either broken or it's fixed. You can sort of go in and you can fix it, or if you don't know you can ask for help or you can just follow some... I'm sure there'll be somebody who's done a YouTube video or something that's gone into very extensive detail of how to do it and people will very much help you. But yeah, I think don't skip the steps and don't think that you can skip the steps because you do need to cover the steps or find tools that can help you do that so that you can get better and build on all of your work.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is how it goes with creating, we'll call it content in general, because your website is a piece of content and that content has technical underpinnings you need to address. It has design underpinnings that you need to address, all these kinds of things. I'll tell you, so LinkedIn carousels, I was avoiding them for a long, long time. It seemed like a lot of work. I didn't really have a lot of time. And now I'm starting to do them once in a while and I've noticed, okay I did X, this is not great. I'm looking at what somebody else did now. I'm like "Oh, that's really good." Really, it's a slow process of maturing.

Your website is the same thing. You start with something, you have your pages, you have whatever it is, and you're thinking, you know what something doesn't feel right about this. I could probably take this to another level. Let's try this, let's try that and let's try this. Adding all of these things in let's say EEAT, adding a layer of real expertise and authority into the content on your website, that might not happen at the onset. You might write 10 blog posts because you got to get that content out there. You got to start from somewhere and you know what, that's fine and it won't rank. And you know what? That's also fine, because there's no cutoff date on ranking. "Oh, if I don't rank today that I can't rank tomorrow."

Crystal Carter:

One of the things that's great about SEO and it's the same thing with life is that you can try again. You can try again and you can keep practicing and you can keep improving. You post it now, you post that piece of content and like you said, maybe it doesn't rank, but maybe six months from now you'll have more data about how it's being seen online, maybe you'll have more feedback from people about what they think about it. You'll be able to see where It's sitting in the SERP and things like that. Then you can say, "Okay, now we can take that information and we can make this content better." Or we can take that information and go, "You know what we didn't need that content in the first place." But you have to start, but you need to take the feedback in order to improve. I think that when you're prioritizing, you should prioritize the thing that will get you to the next step.

Mordy Oberstein:

To the next step. That's exactly it. It is what gets you to the next step. I think that's a mistake people realize. You'll see people will talk about "I'm going to optimize," again, I'll go back to EEAT, "I'm going to optimize for EEAT," even somewhere like Lily Ray who's been doing this for years. You're looking at a cluster of content. You know what this needs to do to go from zero 100. You know the whole process. You've done it a million times before. You're an expert on that. You've got that.

If you are an SEO that doesn't say focus on that, or you're a business owner or whoever you are, looking at it, "I'm going to optimize now for EEAT," it's like a one shot deal. It's not going to work. It's, "Okay, I've done this, the pose," I think we should talk about this podcast before "... and I've added X." Come back in three months from now, "You know what, X really wasn't enough. Now let's add Y." It's an ongoing process. SEO is an ongoing process. Looking at what will get me to the next step helps you do SEO the right way because it helps you say, "I'm going to do what I need to do to get to the next step, but I know that's not the last step."

Crystal Carter:

Right, because It's all rinse and repeat. I think that again, Maslow is good because if we think about the base of the pyramid, the sort of physiological technical leads in the case of a website, those things can change. As you grow, for instance, if you're a nine year old, you're a certain height, so you might need a step stool to reach the top of the cupboard or whatever. As you get older, you're going to get taller. You don't need the step stool, but you might need-

Mordy Oberstein:

You might need to climb. Just climb. You could be slither up a wall.

Crystal Carter:

These things will change. Similarly, I've started to wear glasses or whatever and I need those things. These are different things. Just like with your website. Your website doesn't exist in a vacuum, so there might be new SERP features that happen and then suddenly you have different technical needs for your website. It might be that suddenly your audience is way more mobile first and then you have different technical needs. Maybe there's an app that everybody's really, really into or maybe you've developed an app. That means that your website now has different technical needs and then that has knock on effect.

So then you have to go back through all of the steps to make sure that they all align with each other. All of these things change. They're not set it and forget. It's like a person. Your website is grows, evolves and exists in an environment that is growing and evolving all of the time. Your priorities may very well change. It doesn't mean that you can't still have a North Star, say that if we talk about the self-actualization part where you really want to be, that can guide you, but how you get there might change a little bit. That's okay. That's okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's okay that it's not linear, either. You might say, "You know what, I really need a quick win right now. I am struggling. I need a quick win. This might not get me to the next level. It might not be part of my maturation process. But I know it's a quick way." That's fine too.

Crystal Carter:

I had a client and they had a website, and they did not have time for content. They did not. They were just like, "We don't have time for content. We don't have loads." They had been doing some Facebook stuff, so I was like, "Look, we have some stuff on Facebook. Let's take these Facebook posts, let's adapt them into blogs." Were they the best quality? I'm going, to be honest, they were not the best quality blogs, but this was a website that had no blog and had not posted any blogs ever or hadn't posted any blogs in sort of a year. We took these sorts of mid-level posts that had some information and we added them to the blog. Why? Because we wanted to be able to show the client that with this level of effort we can get this much.

And then you can get a proof of concept and they can say, "Oh okay, so that blog that we all know was kind of okay, whatever got this much. What happens if we actually did a good blog on top of that?" Our goal was to get going. I just needed to get some content on there to get going. The goal was to get going. The goal wasn't to set the world on fire and make amazing, amazing, beautiful... The goal was to just get going. We got going and then they were like, "Okay, yeah, I can see the benefit of this," and helped with their self-esteem, their esteem. That meant that we could get investment and buy-in on doing something really good.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, 100%. It's a little bit messy. It's not like a linear kind of thing. It's a little bit messy. There's also resources to consider. Whether you have the resource, whether you don't have the resources, that's going to factor in. You might have a great projection plan maturation process for your website, but it'd be realistic with what you can and what you can't do. You might have to give up on certain things and that's normal.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's normal. It's normal. I'll tell you right now, there's going to be certain benefits to doing things at whatever stage you're at. The important thing is to be aware of the impact and the important thing is to understand what you expect to come out of it so that it can help you to reach next goal and set your priorities based on that. If you're seeing that actually we did some blog and we saw no benefit of any kind and you go, "Okay, maybe this isn't what we need to do right now. Maybe we should invest in something else." If you see the blog and you see some benefit, for instance you're seeing that actually we're being crawled better. Actually, we have more internal links now. Actually, we're seeing some ranking that's happening out of this. Then yeah, that's good. That's a good sign and maybe they should be moved up the priority list for your overall activity. I think It's just important to think about what works for you and in terms of priorities, what will get you to the next step.

Joe Hall, I talk about Joe Hall a lot, but he was talking a lot about MozCon last year about priorities and how he'd done this big audit for some folks. He was like, "Oh, we should do this, this and this." And he thought again about it, he was like "Actually, looking at what they need to do, I'm not sure this is the best course of action for them based on what would work best for them and what would..." Because I think sometimes people will do their go-to moves. You'll be like, "Oh, I always do this for everyone. This always works." And sometimes it does, but sometimes it's not always the best fit for them because of all of their other needs and all of their other priorities.

So make sure that it aligns with the full flow of who the website is or what the website is at that time and what will get them to where they need to go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of resources and how you work, and how you prioritize, where you work or who you work for can also impact how you prioritize SEO tasks. Specifically, if you're on the agency side and you're part of a large organizational, wider SEO team or digital marketing team, then you might prioritize SEO tasks in a certain way. If you're a consultant or a freelancer, well you might look at the same client and prioritize differently because based upon how you work. Because of that, we asked the CEO of Uproer, an SEO agency out of Minnesota, Griffin Roer, and Nick LeRoy, famed SEO consultant and a former member of the Wix SEO Advisory Board, how prioritizing your work as an SEO agency differs for prioritizing your work as a freelancer. So same task, same things, but from a different point of view. Here's Griffin and here's Nick together.

Nick LeRoy:

I know my skill sets. I know what I consider myself good at. I know where I struggle. And it's kind of more of a litmus test of check, check, check. But I also have that layer of does this make me excited? Do I enjoy it? That will go into again, how I set priorities in accepting a client or working, or even trying to pitch something. I know Griffin, you and I are the same. We're not really big into RFPs or having to truly sell ourselves. We would prefer to take a solid referral with kind of a baseline of trust. I think that kind of goes into my priorities as well. It's like if I have to put a lot of effort into trying to secure somewhere versus already being able to establish some trust on day one, that goes a long way on my end.

Griffin Roer:

There's definitely a difference there because you can look at a project and be like, "Do I have the time and interest to do this?" You can look at a project that is not super exciting and not super maybe challenging or whatever and just be like, "Well, I got some time and I can bang this one out. I'm not going to necessarily love this project, but it's going to help pay the bills." I can make that decision on behalf of myself. Whereas-

Nick LeRoy:

And price it at a level that will make it exciting.

Griffin Roer:

Yeah, exactly. I think one consideration on the agency side is I've got to be considerate of peoples' career development, and that might mean projects that I myself might be willing to take on and do and just gut out and be like, "All right, this is just going to help the bottom line." Or just as a freelancer maybe you're like, "Hey, if I do this project, I can get a new set of wheels for my car or something like that," you're kind of equating it to some reward. For me, if I'm going to put a project on somebody's plate, ideally It's going to align with their career progression and it's going to represent the next challenge, the thing they want to take on.

If it's something that's going to be more like a step backwards, that makes it harder for us to accept that project. Even if it'd be a nice payday or even if it'd be just something to pad the business a little bit, I think there are some considerations there around career development because I think if an agency were to just take on kind of just un-challenging uninteresting projects all the time that just brought in cash, but didn't really push people, I don't think that agency is going to be really successful in retaining people.

Nick LeRoy:

Absolutely. Well Griffin, let me ask you a question here. I think building off of what we were just saying as a freelancer, I have the luxury of knowing this is short term. This is kind of a quick win. I schedule that work intentionally for that. It's like "Yeah, I want a new set of wheels. I want to take the kids on a vacation." But I'm being very intentional knowing that it's kind of like a one day payday. I suspect on the agency front you also have to be really cognizant of what type of short-term work you're taking on so that you don't necessarily lose out or have to turn down something that comes in that could be a multi-year or multi-channel engagement, which would obviously be your preferred client.

Griffin Roer:

Yeah, and obviously probably like you too, we're going to prioritize recurring business over project business any day of the week. There are those project opportunities that kind of come in and you do have to look at that against the overall pipeline and bandwidth of everybody that works at the agency to understand does this make sense? For myself being a leader at a small agency, I think it can be really tempting too for just myself to take on maybe the less than ideal projects, again just to help bring in some additional revenue and pad things and stuff like that. That can be counterproductive in and of itself because I'm expected to do a lot more than just assisting with client work and stuff like that. We've got sales and operations and hiring and just other things happening where my time is more valuable applied to those things versus-

Nick LeRoy:

Without a doubt.

Griffin Roer:

... spending a couple of days working on a project that I was like, "Well this won't be really interesting for anything else, but It'll help the business from a revenue standpoint." I think That's a challenge probably that smaller agencies face moreso than bigger agencies, but it is a reality of trying to balance those competing interests and making sure that what I'm doing is not just in the best interest of myself but in the best interest of the agency at large, which represents 13 people at this point.

Nick LeRoy:

Absolutely, and I think you nailed on one of the most critical components when we're comparing small agency to freelancer. As a freelancer, I get to be very selfish. Everything is about me. I get to make the choices. All my choices impact me only. There's less risk in that aspect. Whereas when, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but as you had said 13 individuals that need to serve 13 meals every night, so you have to be very conscious of the type of work that you're taking, how do you prioritize it and even who works on what?

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, thank you so much Nick and Griffin. Ironically, I approached them separately and I knew they both knew each other to answer this question like, "Hey, we'll just do a Zoom call together and we'll answer it together." It's an amazing conversation. There's actually a whole 30 minute piece that they did for them. We have to somehow repurpose it for something because it's amazing conversation that only we have listened to. We feel we need to share that somehow. But also, make sure you follow Griffin Roer. He's more on LinkedIn at @CGriffinRoerJr, a link to his LinkedIn account in the show notes. And follow Nick on Twitter @NickLeRoy, that's @ N-I-C-K-L-E-R-O-Y on Twitter.

It is interesting, right? You think, okay, SEO is SEO, but You're going to be able to do different things, focus on different things, work in different ways, prioritize different things, all because of the way you work within your organization, at least on the SEO agency side, or the fact that you don't have an organization because you're a freelancer. It's fascinating to me.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think that there is a lot of prioritization that has to do with the sort of ins and outs of an agency and working as a team because very often in an agency you are going to work in lots of different ways. So yeah, it's really interesting to hear the way that they discuss that and how you have to manage all of the bits and wheels and nuts and bolts of all of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a lot that goes into. It's the business side of it all, the billing and the client prioritization and all of that stuff is so different from just being let's say a consultant. Anyway, while we're talking about different situations and different circumstances that help dictate different SEO priorities, there are different things that different search engines prioritize within their results. With that, let's explore what the search engines of the world tend to prioritize differently as we go so many search engines.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's take a look at Bing and Google, and let's take a look at how they handle different types of queries differently. Let's take entities to start. I always like looking at entities. I think they're a great way to dive into the mind of a search engine. I Googled, or one case Binged, a search bar is the word I'm looking for. I searched for John Lennon. I typed in John Lennon into Bing and I typed John Lennon into Google, and it's very different. Very, very different. For example, Bing tends for entities, like these kinds of entities and people, tries to push or tends to push the biographical information way harder than Google does.

Google will show you, for example, when he was born, it'll give you some YouTube videos, a bunch of images, where you can listen to his music is above the fold. So Spotify and YouTube and Pandora. But Bing is pushing more the early years. It really gives you a great biographical breakdown of the different points of his life. It really tends to focus more on John Lennon as a person versus where Google is looking at it as here's an access or entry points to more various media about John Lennon. I thought that was interesting.

Crystal Carter:

I think that Google has been doing a lot particularly around the biographical entities here. It's been a very busy space in the last sort of year or so where they started adding-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, they reformatted the whole knowledge panel thing.

Crystal Carter:

Right. They've added more of... It's more magazine sort of style. There's still the knowledge panel information, but for some people like Beyonce for instance, there's a lot more information around. They even have some quick answers. How old is this person? Or how tall is this person? Or things like that included in some of their search for this. I don't think that Bing has quite gone down that route for the biographical entity.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, not yet at least, or maybe they never will.

Crystal Carter:

Right. They have for a few other ones. There's a few sort of destination places where they'll pull things out. For instance, they used to have a SERP for a lion. If you look up what is a lion, you get a very interactive channel. It's got-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's very cool.

Crystal Carter:

... pictures from Wikipedia and a map and links within the knowledge panel within the knowledge panel content as well. I think that the overall goal for these things seems to be around just making sure that there's lots of content there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. It's very layered. I've seen this across all the entities. I looked at Aaron Judge, who's a baseball player. By the way, both Bing and Google, when you search for somebody who's in the news, will prioritize news content right away. Search for Aaron Judge. He's a baseball player. It's during baseball season. There's always news about him, and both Google and Bing prioritized news results right at the top. But again, Google kind of gives, like you're saying, kind of like a T-L-D-R. You want to get a real quick overview of who Aaron Judge is? Here. And go explore more. Here's access points to more.

Whereas Bing again gives you a timeline of Aaron Judge. He was a rookie here in 2016. He did that in 2021. He did that. It's really trying to give you that layered approach of we want you to walk away really understanding who this person is. Which is ironic in my mind because a lot of SEOs give Google flack about, "Oh, you're taking away clicks to all its information," but Bing really gives you all of that information there. Whereas with Google, I really do have to click somewhere to explore more.

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think that Bing will very often add the information from other folks and they will reference it all together at the bottom. They'll reference all of it together. If you look up for instance, the Eiffel Tower, it has lots of facts about the Eiffel Tower and lots of information there. And It's clickable. It comes from somewhere, but it doesn't say it right next to it where it’s from. There's a bit of a balance of giving people lots of information but also making it more streamlined. I think that the entities around sort of multilayered entities are very interesting.

So, something like the Eiffel Tower where you can buy tickets to the Eiffel Tower, where there's a Wikipedia page of the Eiffel Tower, and then there's also lots of historical things about the Eiffel Tower. There's a map and things like that. The entity management of that, then managing the knowledge panel I think for that is really interesting because there's so much in the knowledge panel for that. There's so much in the knowledge graph around something like the Eiffel Tower or even someone like Beyonce for instance. It's such a top level query to just enter something like Beyonce or Eiffel Tower or Aaron Judd that we need to have more there. So, it's kind of filtering as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and it's interesting because they don't always stick to that same paradigm. For example, if you were to search something about like, what did I search for? It's something to do with tires, like how to change a tire on the side of the road. Google just gives you the steps. Here's how you change a tire on the side of the road. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, right? And Bing gives you more context about tires, while it does give you those steps. Bing likes to give you that context. If I search for something like a song, best songs of the 1990s, Bing just gives me the bunch of videos.

But Google has a whole carousel of little thumbnails of all the songs from the nineties, like Say My name or Torn. And if you click on the thumbnail, you get a carousel of results that give you more context about that song. They don't always follow the same paradigm. It's interesting to see just from a marketing perspective how Google and Bing both think about their audiences. In some cases Google thinks you know what you do want context and some cases they don't and sometimes those are the opposite cases of where Bing says you want context and Google says, no, you don't.

Crystal Carter:

I think It's also interesting that they're happy to get some of that context from people that are searching. We think about entities as being very much things and stuff like the Eiffel Tower, or Natalie Umbruglia song, or whatever it may be. But they also cover abstract things. If you look up something like courage, for instance, courage on Bing, there's a poll. There's a pole underneath that to get more context specifically from people. For instance, they're saying, "Which of the following do you think is the most important trait of a courageous person? A, fearlessness B, perseverance, C, self-discipline or decomp compassion." Very interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

What about E?

Crystal Carter:

What is E? What is E?

Mordy Oberstein:

I haven't thought about it yet. I have no pithy line.

Crystal Carter:

E is questioning the questions.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. What about skepticism?

Crystal Carter:

Right. What about that?

Mordy Oberstein:

What about that?

Crystal Carter:

It's interesting. For instance, you see the same thing with films and stuff. It'll be like, you've just looked up the Barbie movie, what was your review of the Barbie movie. Barbie movie is also an interesting one because of branded entities, there's a potential option to sort of monetize that space or to change around that space. For instance, the Barbie movie, they changed the SERP, similarly with Wordle. So Wordle has a SERP that is dedicated to specifically to it. I don't know if the Barbie movie thing was paid for thing or if Google's just really into the Barbie movie. It's very interesting, that-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's interesting. They do that for the World Cup. They do that for the Olympics. They've done things like that for the Super Bowl. The day after the Super Bowl, you search who won the Super Bowl, the fireworks go off. Yeah, Google likes doing that stuff. I think that's Google's branding, "Hey, come here, we're fun."

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. Exactly. So they know where those queries are going to be and they know where they can leverage that entity and leverage that sort of brand experience with that entity when It's related to a specific brand.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now another entity that We're quite fond of over here on the SERP's Up podcast is the entity of SEO News. I love news. I love SEO News. Here's this week's Snappy News.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Do you like shopping? Do you like Google? Do you like data? Do you like Barry Schwartz? Don't answer the last one. Then you'll like this per Barry Schwartz over at SE Round Table, new Google Search Console shows Merchant Center visibility issues and changes. It's new. Google is now showing way more Merchant Center data and it is awesome and it is right inside of Google Search Console. Essentially, there are reports to help you see products that may have become ineligible for appearing in Google shopping. There's also a second part of the report that helps you get your listings more clicks and improve rankings so Google will actually tell you, "Hey, you should add return costs to the listing because that will get you more clicks."

This is super important to Google and a super good move for them. Google needs to compete, wants to compete with Amazon. Obviously Amazon is the go-to place for e-commerce, shopping and listings and all that stuff. But by Google providing you with data such as this, it improves the chances that you'll be successful with Google shopping. The more success you have with Google shopping, the more Google can facilitate that success with Google shopping, the more you and people listing products on the internet will be invested in using Google Shopping and the more they can compete with Amazon. Very smart on Google's part. Have a look at the article in the show notes and you'll see a link in the article about how to activate the data.

Also from Barry Schwartz, with a little help from a guy named Mordy, this time from Search Engine Land. How the August 2023 Google core update compared to March '23 core updates. The August 2023 core update finished after 16 days, which is a little bit longer than usual, on September 7th. And Barry, with the help of various tool providers dived into the impact of the update on rankings. I had the privilege of working with the Semrush data set to have a look at what the update provided in terms of rankings and it was unique.

Usually, there's, a very, very demarcated spike increase in rank fluctuations meaning URLs moving up and down, changing positions all around the Google results pages. This time there wasn't that kind of spike. There was a prolonged period of really high and stably high, consistent that's the word I'm looking for, consistent rank fluctuations for a very long time. The initial spike actually occurred days before the update was officially announced. What to make of that is a great question for another time, but it was a definitely unique sort of rollout. Was the August 2023 core update more powerful and the March 2023 core update? Depends on how you slice it. Looking at peak rank volatility signals, it looks like the August 2023 update was more powerful.

But you can't really look at that because rank volatility was already high coming into the update. If you look at what rank or how much rank volatility increased before the update versus during the update, it looks like the March update was perhaps more impactful. If you look at the average change in position, meaning how dramatic were the ranking changes, then the data shows that the August 2023 update was a little bit more impactful than the March 2023 core update. The point is slicing and dicing a core update and determining which one is more powerful is really complex.

I have a whole post coming out on the SEMRush blog, so take a look for that when it comes out. I walk you through why analyzing these things are more complicated than it actually is using the August 2023 core update as an example. And that is this week's Snappy News.

Always hard to prioritize which stories to cover in the SEO news each week on this podcast because It's snappy, so I can't cover them all.

Crystal Carter:

You have to prioritize which ones meet your needs.

Mordy Oberstein:

I try to prioritize which would meet our audience needs.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, see that's because you're so nice, Mordy. You're so nice and everyone appreciates you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you. Thank you. The face I'm making now does not say thank you, but I'm saying thank you. You know who I do want to thank though, our Follower of the Week. She's a great friend and a great person, and I feel that we should shout her out loud and clear for everyone to follow over on social media. It is Shelley Walsh. She's the SEO Content Strategist over at Search Engine Journal, and you should follow her on Twitter. She's also on threads, I believe, @TheShelleyWalsh, that's T-H-E-S-H-E-L-L-E-Y-W-A-L-S-H. Link to her profile on the show notes. She's a fantastic person, does a ton for the industry and she has a lot of SEO knowledge.

She's an SEO OG. She actually has a series called SEO Pioneers, where you can watch the OGs of SEO talk about how SEO has changed over the last 100 years kind of thing. It does help you kind of prioritize based on what they're saying, what does work, what doesn't work, because what used to work doesn't work anymore kind of thing. I’ve heard that many, many times on this podcast. Shelley Walsh for SEO prioritization and it's a priority for you to follow her on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

I cannot recommend it enough. She's a great follow. I followed her recently as well, and my life has been much, much better since. So yes, I highly recommend.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's super sweet. She was at our Brighton SEO dinner back in the UK, when was that, April? April, right?

Crystal Carter:

Yes, yes, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow. That seems so long ago. Always nice to see her at Brighton SEO. If you do go to Brighton SEO, look for Shelley. She's usually there, I think.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah. It's great. It's great. Absolutely great follow. Shout out to Shelley, and shout out to everyone in the SEO Pioneers Group,

Mordy Oberstein:

John Mueller. Barry Schwartz. I think. If she hasn't had Barry, she should have Barry. We'll. Make that happen, Shelley.

All right, well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into why even SEO pros need a refresher about SEO. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, at you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify.

Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.