The real deal with keyword research

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the fabulous head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, everybody. I hope everybody's feeling gnarly and radical and tubular today.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm feeling gnarly, but not radical.

Crystal Carter:

Not radical, not feeling radical, just feeling normal. Not-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, but gnarly.

Crystal Carter:

Gnarly. I don't know. Yeah. I just say-

Mordy Oberstein:

When I say it I mean nauseous like, oh, that's gnarly.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

How do you mean gnarly?

Crystal Carter:

I just watched Bill and Ted's and I'm just saying the things that I saw on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so I grew up on that, right? When I said gnarly as an individual, like, awe, that's gnarly. That's messed up.

Crystal Carter:

Like bad?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, bad. Ah it's gnarly. Ugh.

Crystal Carter:

Have I used the keyword with the wrong intent there? Did I-

Mordy Oberstein:

No. No. I think I am.

Crystal Carter:

...not do enough keyword research on my term.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh. Oh, SEO joke. Good SEO joke. You know what's no joke? The fact that this podcast is brought to you by Wix where 301 redirects are automatic for your main pages products and booking pages. Hello.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, automated automatic automations. That's right. You can also do bulk 301. Redirects take them all in bulk and poof.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I'm dancing as if the people can see me. It's a podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, we are dancing like robots. Anyway, we're not talking about 301 redirects in this particular podcast in this podcast,

[00:01:46] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up?

we're talking about the real deal with keyword research. That's right. Keywords ain't what they used to be, which means your process for doing keyword research has or should have changed.

We'll cover what you should be doing with keyword research, where you should be starting the process. Spoiler alert. It's not where many people say you should start keyword research, which is SEO tools. And we'll talk about where the tools do and don't come in the keyword research process and special tip from the great legend of SEO, Cindy Krum on Google keywords advancements. Also, we're talking with Wix's head of organic growth at Idan Segal, all about how he uses keyword research to capture featured snippets in his net of awesomeness.

Crystal Carter:

Amazing, amazing. Idan is such a Jedi when it comes to all of this stuff, it's absolutely incredible. I've studied his featured snippets.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is why we're going to talk to him later, which is why you said we should invite him about this topic. Also, we're going to get a little bit philosophical here. We're talking entities and SEO, and we're going to be covering the latest and greatest in the SEO news. And of course, as we do each and every week, who you should be following out there in the SEO industry

[00:02:57] Focus Topic of the Week:  The Real Deal on Keyword Research

so you could get some more SEO a wesomeness. But let's kick it off with the real deal on keyword research.

Crystal Carter:

Cool. I'm just going to do a little explainer real quick just to make sure everybody's on the same page. So when we talk about keywords, we are essentially talking about phrases that people enter into search to find the information that they need. For years Google has understood these terms, the keywords as literal, the literal words that people type in. And so just to be clear, a keyword can be one word or it can be lots of words. So we talk about a keyword as a singular thing, but it's actually the whole phrase that people enter in.

It used to be that Google would understand this quite literally. So if you were writing something about coriander and you were writing something else about cilantro, then it used to be that those pages would rank differently and that you would need to spell it out really, really clearly. But a lot of SEO has been built around this sort of literal phrasing of those particular words, but Google's getting much better at understanding that cilantro and coriander are essentially the same plant.

When we talk about that, that's where we start to get into the area of entities. And Google's starting to understand that they don't necessarily need to rank one page for cilantro and one page for coriander. They can rank the best content around that plant for users. So that comes into how we think about keyword research that comes into how users are experiencing the web, that comes into thinking about the common names that are seen across lots of different media. And the change from being more literal terms to being more entity-based keywords, will affect how you approach your keyword research as you go forward with your SEO activity.

Mordy Oberstein:

I never knew that cilantro and coriander were the same thing until right now.

Crystal Carter:

They're the same entity. So I'm from California and I eat a lot of Mexican food. And basically I had to start making my own when I moved to England and in England, it's called coriander and in California, it's called cilantro. So I learned that very quickly. And similarly, there's a Latin name for that plant as well, which is different again. And I'm sure they call it something else in other places. So Google knows that if I want to make guacamole and I'm in London, they will serve me whatever content is best. Even if I put in coriander for guacamole, they'll give me a good guacamole recipe, which has cilantro in it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I never liked cilantro until maybe relatively recently, last few years. I always hated it for some reason. It tastes like soap to me, anyway.

Crystal Carter:

Sir, you're incorrect.

Mordy Oberstein:

I said I like it now.

Crystal Carter:

It's good.

Mordy Oberstein:

I said I like it now.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sheesh. Tough crowd.

Crystal Carter:

Don't come at me about guacamole Mordy

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think I'm not.

Crystal Carter:

I take it very seriously.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry I offended you. Are we still friends?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

That escalated so quickly. So let's start this off with where you should start with keyword research. And I always start, I've said it already on this podcast at this point, I probably said 10 times already, I always start with understanding two people. Me and you. Who am I? What do I do with my website? What's my website all about what am I trying to accomplish with my website? What's my site's identity? What am I all about as a company, a product, as a website, and what are the people who I'm trying to target? What are they all about? What are their pain points? What's their life circumstance. What's their life context? Where are they coming from? I'm trying to empathize with them. So know thyself and then know thy other, which I don't think is a real phrase, but it is now. Know thy other. And that's where I start with keyword research, which is not where many SEOs usually do.

Crystal Carter:

I absolutely agree that it's important to think like a user. So think about how your users are discovering your service or your products, and think about how users are talking about it. It may very well be the case that you refer to your particular product in one way, but if users are referring it to it in another way, then you need to think about that. And you need to understand that and you need to make sure that you're articulating that clearly. And that you're including those things. There are lots of tools that can help you do this. But I mentioned this before, when you're thinking about keywords, it's also important to actually talk to people who are speaking regularly to users. So if you're talking to your sales team, if you're talking to people who are front of house, if you are reading reviews, then that will give you some information about how people are interacting with your product and the kind of keywords that you should be including in your content and the kind of entities even that you should be including in your content.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it doesn't tell you just that. It tells you what kind of content they're looking for also. The problem with a keyword research tool, I know we all use them and I know if you're getting into SEO, you've probably heard all about them. And I know when you Google how to do keyword research, you're going to see a whole bunch of stuff about tools, which is why we're literally doing this podcast to be honest with you. Yeah.

The keyword research tool can tell you, this is the keyword, but what kind of content do you create around it? Do you create a video around it? Do you create a really long post? Do you create something really salesy? Do you create something informational, but when you think about your audience or when you see what people are saying about what they want, or what they like, what they don't like. It helps you to understand what kind of content they want. Even if it's informational. Obviously you're talking about the best toaster oven. What kind of content do users want around that? Do they want something comparing multiple toaster ovens? They want a blog post just about this one toaster oven. It's all about the intent.

Crystal Carter:

The intent will change dramatically depending on what the term is. And also depending on what the person's trying to do with it. So I think that if you were thinking about uses for coconut oil, there's a lot of-

Mordy Oberstein:

Everything. On everything.

Crystal Carter:

On everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

To me it's just everything.

Crystal Carter:

So there's lots of different ways that you can use coconut oil. But if the intent is cooking, then that's one thing. If the intent is, I don't know, skincare, that's another thing. If the intent is wellness or something, that's another thing, but there's lots of different uses. So you can't just go literally coconut oil. Coconut oil is good. You should use coconut oil. You have to think about the intent behind that. And you have to think about how users are using it. And it might be that there's ways that users are using it, that you've never even considered, that you've never even considered.

Mordy Oberstein:

A hundred percent.

Crystal Carter:

I think YouTube is a really good example of this. On YouTube I watch a lot of hair tutorials and people are combining different products and people are saying, "Oh, I use this like this, I use that like this." That's great information for keyword research. That is a great place to do keyword research. If there's a really popular YouTube video, that's talking about your product, or talking about product in your wheelhouse, then that's a really good source for that sort of stuff, for instance.

Mordy Oberstein:

And then to take your coconut oil example, because my wife loves coconut oil. You have to segment those intents out. I always think of it by the way, primarily for skincare, cause my wife really likes it for skincare. And if you want to write a top 10 ways to use coconut oil and you're writing a mix of, use it for your skincare and you use it on your salad, you might be catering to nobody and everybody at the same time.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you might need to write just 10 ways to use coconut oil for skincare. Probably don't do the whole 10 ways thing by the way.

Crystal Carter:

But that's the thing, I think also it has to do with your website. So if you are a spa or something or you're a dermatologist or you're a skincare professional and you write 10 ways to use coconut oil, then you should keep it to the skincare area, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

If you are a recipe blog and you're saying 10 ways to use coconut oil, then you should keep it to food.

Mordy Oberstein:

The key [inaudible 00:10:04] are not going to tell you that, that goes back to what we talked about before. Your identity as a site. You have a context of where you're working out of it's not coming out of nowhere. And again, the keyword research tool, you'll come down on them is not the best place for that. You what the great place for that is? The SERP.

Crystal Carter:

The SERP. The SERP.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Go to the actual SERP.

Crystal Carter:

And look up your keywords because this comes back to the user journey. You need to think about how users are actually experiencing finding your content. And it's very, very, very vague, very important that you do this on both desktop and mobile. And also particularly if you're an international branch, you have a look at some of the different mobile experiences. So I do not live in the United States, even though I am an American, the SERP in America is very different from the SERP where I live. And so if you have a lot of clients or users who are based there, that it's important to look at what the SERP looks like there and what the competition is there compared to what the conversation is, where you are. And then again, on different devices. So mobile versus desktop will again be very, very different. So if you're not on top of that, then you won't be able to understand the keywords. And Google's recommending keywords as well. So on the coconut oil, they'll say, do you mean coconut oil for skin or they'll suggest coconut oil health.

Mordy Oberstein:

People also search for coconut oil for your hair.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Exactly. People also ask related searches-

Mordy Oberstein:

Can I use coconut oil on my hair? Does coconut oil help you retain your hair? Does it? I would like to know the answer to that one. But no, the SERP is really, really important for so many different reasons. One is you can reverse engineer it from multiple perspectives. If you see Google's showing videos and images, you can tell... Yes, and again, a keyword research tool might not be able to tell you this. They might be able in some kind of way, but you need to know, yeah, I can create a post about this, but I really need to have some kind of media in there because that's part of the intent package. You see this by the way, with recipes all the time, there's always going to be an image of the food. That's not by accident. Google wants that there.

There's also something really important for understanding your keyword research and what you should or shouldn't be targeting. And that's, there are a limited number of slots on page one. And there's a limited number of slots for certain types of content. Take, for example, the go-to example, they always use it buy car insurance. So 10 years ago, every single ranking website was a place where you can buy car insurance. Now it's split up between places I can go, Geico, Allstate State Farm, to buy car insurance and places to learn about buying car insurance. What's the best policy? What kind of policies should I not consider? Where should you go to buy car insurance? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Crystal Carter:

The comparison sites where you're comparing lots at once.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, review sites a hundred percent, which will be my next point. But you need to know how many slots are available. If I'm trying to ring for a commercial oriented page, maybe there's only two slots available. Maybe I need to create an informational page. And if I'm creating an informational page, what kind of informational page should I create? Should I create a listicle? Should I create a comparison? Should I create a long form blog post? I need to see what's there. And there might be three slots for a long form blog post, and only one slot for a listicle. And that's all part of the intent package on the SERP.

Crystal Carter:

And it's also the case that it might be that it doesn't even need to be immediately on your website. Everything should come back to your website. Your website should always be HQ. You should always have anything that you do online should always be able to be traced back to your website and supported by stuff on your website. But for instance, if it's a how to, like how to use coconut oil in your hair, it's probably going to be a video. A video's, probably going to be what people are going to expect. And you should probably put it on YouTube. That's not on your website, but you can obviously tie that back in within the comments and the links and the various different things. And you can support that on your website as well. So make sure that you're understanding where the best venue for the information is for that particular query as well as the query itself.

And to be honest, I think that tools sometimes do this well, but they cannot give you the full picture. They cannot give you the full picture that you can get from the SERP. They can give you a sort of bird's eye view of certain things like featured snippets and things like video or things like images and things. They can give you a general bird's eye view, but the SERP can be very dynamic and it can change really, really quickly. Google doesn't have to tell anybody when they want to change what they [inaudible 00:14:15] what the SERP looks like. And there's also certain features that aren't included. So if you look up a lion on Google, you get a 3D AR lion. There's a penguin one, there's a 3D AR thing of the tower of London, for instance. That's not going to show up in a third party keyword research tool, but that is going to affect how people are behaving on the search. So this is something that you have to track.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we end this conversation or move on from this conversation around keyword research and whatnot. Tools do play a role.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're not advocating you shouldn't use a keyword research tool. I like to use a keyword research tool. Once I've understood myself and my audience. I know what's out there on the SEPR. I know exactly how Google's relating to this keyword, but there's things that I missed, like subtopics that I may have never thought of or questions I may never have thought of or getting some more context about the topic overall by seeing what kind of results the keyword resources are coming back with. I like to sort of refine my process. I don't start my process with the keyword research tool. I know many people do, I don't. But I do refine my process with the keyword research tools.

Crystal Carter:

I always think that with anything, and particularly in SEO, I always use a couple of tools at once. So I will look at the SERP, I'll get some ideas. I'll go through the keyword research tools and see what they say. Then I'll check the SERP that they say. I'll check that in Google as well. And then you want to back that up with a few different things and experience it as a user on different devices. So there's a couple of different tools, but I don't think you should ever rely on a single source for anything. And also you should also back it up with stuff from Google Search Console. So Google Search Console will give you information on where you're getting impressions for, but maybe not necessarily getting quick clicks for. They also have a breakdown of different parts of the search. So whether it's webpages, whether it's images, whether it's videos, whether it's product pages, that sort of thing. So it's important to just spend the time to see how the keywords are showing on the different parts of the SERP.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there's just so many tools in there from Search Console, which everybody should be using to Semrush, Ahrefs, they have Mangools, also [inaudible 00:16:11]. There's plenty of tools out there. Have a look at them. A lot of them offer a freemium version. [inaudible 00:16:16]. If I didn't mention your tool, I'm sorry. SEOrank. I could keep going. There's really a ton of them.

Crystal Carter:

Many tools are available.

Mordy Oberstein:

Many, many tools. Now we've been mentioning and throwing around entities a little bit and we're going to get into more of that later on in the podcast, but we thought it would make sense to bring it an absolute SEO legend for you, to talk about entities, to talk about keywords, to talk about specifically, how has Google's ability to understand entities made focusing on specific keywords less relevant?

[00:16:47] Focus Topic Guest: Cindy Krum

Here's the founder of MobileMoxie, the one, the only Cindy Krum.

Cindy Krum:

So when I think about keyword research for entities, I think about topic clusters. And so your main kind of head keyword, the main concept is in the center. And then we think about ways that that topic breaks down. So if we're thinking about a breed of a dog, let's say a labradoodle. So we have labradoodle and then we have their health, coat, where to adopt a labradoodle, temperament, things like that. And so you would do the research to see what comes up around the head term. And then you would create a cluster for each topic that is a reasonable section of questions about that head term. And you can see when Google's building out entities, they do this and they add sometimes in a mobile search result, they'll add expanders under the knowledge graph where they know, and they say, Hey, here's the main topic. And here are some subtopics.

And so subtopics are different from related topics. Subtopics are within the core topic and they're just a division of what you would want to know or what someone might want to know. And I think to rank well in search, in some cases, we may have to go a little bit beyond topics that our website has a financial benefit for. So for instance, let's say that we are a site that allows you to adopt Labradoodles. When we only talk about adopting Labradoodles, Google knows that people who want to adopt a pet have more questions than just where to adopt, usually. And so they are thinking about the next step of someone saying, "Well, I think I want to adopt a labradoodle," because that's how the normal process goes. You don't go, I think I want to adopt, let's do it today. You usually go through a research process.

And the more you can answer those questions and help users with their journey on the topic and not just try and sell them things it seems like, the more Google is going to count that as high quality content, the more Google is going to understand the entity. The more Google is going to understand that you understand the entity and you are going to have the requisite keywords clustered somewhat together or in a meaningful way that Google uses to determine if you are authoritative and an expert. And if you're willingly giving people information to help them, or if you're just trying to make a sale.

And I think that Google does seem to want the extra steps to prove that you're not an affiliate site for instance, or maybe if you are an affiliate site, that you're a great affiliate site that you're going the extra mile to keep your customers happy. In my mind, I kind of equate it to having a clean brick and mortar store. Yes, you could sell stuff in a brick and mortar store, but just selling it might not be enough. You also have to have nice educated employees. You have to have a clean store. You have to have easy parking, things like this. And since those aren't concerns, when you're shopping on the internet or when you're searching on the internet, they're looking for other things, other symbols that this is going to be a good experience for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

So that was super, super interesting. And what I think people don't necessarily realize is that concepts, topics are entities. I know Cindy gave the example of a labradoodle, which my in-laws used to have a labradoodle, I really did not like that dog. But anyway, topics are entities. Concepts are entities. And within a certain topic, there are certain things that are subsumed in that topic, or also known as subtopic. So if you're talking about baseball, you're going to have teams and players and rules and playoffs and world series and blah, blah, blah, blah.

This goes into how machine learning works. When you talk about a certain topic... Well, let's go back a step. When Google see a certain topic, let's say Labradoodles, or let's say, I don't know, healthcare. It understands that healthcare means X. It means subtopic, A subtopic B subtopic C. And this is connected to that thing. And that things connected to this thing. This is all what constructs the concept of healthcare. And then when you talk about healthcare on your site, if your profile doesn't match that, if, when you talk about healthcare, you're not talking about A, B and C, you're talking about completely different things in the way Google understands the entity that is healthcare, the concept that is healthcare, that's not going to bode well for you. So you can be focusing on all the keywords that you want. It's not going to matter.

What you need to focus on is the fact, how does Google understand this entity? And that could be, again, anything from Labradoodles, to healthcare, to bricks, to astrophysics. If you understand and talk about that entity, the same way that Google understands it, which is hopefully how everybody kind of sees it, because let's hope we all understand astrophysics the same way, then that will help you rank as opposed to focusing on the keywords. That's what I took away from that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the difference between keywords and topics or entities is very clear to me because I've seen this in action. So for instance, goggles, if I talk about goggles, there's lots of different types of goggles and the intent will change, depending on what you're talking about. So if I were to write just keyword optimizing for the word goggles, I could say, goggles are great. You can wear goggles on your face, goggles protect your eyes, buy goggles in Brazil. Yeah. I could say that. And that would be optimized for the word goggles because I said it lots of time. Or that's what old school just-

Mordy Oberstein:

Goggles.

Crystal Carter:

Goggles, right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Goggles.

Crystal Carter:

But what kind of goggles am I actually talking about? When I say that. Beer goggles, ski goggles, safety goggles, swimming goggles. What am I talking about now?

Now if I said, when you are skiing, you should wear goggles to protect your eyes from sun and wind. That's giving Google a lot more information about context, topic, and more relationships for the entity of the goggles that I'm talking about. And additionally, if I were to talk about that as a topic, I might also include things like ski gloves or hats or helmets or protective clothing for skiing or maybe even sunscreen. And that helps Google to understand that I'm talking about goggles. I'm also helping the user who's probably going skiing and is probably deciding what they need to wear to be safe. And it's telling them that all of those entities are related and they understand that all of those entities are related and that they're different from if I was talking about goggles and a swimsuit and fins and a snorkel and things like that, they understand that those are different, but you have to put them in a topic together to help them to understand that the entity is the entity that you're actually talking about.

Mordy Oberstein:

The entity. Speaking of the entity, we've been talking a lot about entities. But the truth is what is an entity?

Crystal Carter:

Who am I?

Mordy Oberstein:

[00:24:12] Deep Thoughts, with Crystal and Mordy

You are now entering a deep thought by Crystal and Mordy around entities?

Mordy Oberstein:

What are entities, crystal?

Crystal Carter:

An entity is like... It's a person, place or thing. It's a noun people. It's a noun... Wait. It's a noun.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh that settles it. We have defined [inaudible 00:24:37]. We're done.

Crystal Carter:

We're done entities. We're done. Done here. But yeah, it's essentially, the way I think about it's very similar to Latin names. So there's a Latin name for an Oak tree, Quercus. Quercus hispanica I think is the Latin name for London plane tree, for instance. And I might call it one thing and somebody else might call it another thing, but there's a Latin name for that tree or Latin name for that animal. Like Roly-Poly bugs we used to call them when I was a kid, but my husband calls them something else. But there's a Latin name for that. And essentially in science, they settled that and they said you might call it a bear. I might call it oso, but is it a bear? And they'll settle that. Google's essentially trying to do that with entities. They're trying to apply that same logic of just understanding the concept to the world. Wider things in the world. And I think that it's-

Mordy Oberstein:

Which by the way, it saves them so much on resources.

Crystal Carter:

Saves them so much because I mentioned cilantro and coriander.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because they understand bear. And bear goes with honey and bear goes with Winnie. It all goes. And then the language doesn't matter. They know this is universal across the board. They don't have to figure out it again in another language by looking at the number of instances that bear went with honey on a webpage.

Crystal Carter:

So again, there's a Latin name for a brown bear for instance. And it doesn't matter if I call it cafe Oso or if I call it brown bear, Google understands just like scientists understand that it's the same thing. And that means that it's transferable because it's the same thing. And you've essentially distilled it to its essence.

And you can see a really good way to see this as well is if you have Google photos, if you go to the Explorer area and type in a word, you can see the way that they understand entities because they classify everything into different sections. So they'll classify things into trees or birds or flowers or cars. Or if you look up goggles, you'll see lots of sunglasses because they just sort of think of it as eyewear for instance. But yeah, there's a lot of different tools around there. And a lot of people who are doing some very clever things around entities and it's very, very interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think of entities as fundamentally, something that has a unique identity. That's something that's discernible, that's distinct. And that, by the way, identity, we're going to go philosophical here for a sec. Identity can either be independent identity or dependent identity, for example. And this is where you start understanding why entities relate to other entities because they have to. For example, a keyboard. A keyboard's it's own thing, but then a keyboard has keys. So the keys on the keyboard. Is the key it's own thing or is it part of a keyboard?

Crystal Carter:

It's also which keyboard are you talking about?

Mordy Oberstein:

A keyboard on my computer. Keyboard.

Crystal Carter:

I thought you were talking about piano keyboard.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh we're not going that way with the entities right now.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Okay. Keyboard on my laptop, right? So the keys on my laptop, are the keys independent? Are they it's own thing? Yeah. I can obviously refer to it. That's the A key, that's the W key, but together they can also be a keyboard. So entities relate to one another because no entity is independent of another entity. Right, parent and child. I am me, but I'm also my mother's son.

So entities are always going to relate to other things and be spoken about as independent things at the same time. Which is super important to know because now you could understand why Google is going to automatically connect whatever entity that you're talking about with something else. Because that is simply the nature of entity. It's not making this up out of nowhere. That's how entities work. Also important to know, and I'll end on this point is that your website is an entity.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is your website a distinct discernible thing? I would hope so. Then it too is an entity.

Crystal Carter:

It too is an entity.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now what kind of entity is it? Let's say you have a website that talks about bricks. I [inaudible 00:28:17] saying bricks. I'm looking out my window and looking at bricks. What does it mean to be a brick website, a website that talks about bricks? It's very different than a website that talks about physics.

Crystal Carter:

Also there's relationships between the entities because there's keywords and with keyword research now in this space, we have to think about the modifiers, right? So you say bricks, there's lots of different types of bricks, so different bricks materials. There's also like Lego bricks. So I spend a lot of time playing Lego with my kid. So when you say bricks, I think Lego straightaway. That's what I think. And you're looking out your window and you're thinking another things. So Google says, okay, Cindy talked about the head keyword and it's like, okay, brick. They're like, great. Now if you said rusty brick, that would mean a different thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

That would mean Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

Right, that would be Barry Schwartz. If you said Lego brick, that means a different thing. And that takes you down a different path. So it's very important to understand the modifiers. So not just the keyword, but also the modifiers that are important for those users.

Mordy Oberstein:

A thousand percent. And it also is really important about what you talk about, what you link out to what's linking to you on your website. Because again, if you are a brick website and you are talking about things like air conditioners, right? Yeah, that might make sense. I could see if you have a brick in your house, how do you connect your air conditioning unit to the bricks? Right? That would make sense if you have... I guess, I think. If you have a brick website that sells bricks to build your house and you're talking about football teams, does that really make sense? And when Google's looking at that, your site is an entity, your site's an entity about bricks. Your entity is a brick website. Does a brick website, talk about football teams? No. So what's going on here? Are you really a brick entity website?

Crystal Carter:

Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there you have it.

Crystal Carter:

And there you have it.

Mordy Oberstein:

From philosophy to action. All on the SERP's Up podcast.

Crystal Carter:

That's what we're doing here, people.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what we do here. All day, every day or at least once a week. But we're not done yet. We are not done yet. You thought we were done. We're not done, because we have a legend for you.

[00:24:12] Inside the WixVerse: Idan Segal

We have Idan Segal, the head of organic growth here at Wix. As we go across the Wixverse to bring you experts from Wix who talk about all different types of things, in this case about getting keywords for featured snippets. Let's talk with Idan.

Mordy Oberstein:

So as promised, I just want to preface this. A lot of the time you go out there on Twitter or wherever you consume social media content around SEO. And you see all these people with a lot of big mouths, I'm talking about myself in particular, but you don't see the people working behind the scenes doing some great things who are generally in house, because they don't feel they need to have a social presence in the same way that some other people do. And that's fine. I feel at Wix, we have so many people here that you have no idea who they are, and you might know who Ian is, I'm not talking about Idan that way, but it's so important to bring those voices out in general. So I kind of love this segment. With that, Idan is here.

Idan Segal:

What's up? It's nice to finally be here.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is. Idan, I love your eyes. I always say that.

Idan Segal:

Yeah. You say it a lot, I must say.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know. Is that weird?

Crystal Carter:

So much.

Idan Segal:

No, it's okay. It's okay. I'm already so flattered from what you said before. So what can I say now?

Mordy Oberstein:

Did I set you up?

Idan Segal:

Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, you invited me so many times and finally I'm here. I was starting to think that those [inaudible 00:31:48] invitations.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Well when you know when you invite somebody your wedding or whatever, but you don't really want them to come. So you invite, "Yeah, it's at one o'clock in the morning, but we'd love to have you there."

Crystal Carter:

Oh, in England they do it two tier. At England there's the ceremony and that's how you know your real friends. And if they're like meh friends, you only get invited to the dinner after.

Mordy Oberstein:

What? I would do the opposite. I don't want to be invited to the ceremony. Invite me to the dinner. That's all I care about.

Idan Segal:

Anyways, for me, it's amazing. What a morning. I repaired my car. I watch the NBA finals and now I'm in a podcast. So it's a work procrastination at its best.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we've been talking in this episode a lot about keywords and keyword research. And you're a little bit of a legend around here because you and your team and we, all of you, but you're the head of this, so we're going to call it you, rank for a ton of featured snippets.

Idan Segal:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Crystal in particular is really impressed. Not that I'm not impressed, but...

Idan Segal:

So yeah, I'm leading a team of rock stars. They really do the magic, not me, but it's a bunch of SEO teams and blog teams and CRO teams. But the bottom line is really amazing. I think only in the US, we're triggering more than 3,000 feature snippets. I think 54% of them, according to the May report, probably even more now are from the blog. Many of them are from product gates. And that's really cool. I must say that even the last algorithm change worked tremendously well for us. And I think we increased the amount of featured snippet that we have in 20 something percent. So that's just awesome.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you get a bonus for that when you-

Idan Segal:

I'm not answering without my lawyer.

Crystal Carter:

I'm not surprised because I did an article around featured snippets for Search London recently and they used Wix as a really good case study because the featured snippets, for instance, there was one article that was 120 best blog niche ideas to write about. And if you look up topics for blogs, it shows as the featured snippet for that. If you look up blog topics for beginners, that same article shows as the people also ask. And then if you look up blog topics, it shows in an accordion as a dropdown there as well. You're also covered if you look up blogging, it shows in the knowledge panel as one of the, what is the subtopics of blogging as well. It really is an incredible case study in topic clusters of how you mapped out different topics around blogging. Can you share any insights on how you did that?

Idan Segal:

First of all, we are big fans of HubSpot and HubSpot Strategy in general here. We think that they're awesome. I think by the way, they are kind of a role model, to some extent. I think they even call the HTML components, some of them, when you go to the HTML, you see they call them featured snippets. Let's say that they're students of the game and they really try to get better every day. And this is my philosophy here as well. I think that here in Wix we are very lucky to have products in many niches so we can get tons of feature snippets. I think it's also a good sign for our product to show that you are capable of getting featured snippets when using the Wix blog. We have 22 different blogs in 16 languages and in most of them or all of them, we are getting featured snippets. And that's really, really cool.

I think we are really trying to give the people what they want to bring real value. I don't want to say some fancy words, but we're really trying to bring value and to answer real problems. And by doing that, we also have structure that we're trying to do because we see that it's working. If we are doing a recap in the end so we're also doing a precap in the beginning, an introduction. We are trying to use things that we see that are working like ordered list and unordered list. And we have even showcases, inspirational intent content, we are trying to use scattered age free titles along the text. And you see that it's just working because we write great content and our philosophy that we're always on the hunt for more, but it's not that I detect featured snippets on the SERP and I'm trying to get them. I'm trying to even help Google educate him that it's worth a featured snippets. And I think we have tons of success by creating feature snippets on SERP's that didn't have any, and that's really cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a really great point, because the way you usually hear this topic being talked about and even the way we introduced it was, yeah, how do you target keywords for featured snippets? Whereas you're just saying, yeah, we just target writing content and then we tell Google, this is a great place for a feature snippet.

Idan Segal:

Google is kind of good in what they're doing. Usually they figure it out and it's not always violets and roses here. I think in the last algo update, there was a topic that it's not really our niche, but was how to start a YouTube channel. And now of course Google is getting the featured snippet, their support. And I think we crushed. Decreased. I have it here, 67% decrease, but on the same graph we had some content about writing a bio, about blogging, about fonts, I think. And we increased in a second in between 20 to 50% in traffic. And in general featured snippet are more than 10% of our blog traffic. And that's huge. That's really huge for business.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think one of the things that I noticed again, from studying your featured snippets from the outside or whatever is that you spend a lot of time on the long tail, which is really, really core for featured snippets. A lot of the broad terms are going to be covered by things like Wikipedia or even by an instant answer. So the number of blogs you have about blogging is extensive, which means that you're going to be getting into that sort of longer tail. Can you talk to us a little bit about your research process at all?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. How do you break down topics like that? What's your approach?

Idan Segal:

Again, I think in the Wix blog, we're going after our products and what we're really offering to people and we're trying to go after that. So we have different clusters. One of them is about the website creation and that means that I need to cover everything. Also, things that I can't really cover on my product pages. And if I want to talk about menus and about the importance of navigation and about what is a 404, it's all about semantic depth.

And again, I am a very cynical person and I am a capitalistic pig that cares about conversions. But having said that, I do try to do it while I'm trying to imagine that I'm writing to a fancy editor and to really give value because that's the right way to tackle it. So blogging is another big cluster of ours that we're trying to tackle the same way that marketing is and web design is. And we're trying to all the time to beef up and to learn from our competitors about topics that we're not covering. And also for us to lose a featured snippet, it's a wake up call. It means that we need to do something better. We need to try to learn from our competitors how to do things better. And sometimes it's just about Google turning off the feature snippet. And that's also okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's such a good point that, we were talking about this earlier in the podcast, about when you're thinking about keyword research in a nonlinear way, not so focused on the tools, it's really about being able to yourself, and you can use tools to help you do this, being able to parse out what that topic is or what that topic means and creating content around all of that in a really substantial kind of way.

Just one more question before we have to let you go. When you see that you lose a feature snippet, you're talking about the YouTube content that came in and took away our feature snippets. Do you try to regain that or do you say, "Okay, look, I realize I should never have really had those to begin with and I'm not going to waste my time."

Idan Segal:

So, if I think that I didn't deserve it, it will affect my priorities. Having said that the fact that I got it previously means that at least I will give it a try. And I think that part of our work process here, we have tons of emphasis on redos. We want to send Google fresh signals that will keep working on our content. Huge part of our strategy is evergreen content. So for me, when I'm losing it, I'm trying to learn why I lost it. What's the other competitor, the URL that took it. I'm trying to learn from what they did. And I will try to do a redo to prioritize it in many cases the success rate is awesome. And again, all the credits to my team. And also I'm lucky to work in a company that has a great domain authority because Wix has a great product. That enables us to get those featured snippets.

Crystal Carter:

When I was speaking at Search London about featured snippets, someone said, "Oh, can you go over existing content to make feature snippets?" And I was like, "Yeah, you absolutely 100% can. And it's definitely, as you say, redos, going back over the content and adding bullet points or lists or tables or adding images or videos or whatever can really help.

Idan Segal:

There was a thread on Twitter from someone that I didn't know. Maybe you'll remember it. And if not, I will share it and you can share it later in a thread or something about someone that explained to details, how he's trying to tackle featured snippets. It was a very insightful one. Most of the things that he's trying to do we are already doing here, but I learned a trick or two. And there is a lot of technicalities when you're doing it, right? So you need to use some techniques, some HTML markup, ordered lists, unordered lists, hierarchy, amount of text, imperative verbs. There's some stuff to do, but eventually create good content and you'll enjoy the fruits.

Mordy Oberstein:

Idan, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day and joining us.

Idan Segal:

No problem. Thank you for inviting me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. Again, Idan, before you leave, where can we find you out there in the public? Where can your people find you?

Idan Segal:

You know, you can find me on Twitter probably. You can share the handle later on.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'll share the handle. It'll be in the show notes. Look for it in the show notes folks. Idan, thank you so much.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you so much.

Idan Segal:

Amazing. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye, bye.

Idan Segal:

Ciao.

Mordy Oberstein:

Brilliant fellow, no?

Crystal Carter:

Idan never ceases to amaze. I think that he just delivers. I think there's such amazing content that comes out of that team and the way that they approach it is incredible.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is why we go across the Wixverse. There's so many awesome people here. By the way, there's so many people out there in the SEO world who are not super famous who are doing super amazing things.

[00:41:43] Snappy News

So just know that. You know what else might be news to you other than the fact that there are SEOs out there who don't have huge profiles? The actual news, the actual news. The actual SEO, snappy news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Let's get right into it because otherwise it wouldn't be snappy. First up for the master of disaster and last week's guest Barry, made the Schwartz be with you. From search engine round table, new Google featured snippet with multiple answers, new design call outs and more. Essentially what we have here is a featured snippet on a gray background with a call out i.e. bolded text that basically gives you the answer to the query and multiple answers from multiple URLs to boot. I'm covering this because this has been the fifth or sixth test where Google's actually using multiple URLs inside of the feature snippet. It's a big shift in how they're thinking about feature snippets and search overall. In my honest opinion, Asher just covered this and why I think Google is doing this on the Wix SEO hub. I'll link to that and I'll link to Barry's article where you can see what this feature snippet looks like. So check out the show notes.

Okay. More on the old HCU the Helpful Content Update from SEJ, Search Engine Journals, Matt Southern. Google, helpful content signal, make it stronger with next core update. So the helpful content update might be a strong part of the ranking equation as time goes on. It was not a very potent part of the equation this go around as the update, as Google confirmed, has finished rolling out. This actually kind of makes sense as the HCU as we call it, the Helpful Content Update is based on machine learning properties and the machine needs to learn. And as it learns, it'll be more powerful than anything the SERP has ever known before. Okay. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but it does make sense that as time goes on, as the machine learns more, it will be a greater factor in the ranking equation. So Helpful Content Update, go get some learning done and come back soon, you hear. And with that, that is the snappiest of news.

And what a set of news that was, no?

Crystal Carter:

It as very news news to me.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was very newsy. It was newsworthy, Newsies, good movie. Classic growing up as a kid, Christian Bale.

Crystal Carter:

I was just about to say that people don't realize the American Psycho was in Newsies.

Mordy Oberstein:

He was. Dancing around singing about newspapers.

Crystal Carter:

Do you want some news? Because he's Batman as well. That was my Batman.

Mordy Oberstein:

News.

Crystal Carter:

That's a much better Batman.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you. I have specialties in doing Batman voices. Now let's talk about other stuff about SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Again, before we leave you and thank you so much for listening all the way through to this point, we want to make sure that you understand that there is so much great SEO information out there besides just this podcast. And a lot of it comes from the SEO industry itself, which means the people, the people are the industry.

[00:46:31] Follow of the Week

And today we're going to share who you should be following out there in Twitter. And that person is Crystal. No, it is crystal.

Crystal Carter:

It's not me.

Mordy Oberstein:

You are someone we should follow. It's not what I meant. But crystal, who are we following this week?

Crystal Carter:

Today I would like to discuss, and I would like to put a little shine on Lazarina Stoy. I think she's amazing. She's an SEO, she's like a data phenom. She's really-

Mordy Oberstein:

Machine learning.

Crystal Carter:

Right. She's really into machine learning and she's got some great, great resources that she has particularly around keywords. She has a tool called the keyword search intent classifier tool. And it's a Google sheet that you can use to understand your keywords better and to understand the intent behind them. She also has some really good resources around big data sets as well. So she's a great person to follow. She tinkers a lot and makes a lot of really cool resources and shares some really good stuff. And she's just really, really clever. I think that if you're interested in keywords, you're interested in machine learning, you're interested in checking out somebody who's doing really cool stuff follow Lazarina.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's doing some really cool stuff. And that's @LazarinaStoy on Twitter. L-A-Z-A-R-I-N-A-S-T-O-Y. And of course we'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes for this podcast. Folks, that's it. That's that's all we got. I know you wanted more, but that's all we got for you this week. 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 an all new episode diving into Ooh, ranking factors. Should you care?

Crystal Carter:

Should you?

Mordy Oberstein:

We have different point of views on this one I think.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah, we kind of do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh boy. Going to be some drama. Well-

Crystal Carter:

It's going to get heated. [inaudible 00:46:43] at the guacamole discussions though.

Mordy Oberstein:

I will draw lines in the sand. You should not cross them. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Until next time everyone peace, love and SEO. See ya.

Crystal Carter:

Bye.