Podcast With Mordy Oberstein

Wix SEO Myths Busted: Wix’s Mordy Oberstein Reveals All

Show Notes

Unlock the secrets behind mastering SEO for Wix with Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix.

Whether you aim to rank your website number 1 or drive more organic traffic, this step-by-step guide is packed with invaluable insights. Join me as I welcome Mordy Oberstein, to demystify SEO strategies for 2024 and beyond. Discover how to achieve a #1 ranking by addressing common misconceptions for Wix and leveraging the latest SEO trends. From optimizing your Wix Site guide to enhancing search engine rankings, learn practical techniques that beginners and advanced users can apply.

Stay ahead of the curve with proven strategies that improve visibility and traffic. Dive into this enlightening discussion

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:40 - Mordy Oberstein's SEO Journey

01:25 - Head of SEO Brand Explained

03:50 - SEO Challenges Overview

05:19 - Common SEO Misconceptions

05:25 - Misconceptions about Wix

15:06 - SEO and Branding Strategies

18:30 - SEO for Small Businesses

21:55 - Leveraging SEO for Small Businesses

23:33 - Wix’s User Intent SEO Strategy

25:50 - Best SEO Learning Resources

32:26 - AI's Impact on SEO

36:42 - Understanding EAT in SEO

40:30 - Current SEO Challenges

42:40 - Biggest Challenges for SEOs Today

44:55 - Advising Brands on SEO Challenges

47:01 - Technical SEO Insights

51:05 - Future Trends in SEO

53:49 - SEO Rand Insights

55:54 - What's Next for Wix and SEO

56:20 - Recommended SEO Books

56:57 - Staying Connected with Mordy Oberstein

57:27 - Thank You Note

Transcript

Intro

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider the podcast that pulls back the curtain on the digital marketing world I'm nvit

0:06 kosel your host and we are here to bring you Insight strategies and the inside scoop from industry leaders today we

0:12 have a special guest who needs no introduction in the SEO World he's the master behind vix Su strategy please

0:19 welcome the incredible Modi opin head of SE brand at vix

0:26 [Applause]

0:31 [Music] thank you for joining today thanks for

0:37 having me this is fun yes so let's dive right into it you held various SEO

0:42 positions throughout your career can you walk us through your SEO journey and how it led you to your current role at Wix

0:49 yeah so I actually started SEO on the content side of things I was working I was a teacher at one point and I was

0:54 working for an educational software company writing content for them I'm educational content

1:00 and they asked me hey you're one of the only native English speakers here could you write web content I could write

1:05 anything whatever you want I can write it said great can you also get organic traffic from what you write and I'm like

1:11 yeah I can do that what's organic traffic and that's how I started my my it's like 10 years ago so like

1:19 around 2013 14 something like that all right so that's where it started in and now you are at the wick so so uh of

Head of SEO Brand Explained

1:28 course head of SE brand at Wix I mean you find head of SEO head of digital

1:33 what exactly head of SEO brand means so my SEO career has been pretty interesting I've always kind of

1:39 straddled this line between the SEO side and the marketing side of things so for example I'm at rank Ranger which is one

1:45 of the SEO um platforms got bought out by similar web so I started off there as their content manager head of marketing

1:52 their CMO so I've done a lot of things like we grew traffic for the blog like 200% over the course of I think was two

2:00 years something like that so I've always done like Theo side but also the marketing side of it so like while while

2:05 working to grow their blog 200% over the course of two years we were also doing things around growing ourselves as um a

2:11 leader in the in the SEO space thought leadership Authority building that kind of thing so I've always kind of

2:17 straddled both the SEO and I call it the brand marketing world I was at semar for

2:22 a while doing AE of their coms so on the Wix side it's it's an interesting role it's about basically how Wix or Studio

2:31 positions itself for seos right so what do we want seos to know about the

2:36 platform how do you want seos to feel about the platform how do you want digital marketers in general to feel and

2:42 to relate to the Wix studio and the Wix platforms and a lot of that is also um internal education education for our

2:50 users so it's an interesting role between somewhere like SEO education brand marketing and with our Wix SEO

2:55 Learning Hub actual SEO okay so so what are you the guy paying $2,000 dollar to

3:02 the SEO who get ranks for the wigs oh no no no I'm the guy you know that right no

3:08 no no I'm the guy I don't feel like you know Wix has an interesting um relationship with SEO historically you know back in the day we were built on

3:14 flash seos didn't love us I didn't love Wix way back in the day so I was the

3:19 person who came in and said hey wait a second Wix isn't what you think it is for SEO here's what you need to know

3:26 about SEO for Wix and S of like changed that whole positioning around how seos feel about wi we've gone from industry

3:32 Pariah to also say industry leader in SEO okay yeah I still remember a lot of people I mean I run an SE agency and

3:40 when somebody say can you optimize Wick right so the fact that you don't think about Wick that way like I'm that dude

3:45 right right so that's interesting so what are some of the biggest challenges you have faced in the Su industry and

SEO Challenges Overview

3:52 how have you overcome including the one where vix is not loved by the Su so I

3:57 mean from a community standpoint you know I think the big challenge was how do you go from what I'll call was being

4:03 a toxic relationship between Wix and the SEO Community to creating a healthy

4:09 relationship forget leading the community like we now we're doing meetups with Serge and journal with Al latest soless with John jiada forget

4:16 leading the SEO Community how do you get to a place where you have a healthy relationship

4:21 with the SEO Community is probably the biggest challenge on the SEO side you know we have our whole SEO Learning Hub

4:28 I think like one of the advantages having an SEO Learning Hub under the Wix domain is that the Wix domain carries a

4:33 lot of um Authority with it right so ranking is probably not our hardest

4:39 issue I think our hardest issue this is for all you Enterprise seos out there is

4:44 when you have multiple sections within a website or multiple Publications in a website think like the New York Times and the wire cutter or the New York

4:51 Times and the athletic how do you find that Niche for that subset of the website right so how do you make sure

4:57 that we're not overlapping with let's say the blog or how to make sure we're not overlapping with what Ecom is doing

5:02 so making sure that we stay in our lane and that we help the domain Authority overall but we don't we don't um let's

5:10 say cannibalize our efforts kind of thing I think that's the biggest SEO challenge for us okay

5:16 okay yeah and in your experience what are the most common uh what are the most

Common SEO Misconceptions

5:23 common SEO misconceptions that the businesses have and what are the most common misconception about business app

Misconceptions about Wix

5:30 so these are two questions oh okay I think let's start with the later one first I think the most common misconception has nothing to do with SEO

5:36 at this point I think most common misconcep about Wix is that you can't customize things or you're limited which

5:42 is completely not true like for example in Wix Studio which is our platform for agencies you can customize the CSS it's

5:49 open to you on both Wix and Wix Studio first off there's a Wix headless option

5:54 um but on both platforms you can custom you have a full stack Dev tool called um Vell which is an in-house tool that you

6:01 can customize all of the JavaScript whatever you want so there's an absolute ton that you can do to customize a

6:07 website you can add custom scripts you can add things to the header there's there's there's really outside of

6:13 touching your server which for most people you're gonna lock yourself out of the server um there's really not much

6:20 you can't do on a Wick's website to customize it so I think that's the biggest misconception there on the SEO

6:26 side I think the biggest misconception seos have now in general about SEO is or

6:33 businesses have about SEO I think both I think both businesses and seos both have

6:38 the same misconception which is SEO is siloed I'm gonna do SEO and I think we're quickly moving into a world where

6:44 there's no such is doing SEO I think that's true on the more technical side of SEO right but if you're looking at

6:50 SEO as a wider discipline I don't think there's doing SEO I think there's building your digital footprint and I

6:56 think SEO is a big part of building your digital footprint because Google Drives the most traffic to websites out of any

7:01 other platform so I think seos need to think about SEO broader than just traditional SEO and I think businesses

7:09 need to realize that what they're doing on the SEO side should be interjected and connected with the wider branding

7:15 efforts that they're doing overall okay so it's it's like a is not in Silo it's part of a marketing mix you

7:21 can it's part of a whole thing yeah like um I'll give you like just you know a concrete sort of example the way I think

7:28 about Google is that Google's like a moth Google is looking for whoever has the biggest Digital Light possible so

7:35 just like a moth that gravitates to the the brightest light Google will gravitate to whoever has the largest and

7:40 most powerful digital presence out there that means that in order to help your

7:46 SEO efforts you might want to focus on social getting your URLs out there getting things shared getting people to

7:52 go on social media see what you're doing and then go to Google and do a branded

7:57 search X Brand Plus whatever product whatever service you're offering I think search a journal um recently did a um an

8:04 article Roger Monte did an article about a Google patent an old Google Patent showing that Google looks at branded

8:10 searches in order to understand who you are and Order see how relevant you are which I don't think you needed a patent

8:16 to understand if okay if you're if you're I don't know um Nike if if people

8:22 are searching for Nike shoes Nike tendis shoes Nike running shoes Google sees all

8:27 of those Nike searches related to shoes and understands that okay in the shoe

8:33 space Nike is an authority but a lot of that Authority building doesn't happen on search a lot of that Authority

8:39 building happens on other platforms like YouTube or social media right right right right so so of

8:46 course as everybody says if you are starting the first thing is to build your brand even if you're doing social

8:51 media it's your brand out there you put your brand forget the keywords yeah focus on your brand as a rule focus on

8:58 your brand right now I also have some misconception about Wix which I'm sure

9:04 my listeners also would have so can I shoot some of those very quick questions let's do it okay de my developer now we

9:12 can't op we can't do htag optimizations I can't change H there are all wrong Ed

9:17 tags I can't change it in bxs true or false which tags header tags oh no

9:23 header tags no no no super easy you can change them on the page level you can

9:28 set them at the folder level so let's say for example like um I'm a local business right or I'm an Ecom I'm a

9:35 store I'm a big Ecom store right I want in all of my products I want the price

9:40 in the title tag okay two clicks right I I go to that folder where I have all my

9:45 products I set that the title tag should always show the price for all of the

9:51 products and we dynamically match the price from the page to your title tag um if you're let's say for example robots

9:57 meta Tags I'm a big proponent of Google discover I think it's a great source for Traffic John shahada from news put out a

10:04 um study recently showing that Publishers are getting a lot more traffic from discover and less traffic

10:09 from traditional search if you're trying to optimize for discover there's not a lot you can do to specifically optimize

10:15 to get placement there it's about your entity as a whole but if you do show up in Google discover you'll notice some

10:22 sites show up with a small little image and some sites with the the larger card yes you need to set your your Max image

10:30 preview to the large image to get set up with that larger image and Google discover you can do that at Wix at the

10:36 page level but again you can do that at the folder level you can say all of my blog pages I want the max image preview

10:42 to be set to large so that when my articles get shown in the Discover feed they are with the large thumbnail and

10:48 not the small thumbnail so header tags robots meta tags super easy we have an AI metatag Creator wow that's super easy

10:57 honestly didn't know that misconception number two if I create a new page I don't want to link it from the header I

11:03 just want to link it from the footer of the page can I do that you just so you want to have a jump

11:09 link to the footer of the page yeah let's say I want create a specific City page but I don't want it Link in the

11:15 header navigation I just wanted footer near somewhere around copyright okay cities we Ser in because it will not

11:21 look good in the header so can I do that yeah you you can you can put your links where you want okay problem yeah I can

11:27 modify robert. txt as want you can modify roberts. txt oh yeah absolutely

11:34 robot.txt fully customized so we set it we optimize it by default um to for

11:39 example we'll exclude I think what is it like Hawaii Hawaii's bot the Chinese phone app um I think we exclude that

11:47 from because they they're just like crawl and crawl and crawl and crawl and crawl we saw no benefit to it but I could be wrong about that but I'm pretty

11:53 sure we do uh pedal bot I think it's called but you can you can fully customize it's open to you one of the

11:58 cool things by the way is that if you're in there you change something in the robots meta uh robots meta the robot.txt

12:04 file and you're like wait a second I totally screw that up you can reset to default in one click okay that's good I

12:12 can do three ones yeah on many page types for example let's say um your your

12:18 static pages so like your homepage your about page uh you know any any kind of let's say landing page you built at the

12:23 static page will do an automatic redirect for you so for example ex let's

12:29 say you changed it from mysite.com to mysite.com

12:36 okay it's a it's a main page it's a static page we'll implement the 301 for you we have to do nothing and we'll tell

12:43 you that we're doing it when you do it beyond that you can uh bulk redirect so you can import up to 500 and you can

12:50 just bulk redirect them you can also do it by path so let's say you're changing

12:55 all of the URLs from mysite.com uh poost to mysite.com I know blog whatever it is

13:02 so anything under that fold it will be automatically redirected as well okay uh

13:10 one last question what about the technical Su because that plays a role so is it already optimized because a lot

13:17 of businesses fail issue when it comes to Shopify they pick a wrong theme and then the site is slow because it doesn't

13:23 show in the Google everything screwed up so how does it work with wigs yeah so a lot of the technical things you can hand

13:29 handle um you can reorder the Dom let's you're trying to deal with CLS you can reorder the Dom in week Studio we try to

13:35 we try to optimize the Dom automatically for you the way that it should be but you can customize all those sort of

13:40 things some things on the technical side we try to do again for you we automatically optimize your site maps for you there's flexibility so by the

13:48 way so I was like um Wick site you have to do this by a Geo but I'm thinking of the US on mobile I think it's close to

13:54 70% of of of Wick's websites pass core web vitals on on mobile in the US

13:59 off the but again there are a lot of things that you can do we automatically for

14:05 example automatically compress images for you okay so you don't have the plugin

14:12 right we don't need to do a plug-in we automatically compress the image we actually automatically cash Pages for you unless you interject custom code so

14:19 again there's a customizable thing you can interject custom code on a Wick's website and what we do is we don't cach

14:24 the page for you we automatically stop caching it why because we know the logic of your custom code so let's say for

14:31 example you added a stock widget so if we're if we're caching the page once an hour that might not be quick enough for

14:37 you but so in those instances you can set automatic caching so again there's a

14:43 lot of flexibility in what you can and what you can't do there's a lot of things you can remove they are

14:48 thirdparty scripts those are completely up to you they can weigh things down they cannot weigh things down that's up to you okay so I think that would be a

14:57 lot of misconceptions our listeners would have now are no longer the

15:02 misconceptions so thank you for sharing all that moving on now you've been a Pioneer in uh merging SE with brand

SEO and Branding Strategies

15:09 marketing as we spoke as well can you share how the roles role of SE has evolved in The Branding landscape over

15:16 the last few year and especially at yeah so I I think in general your your your

15:22 first I think what we've done is like way ahead of the curve I think you're first starting to really see SEO and

15:28 brand sort of merging now I think part of that is to do with the the Google

15:34 leaks that came out a few months ago where people started saying oh wait a second Google's looking at mentions

15:39 mention is a brand play it's not an SEO play but if Google's looking at mentions like oh I need to focus on mentions like

15:45 you should always focus on mentions but okay so you're first starting to see

15:51 that sort of thing happening I think you're also starting to see brand pay play a bigger role in general inside of

15:57 marketing I wrote an article about search about this on search engine Journal two weeks ago about why you

16:03 should be focusing on brand marketing and actually in a few hours after recording this podcast I have a follow-up article going about how you

16:09 balance brand and Performance Marketing that's going out in sech and journal so look for those because like I'll get way

16:15 into the weeds there but basically the the I think the web as an ecosystem is moving to a place where you're gonna be

16:21 focusing more on brand for a few reasons one is users are kind of woken up to the idea people forget users I hate that

16:28 word people people have woken up to the idea that what I should be spoken to

16:34 meaning don't don't speak at me with web jargon the most powerful optimized platform ever give me something real and

16:43 also let me decide when I want to buy stop pushing me so hard so I think there's that and I think there's the

16:49 idea of the AI the proliferation of AI generated content is waking people up like wait a second is this real is this

16:57 the same old garbage and brands are waking up to the idea I need to be more differentiated so you have people

17:03 looking to be spoken to and have an actual conversation and being engaged at a real level and having the ability and

17:10 the autonomy to decide I do want to buy I don't want to buy and you have Brands

17:15 looking to differentiate themselves more both of that speak to Brand marketing right differentiating yourself is done

17:21 via brand marketing if users are not looking to be pushed into the sales funnel but they want to come to it on

17:27 their own that's also brand marketing because now you need to be or need to have top of the funnel brand awareness

17:35 if people are not going to be just thrown into the funnel you want them to know who you are know that you're

17:41 somebody who is very authoritative or relevant to this to this service or this

17:47 product and have them as I mentioned before Google you or or go directly to your

17:52 website you want people to know that if I'm selling widgets let me Google this company I know they're the ones who sell

17:58 the widgets it gives the user more autonomy it gives them the choice of when to come

18:04 to you when to buy from you when to engage with you and how to engage with you and that's all done with brand

18:10 marketing so brand marketing is more and more in Focus which as a concept we can

18:16 get into how that works pushes SEO more into brand marketing because the companies themselves and the users

18:23 themselves the people the audience themselves are looking for something that's better serviced by brand than

18:28 anything else right right now now uh how do you see this working for a small brand

SEO for Small Businesses

18:35 versus uh let's say larger Enterprises I think it's I've talk about this a lot

18:41 like I think there's a misconception in general like Oh I'm a small brand I can compete it's it's the complete opposite

18:49 branding gives you the ability to carve out a niche of the web for

18:54 yourself branding is kind of what gives a small business the ability to have a pres and I think part of the

19:00 misconception is that oh the only way to do brand marketing is to go viral the only way to do brand marketing is I need

19:06 to be a super Authority I need to be a knowledge power that's not necessarily true you know a small business for

19:13 example I'll give you an actual case Starbucks right I think Starbucks is a great case I don't know if people know

19:19 this but Starbucks has gone under a lot of trouble recently some of it has to do with consumer Trends and with their

19:26 marketing strategies some of it just has to do with the fact that there's an interview with CB I think CBS or CNBC I

19:32 forgot who it was they were interviewing people why don't you like Starbucks anymore and one of the responses back

19:38 was I feel like Starbucks just became too corporate and Starbucks is now facing an issue where if I'm a person

19:45 and I have two stores right in front of me the local cafe and Starbucks I'm

19:50 going with the local cafe because Starbucks this gives me an icky corporate feel whereas the local cafe might actually not have good coffee but

19:57 I feel oh it's Boutique nich it's local it was the same thing that happened to beer companies over the

20:03 I don't know like the last 20 years the smaller craft breweries started popping up gaining market share and some of the

20:11 Brew some of the big breweries dealt with it by controlling distribution that's a whole complicated story of how they do that but some of them dealt with

20:19 it by leaning into being more Niche being more local so Kors Kors created

20:25 Blue Moon which is a craft brew that people don't realize is actually

20:32 part of Kes but it comes off as crap Starbucks would be doing well to do the same thing

20:39 Starbucks would do well to create a sub brand that's local where it's not necessarily Starbucks it's Bob's coffee

20:46 but really it's Starbucks local brands have that power going for it your

20:51 Grassroots you're likable you're not corporate you're all of those things and

20:57 they should lean into that to gain market share what I think what local brands do that make a mistake is they

21:02 feel like oh we need to compete with Starbucks and we need to be in Authority we need to have market share like

21:08 Starbucks no you don't you need to be differentiated from Starbucks so instead of trying to fight the big brands for

21:14 visibility fighting the big brands for that brand Persona I would I would I would find the

21:21 the opportunity by looking what are the big Brands not what can't they do and be

21:27 that and serve that and don't go I need to get a million people drinking my coffee like Starbucks think about how

21:33 you can steer your brand identity and brand positioning to take advantage of everything Starbucks can't

21:39 be right right uh I completely agree with

21:44 you I think that's one reason why Starbucks replac their CEO and their share move 20% just yesterday yeah there

21:52 you go yeah now now how can uh of course so when it comes to Brand marketing I

Leveraging SEO for Small Businesses

21:58 understand for a small business but how can small businesses leverage SEO to not only improve their rankings but also

22:06 build a a strong brand identity yes so I think like one thing to realize about SE

22:11 and branding is your content is your brand whatever you put out there is your

22:17 brand that's what people are can see and that's how they can interpret what you're doing understanding that you need

22:22 to balance your SEO strategy with your brand strategy so for example if you're going to if you're a small business who's just going to go after after the

22:28 local SEO keywords or going after the the whatever keyword market share you can gain and going full on SEO with it

22:36 everything kind of feels like SEO content everything kind of comes off as SEO content you're doing yourself a

22:43 disservice you might win the rankings but once the user gets to you what are they feeling about you what's the

22:49 associations they're creating what's the sentiment they're creating so you need to balance having a very strategic SEO

22:55 strategy to capitalize on local SEO or local keyword market share doing it in a way that doesn't tarnish your brand to

23:02 look when a brand does something like um dentist near me and they name their

23:07 brand dentist near me yeah people aren't stupid they know why you're doing that

23:13 and you come off as a little bit spammy I am not letting you near my mouth I don't care how cheap you are I'm not

23:20 letting you near my mouth so you need to balance that that local strategy to get those local keywords with not coming off

23:27 as over like manipulative and scammy at the same time right right right so in many of

Wix’s User Intent SEO Strategy

23:35 your talks you emphasize the importance of user Centric content and uh how does

23:41 vix incorporate user intent and behavior into its SEO strategies I mean look what

23:46 we're doing now so we have like a wix's Blog and we have an SEO Learning Hub a lot of the topics that we cover kind of

23:52 overlap so the wix's blog will cover what is SEO we will not cover what is SEO on the SEO Learning Hub as a keyword

24:00 targeting why because there's different intents our the intent of our Wix SEO

24:05 Learning Hub is geared towards SEO professionals or SEO enthusiasts or people who doing SEO for a long time or

24:11 getting started in SEO it's SEO from a more professional mindset like I earn my

24:17 living or I'm building up my my business with SEO whereas if you're on the wix's blog

24:24 and you're you're maybe a self-c Creator or you're a business owner or where and you're just looking to get a little

24:31 dabble into what is SEO I'm just looking to get started that's not the same intent are two different intents it

24:37 might be the same keyword and we can both rank for them on different parts of the website but it's a if you're looking

24:43 for what is SEO we look at that is you're really really just at the very

24:50 very beginning of your of your journey maybe a professional SEO Learning Center

24:55 is not for you yet we might steer you there in that article on the on the wix's blog

25:01 we might have links to hey if you now know about SEO and you want to go a

25:06 little bit deeper into the weeds here's a whole Learning Hub about it but we're not going to try to Target you with the

25:11 wrong asset at the wrong time we'll try to use our assets and line them up with user intent okay so we can also show how

25:21 where the person is in the funnel is it in the bottom of the funnel it's kind of similar right yeah I mean we look at it

25:27 as like less of like I look at it at least I W speak for the entire team as less about funnels and more about where

25:33 the user mindset is which I think would align to a funnel I think the funnel is messy which I don't like thinking about

25:38 funnels because of that but if you think about where the user is on their Learning Journey it should usually match

25:44 up to where they are in their buying Journey also right right right right I

25:49 hope yeah yes so now what are your thoughts on the current state of su education and are there any resources

Best SEO Learning Resources

25:56 you would recommend for beginners I know one for sure the SE Learning Hub at Wix but what are your thoughts there are

26:02 okay there are a lot of great resources obviously I'm pitching the SEO Learning Hub we have lot of we have a podcast we

26:09 have webinars we do a daily news Series so you can keep up the SEO news with Barry Schwarz who's like the king of SEO

26:15 news there's a lot there I will say like diving deeper into the SEO news is a

26:21 great way to learn SEO it's how I learned SEO to be honest with you I went to se roundtable.com I still go to se

26:28 table.com every day in the morning s land all those kind of websites to see like what's going on where's the SEO

26:35 World heading and I think what happens at the same time you'll start seeing things like you know barer will cover a

26:41 certain topic like what is that I don't know what that is and that still happens to me every once in a while B I'm like what is that and you start googling and

26:48 start researching yourself like what is that topic so I think that's a great way to learn about SEO social media can

26:54 still be a great way to learn about SEO so follow people like Glen Gab G Glen Gabe is an absolute wealth of SEO

27:01 knowledge follow him on X M Solus is an absolute wealth of SEO knowledge he's on LinkedIn and x i and Glenn's also on on

27:08 LinkedIn so following the right people will lead you to the right resources because they'll quote the right

27:14 resources for you as well right uh those are some of actually

27:20 good content creators for Su of course get a lot of information I follow almost all of them yeah they're really great

27:27 like Glenn is great A is great Kevin indig Eli Schwarz there's there's a ton of people out there I have

27:33 interviewed Elli just recently as well nice yeah Nathan also Nathan gosh also

27:39 does good oh yeah there's really a lot of good people you do have to be careful because there are some people who might

27:45 have very large followings who may not be the best yes giving the best SEO advice yeah because recently I've seen

27:52 most of the people who are giving best seos advice if you ask when was the last time you read this they say a couple of

27:57 years back so that doesn't hold true now so yeah or there's a lot of like you know what

28:03 what's traditionally called a bad name for but black hat SEO like link building or link building in a in a in a

28:09 nefarious or manipulative kind of way and a lot of those people have a lot of huge followings but they're giving you

28:14 advice that actually I think isn't isn't helpful long term to you right right

28:19 right with the constant evoluation of Google algorithms how do you stay ahead of the curve and ensure Vick's Su

28:26 strategies remain effective I know one is by reading all these blocks but are there any other way you stay ahead and

28:32 how do you ensure that Wix Su strategies especially once AI these Google updates

28:38 recently came so a general Point like the current ecosystem around SEO is very

28:44 difficult there's been a lot of upheaval a lot of inconsistency on Google's part

28:50 and a lot of just things don't seem to be working exactly right I think if you were to ask Google honestly the is this

28:57 working they way that you intended it to work I think they would say no and then we need to fix it which is why you have

29:04 people like Google search liais on Denny s of a meeting with websites talking we're taking feedback we're trying to

29:09 see what's going on John Mueller of Google search Advocate has even said yeah we expect things to change with the

29:15 next core update I think they get it like something happened that didn't go

29:21 just right and I'm not saying I think people are very negative on Google about that I think it's very hard to get it

29:26 right especially as you see as I mentioned before consumer content

29:31 content consumption Behavior patterns are changing both because what users are expecting and both because what's being

29:38 put out there because of the AI content generative content it's hard to get it right I think Google is looking to get

29:45 certain things done that the web isn't ready for yet and that's on both of us as content creators and on Google to get

29:51 that right for example firsthand knowledge in content Google says we want it Google dumped a bunch of Reddit on

29:58 the result pages to get that because we haven't created it for Google and that's

30:04 bothy because or both because we're not focused on that and

30:10 because Google hasn't incentivized that we're both at fault for that right um so

30:15 it just makes it a complicated landscape to rank content or to feel confident in what my strategy is to rank content

30:22 because I can be doing the right things and not I think now more than ever you might be doing the right things and not

30:29 getting the results that you wanted to at least in the immediate sense yes I think it's important and I can't speak

30:36 to the wider SEO strategy at Wix obviously we speak to the wider SEO teams but on our SEO Learning Hub we are

30:41 all about our SEO strategy is all about doing the right thing long term where

30:47 where is the what is the right way to create content for users that speak to the intent that speak to the users that

30:54 help build up our brand that help create content that's different differentiated that even though it might not rank right

31:01 now we feel confident that once Google gets things under control will be the content that ranks now obviously it's a

31:08 little bit more we have the luxury of doing that because we're not trying to build signups on our SEO learning how

31:14 we're trying to build a brand if you are trying to get signups and conversions in Revenue obviously that approach is way

31:22 more anxiety written way more complicated I will say you it doesn't mean that you should abandon in it just

31:28 because it's not working right now think about what's best long term for the health of your of your of your

31:35 content and and mitigate that by trying to do the things that'll maybe move the needle right now but I wouldn't abandon

31:41 an entire content strategy because Google's not working right right now play the long game right that's a good

31:48 advice because even if a lot of people left affiliate marketing a lot of people said Google I mean jillion of things but

31:54 I believe there is a course correction coming ahead yeah there's a it's a course correction on both sides look

32:00 affiliate marketers I don't want to you know call them out but there are a lot of things

32:05 going on that I think weren't healthy for the state of the web that Google we have a whole podcast episode about this

32:12 with Glen Gabe where we go like is Google at war with Affiliates and the answer is yes I think Google is at war with affiliate marketing but that

32:19 doesn't mean that done right Google won't reward affiliate marketing either right right now let's talk about

AI's Impact on SEO

32:27 AI and of course any podcast how can we leave AI so the AI is of course rapid

32:33 has rapidly transformed content creation so what are your thoughts on use of use of AI in generating content do you think

32:39 it can ever fully replace human creativity I'll give you a heart take I think that's crazy think I think even

32:45 the thought that it could is crazy yes AI is a very powerful tool I think there's been a couple a couple things

32:52 that that have that we need to take a pause just because something is amazing

32:58 it's cool it's Innovative wow doesn't mean there's a business case to using it

33:03 those are two very different questions so yeah AI can do all these great cool things but when I apply it to my to my

33:10 business use does it actually work the way that I wanted to or not that's two

33:16 very different questions and I think what you're seeing at least in the marketing space is a subtle push back

33:23 where every was ai ai amazing amazing amazing and now was wait a second wait a second is this differentiating me enough

33:31 is this giving me the ability to rank well enough maybe maybe I don't want to go all in on AI just be and I think you

33:37 have you know things like oh you're selling me on an AI tool I think you're starting to see even in public now

33:43 marketers saying pause is this what I really want and

33:49 does it really work the way that I wanted to I know that it's Ai and it sounds cool but let's let's hash this

33:55 out a little bit more so there is a place for AI if you're not adopting AI

34:00 if you're not thinking about AI if you're not focusing on AI I think you're you're you you've missed the boat if

34:06 you've gone at the same time if you've gone all in an AI too far there has to be a balance between using Ai and using

34:14 AI the right way if you're using it to spin up content I think that's the wrong

34:19 way to use AI I think if you want to generate ideas if you want to refine things if you want to say hey I wrote

34:26 this post something about it isn't working right could you maybe like redo the tone for me uh could you give me

34:31 some ideas could you redo the headings for me I think if you give AI a particular mission to do within a walled

34:40 off context where you're giving it parameters where you're saying take something I already did and make it

34:46 better or make it different or generate ideas for me that's a great way to use AI right that's a good use case actually

34:54 now how does vix balance the use of AI tools with the need of authentic uh brand align

35:00 content I mean look we get we're a platform so we give you the tools what you do with them are completely up to

35:07 you so for example we have um an AI meta tag Creator so I can I can write a title

35:12 tag or a meta description the AI will scan the page you can even tell the

35:18 AI I'm talking like it's an actual thing of the AI you can even tell it which what's your focus keyword and it'll spit

35:24 back a title tag or a meta description for you I love using it for meta descriptions I don't care about metad

35:31 descriptions go ahead write me a meta description that's not a ranking Factor just a click it's not really a ranking

35:37 factor that directly Google's rewriting them anyway half half a time anyway and

35:42 what the AI outputs is generally pretty good because again it's a it's a walled context you're not telling it write me a

35:48 meta description you're saying look what I wrote on the page take this keyword and now write me something you're giving

35:53 you're giving it some context or some some meat to work with right so again it's it's but I might not I might say

36:00 Hey you know wait a second like this is a really important keyword for me a really important converting page what

36:05 the AI wrad is good but it's not good enough or I want to refine the messaging because it's something that's really important to me I'm gonna put my own

36:12 personal spice and touch into it what you do with the AI like we can give you AI that spins up websites we have ai

36:19 that spins out content you could do all of those things do I recommend you go Okay click the button and do it and then

36:25 leave it 1,000 % no that is not how you should be using our tools for AI or our

36:31 AI tools you should be using them but then putting your own personal emphasis or own personal touch or own personal

36:38 focus into it afterwards right now there's been a lot

Understanding EAT in SEO

36:44 of discussions around eat and of course can you elaborate on the importance of eat in SE and how can business build it

36:53 yes so there's always been like you know um SEO I guess like I'll say it's like what's

36:59 we're looking for it's a um not a confrontation charg with the sea conflict no oh my gosh I tip my tongue

37:07 and I can't get it out there but a scandal all right whatever there been like an SEO Scandal of some sort it's

37:12 not the word I was looking for where is eat part of the ranking system is it not

37:18 part of the ranking system blah blah blah so eat comes from Google's quality radar guidelines those are the actual

37:25 people Google is paying to review content content and Google's telling them here are some guidelines about how

37:31 you should score this content and part of this scoring that they do is called eat experience expertise

37:37 authoritativeness and trustworthiness great is it playing a role in the

37:42 algorithm so I'll say two things on this one who cares if Google is telling its readers this is what this is how you

37:49 should be looking at quality then that automatically tells us

37:54 that this is what Google really wants to do with quality or how it really defines page quality so why wouldn't you do that

38:02 the second thing why it doesn't matter is if it's good for your users which it is then do that the third thing is

38:08 Google has said they try to simulate as best as they can what quality to a human

38:15 would be with the algorithm obviously it's not a one to one but they're trying to assess quality algorithmically you

38:23 saw that with what was the helpful content update which now part of the actual core algorithm where quality is a

38:28 domain level constructs right right so you clearly

38:34 see Google is looking at quality is trying to simulate the quality the best

38:39 that it could from how a user or person will look at it so obviously looking at eat would be helpful in understanding

38:47 how Google is thinking about quality so the answer is yes on multiple

38:53 fronts you should be looking at what is Google saying about eat and you should

38:59 really be going Beyond it how how would you best Define what's Experience L

39:05 content what's expertise Le content how would you define Authority that even goes beyond what Google is is saying in

39:11 their quality rer guidelines and what speaks to the actual user themselves right right right so do you

39:17 you you follow or use eat guidelines on Wix blog I mean look when we're writing

39:23 content we we do want to make sure for example on the Wix SEO Learning Hub that have our authors there prominently so

39:29 you know who wrote it you can understand that this person is an expert on this topic does that play into the algorithm

39:35 I like to think so we we very much try to focus on offering you an experience

39:40 in the content that's driven by people's actual experience on that topic so we're

39:45 talking about how to build an SEO report so we have an article from Judith Lewis

39:50 on that Judith Lewis is an expert on on creating SEO reporting and she's pulling in her own experience of crafting SEO

39:58 reporting over the last 15 years or or more I don't want to Short Change Judith

40:04 into into how you should be crafting your report so we like to think that

40:09 we're naturally integrating eat into our content simply based on our own on our

40:15 own editorial guidelines right so our editorial guidelines are focused on

40:20 Crafting content based on what's actually worked for you and I was like all right I'm just going to spit out

40:26 some content okay now let's talk about challenges in

Current SEO Challenges

40:31 the Su today of course there are a lot of challenges we both know so what are some unique SEO challenges that website

40:38 Builders like Wix face and how are they addressing them I mean I think it's the

40:43 same challenges that we're all kind of facing the ecosystem is very uncertain you have things like um the AI overviews

40:49 so in the US particularly Google has Unleashed its AI overviews the aios

40:55 different data sets will say how often they actually show up ranging from like like very not very commonly at all

41:01 you're talking about right yeah the sge what was sge Google's now rebranded as

41:06 AI overviews how are they playing a role in what's ranking in the traffic you're

41:12 going you're going to get I think we're still not there in terms of understanding that ecosystem I think

41:17 people are freaking out one thing that I'm looking at by the way it's like okay

41:22 great the AI overviews may show up 15% of the time or 15 % of queries or 7% of

41:29 queries depending upon the data set but one thing to think about is how how secure are the URLs is is Google using a

41:36 different URL inside of the same AI overview one day to the next day we

41:42 don't know yet by the way little like I don't know like a soft pitch or teaser

41:48 it's something that I'm working with semrush now and doing a study about like how how consistent is URL placement

41:54 inside of an AI overview because that might change my entire strategy or it

41:59 might change how much I actually care to focus on AI if Google is showing the same URL every single day inside an AI

42:08 overview maybe it's worth getting that link if Google's showing a different one every single day okay yeah the a

42:14 overview is there but maybe it's not worth spending my time on so there's a lot of uncertainty in the market right

42:22 now and that's doubled down on the fact that the algorithm seems a little bit wonky

42:27 there's a ton of Reddit on the Ser Google is maybe not showing the best results for the for the queries right now it's it's all kind of a an ecos

42:35 system of uncertainty right now I think that is the biggest challenge to an SEO professional at the moment right I

Biggest Challenges for SEOs Today

42:41 completely agree now just a follow-up question of course more complex than ever are there any other biggest

42:47 challenges you see for Su today particularly when trying to align their brand I think from that front the

42:54 biggest challenge for an SEO is take seos are Fally performance marketers and I don't think Performance Marketing is

43:00 what makes sense right now so if you look for example what Nike did Nike went all in on Performance Marketing since

43:05 covid has been a giant disaster for them and actually led to other brands let's

43:11 say like Hoka or an to having more shelf space at stores like Foot Locker which is not what Nike wanted gave their

43:17 competitors an opportunity to really create a very strong foot hold because they went all in on performance

43:23 marketers and I know seos listening to this will probably call me a heretic for saying this but as a brand you do not

43:30 want to give the keys to the kingdom or the keys to the car to the performance marketing team to the seos what you

43:37 really want to do is have SEO or Performance Marketing as a in general sit under brand and Communications so

43:44 that there's a unified approach to how are we presenting ourselves what opportunities are available to us

43:50 because of our overall brand power and what do we and don't we want to seize and how do we want to seize it from a

43:57 much wider strategy Beyond just SEO or just performance because if if you do

44:03 you'll end up in a situation where you're not aligned to what your audience actually expects which is literally what

44:09 happened with Nike and then you see by the way it impacts the other side Nike's brand Team I think right now is

44:15 completely out of sync they they're not where they want to be and they're not putting out the measuring they want to

44:21 because the overall company is at a sync because of they double down in performance which is a totally different

44:27 conversation but it's super interesting to see what Nike did I think they're the Paradigm for not going all in on

44:33 performance because it'll mess you up on the performance side and it'll mess you up on the brand side right right right I

44:40 know like all your entire audience is like shaking their head at me like oh my God I can't believe we just said that we're all performance marketers what are

44:47 you saying we want more control not less yes yeah I agree sorry I'm really sorry I said that no no you just said what is

Advising Brands on SEO Challenges

44:55 right so how do you you advise Brands dealing with these challenges especially in a rapidly challenging Market of

45:02 course when you said don't give it everything to the performance marketer but otherwise how do you advise yeah you really I think brands

45:09 are you know what I'll compare it to affiliate marketers I think affiliate marketers now realize that you have to

45:17 take your foot a little bit off the gas pedal you can't go fullon trying to get

45:22 traffic to the affiliate sites because you know Google's going to kill you if you do that this case it's not Google

45:28 not just Google that's going to kill you it's your own consumer base that's going to do it or your own potential consumer

45:34 base if you go full on in on what Performance Marketing will tell you to do which is maximize Revenue maximize

45:42 kpis ignore the wider messaging and go with what works right now to get a sign up to get a conversion to get a dollar

45:49 spent I think in in a year from now two year whatever it is your overall consumer base is going to kill you and

45:55 they're going to say we like that just like they're saying with Starbucks now it's too corporate they're going to say

46:01 to you like that's too much that's too salesy it's too markety it's too

46:07 controlling it's too coercive it's too bothersome it's too whatever

46:13 you have to take your foot off the gas pedal and I think by the way I'll give

46:19 you another hot take I think it's going to mean that brand teams are going to

46:24 have to start realizing that half the things they're doing are not actual brand marketing it's product marketing

46:30 and Performance Marketing in Disguise you going online and you saying we have the best product is not brand marketing

46:37 that's product marketing which is basically per like the borderline before you get to Performance Marketing so I

46:43 think everyone needs to get take a break take a chill pill stop trying to push

46:48 what's good for the immediate sale and the immediate sign up and think what's good for your ecosystem longterm that

46:55 gives you long-term stable growth over time okay so that's interesting take so let's

Technical SEO Insights

47:03 talk a little bit about technical issue uh now with the increasing importance of user experience and Page

47:10 speed how does vix ensure its technical SEO foundations remains solid and

47:16 competitive I mean you know so I want to say two things about performance I think like seos have kind of blown performance

47:21 out of out of the water um or out of proportion rather and I think Google's partly the blame because what they

47:27 wanted to do with cor web vital was try to like make the the web uh more improved from a performance point of

47:32 view which would save them a lot of money I don't think it's been effective at all I think what people have

47:37 basically seen you see I think you've seen Google themselves do this because some of their Pages cor vitals think is

47:43 people decide when they want the tradeoff and when they don't want the tradeoff I think a lot of the things

47:48 that would get you Corb vitals would also mean less conversions so websites I know this for a fact will say

47:57 we're not going to optimize for Corb vitals here we're going to optimize for the conversion I want that very heavy

48:02 image there I want that gift I want whatever it is there because it brings me conversions which is why I think Corb

48:07 vital has been ultimately a failure because it forced a tradeoff if you want to improve performance across the web

48:14 you can't force a trade-off it has to work together right so leaving that aside for a minute where core web V and

48:21 Google has said this and basically every SEO study on the planet from semrush to Bright Edge had basically shown this

48:27 where core web vitals matter is basically nowhere except where you have

48:33 you have a runoff where you have two petas that are very similar um that Google Now needs to decide like what's

48:39 going to tip the scale Google said that that's where we look at cor vitals so for example in the news space cor vitals

48:46 is very very important syndicated content I'm ABC News and I'm NBC news we have the exact same content we're just

48:53 pulling it from the AP PHP is going to be a deciding fact for example one of the deciding factors right that said

49:01 page speed is I think predominantly or performance is predominant way more important for Consumer

49:07 satisfaction in most cases than it is for SEO so one of the things that we'll

49:12 look at we're we're con we have an entire team dedicated to constantly improving things so when Google by the

49:18 way switched from FID to inp we were one of the teams that Google was talking up

49:23 to about how do we best go about making that change what's the best way to make the

49:29 change from focusing on first input delay to interaction to next paint our team is one of the teams working with

49:35 Google hand in hand to make that change possible so we're we're constantly talking to Google we're talking to Bing

49:41 we're talking to a lot of different players in in the performance field to make sure that what we're doing to a

49:48 make sure that what the the changes that search engines make actually make sense for the web and and because we're

49:54 talking with them we're making those changes inside of our own platform to make sure that our users are getting the maximum benefit from a performance point

50:01 of view from our platform before Google even makes the change for example okay because most of the time

50:08 businesses comes to us and we talk about speed and then we end up they were no I just want my speed and we just pull up

50:14 the top three results and we say look at that I mean why are we it's like it's

50:20 like the 100 meter dash rate in the Olympic where it just mattered for the winner was with 05 seconds that's where

50:27 it only not yeah thankfully somebody else spoke so I can always refer to this

50:32 podcast so they say you just cooking up because you don't want to do it I said you know I'll quote bar or paraphrase

50:39 Barry Schwarz from search Eng and land search around about he's like why are you spending so much of your time focus

50:46 on this what there's got to be bigger things that make a bigger impact yes unless the site is visibly

50:53 slow I don't think anything else matters if it's exceedingly slow to the point

50:58 where users are going to bounce and Google is going to bounce then you should fix that yes that's the only

51:04 thing right right so let's talk about the future of SEO looking ahead of

Future Trends in SEO

51:09 course not everybody sees that very bright but where do you see the future of SEO heading and what should the seos

51:16 be preparing for in the next five years I know none of us can prepare for the next one year for that matter sake but

51:23 still your take you know I I think I was talking to my my counterpart at Wicks Crystal Carter the co-host of our

51:29 podcast serps up about you know is SEO dead and one of the points that she made I thought was a really nice point was

51:35 that no SEO is not dead but I think how we think about SEO might be dying and

51:40 that's again as we mentioned before this idea of SEO being very siloed off from other marketing disciplines I think over

51:46 the years you've kind of seen like a merger between SEO and say content strategy or content marketing I think

51:52 that's like a precursor to what SEO is actually going to to look like when SEO is actually going to be it's going to be

51:58 a much mult much more multi-discipline activity it's going to consider other the needs of other

52:05 disciplines much more than it currently does and I think you're going to see SEO be integrated into other activities

52:13 right it's integrated into my content strategy it's integrated into my brand strategy right if I can if if I'm a

52:21 brand marketer I would be thinking about how can I lever how can I build Brand Power how could I position my brand in a

52:28 certain way that makes me an authority on a certain subject or subssub and now how can I leverage that brand power for

52:35 SEO and I think Brands hopefully will be thinking about exactly that which will

52:42 create more opportunity for seos but it'll create more opportunity for seos from a very different or unique point of

52:49 view or context so H how is vix uh positioning

52:55 itself to in this SEO landscape to lead in this SEO landscape I mean we listen

53:00 we're all in on SEO I think it's it's probably one from a user point of view it's probably one of if not the one of

53:08 the more popular topics among our audience among our user base it's also

53:13 one of our greatest growth channels so we say like we're an SEO first company

53:19 we literally mean we're an SEO first company in terms of the product in terms of what our audience is interested in

53:25 and in terms of what we actually do for our own growth it's first and foremost

53:31 the top of our mind what is going to happen with SEO and how do we adopt SEO

53:36 practices that are going to position us for long-term success in five years from now kind of thing okay that's

53:42 interesting to have an SEO first platform to uh for people to use yes

SEO Rand Insights

53:49 yeah now you host the SEO Rand podcast of course uh what inspired you to start

53:55 it and what's your approach of creating engaging content I host a lot of podcasts I do the SEO ramp podcast um I

54:02 do wix's Ser up Podcast okay which is another SEO podcast and I co-host edge

54:08 of the web's News podcast every week and I guess our daily SEO news series on the

54:15 on YouTube is also syndicated across podcast I believe so that's also a podcast it's new it's called on the SEO

54:22 Rand side I that really started as a side thing I wanted to continue to have conversations with seos just for my own

54:28 sake to be connected with people to put out some really interesting content to give seos a chance to speak about SEO in

54:35 a like unfiltered kind of way so that's how that basically started I didn't it wasn't meant to grow you know a million

54:41 users it wasn't meant to grow my brand I really just wanted to connect with other seos and put out content put out the

54:48 conversations that seos would have behind the scenes but put it out there in public okay and so what's your approach

54:57 to creating engaging content so um engaging content I think it's I think

55:02 it's two things my my personal approach there's nothing to do with what we do on on the on the Wix SEO side my personal

55:09 approach is to be a little bit real I won't maybe my posts aren't the most polished posts think five ways to do

55:15 whatever whatever that's not what I'm looking to do I'm looking to give you like what am I actually thinking or to

55:20 give you a contrarian point of view like if you're all everyone's all hot about this maybe pump the brakes on that

55:27 because of this reason so I'm trying to give you just a little bit of a different take I'm also giving you a

55:32 more of a conceptual take maybe to my detriment steer away from three practical things you can do I'd rather

55:38 give you a mindset here's a mindset that you can take and now apply that to whatever you want to apply it to kind of

55:45 thing okay all right myty thank you for sharing your valuable insights is there

55:51 anything you are particularly excited about that's coming at vix or in the Su world that you like to share with our

What's Next for Wix and SEO

55:57 listeners yeah I mean look on on our on our SEO Hub side we're putting out um a new 100th episode of our podcast soon

56:05 it's going to be a live podcast you can tune in and join us and see how many times I flood my intros another podcast

56:12 yeah right and we're putting out some new resources downloadable resources on our SEO Hub so check those out as well

56:18 we're always putting out new contents I'm always excited about that okay and are there any books or

Recommended SEO Books

56:24 resources you recommend uh books on top of my head always keep an eye on what Al sess is doing and what Glen Gabe is

56:30 doing as I mentioned before those are like Lily Ray as well keep that an eye on with the content they're putting out

56:35 they're like that running record especially Lily and Glenn about what they're putting out around the algorithm updates it's almost like a running

56:41 record of what's what's happening in the SEO world I'm I'm always excited to see what they're saying and I would highly

56:47 recommend you keep up with them yeah even Google is noticing them now Google throws them for a long time yes I meant

56:54 they are very actively now yeah right yes right so and how can our audience

Staying Connected with Mordy Oberstein

56:59 stay connected with you and follow your work yeah I'm I'm on LinkedIn a lot so look for me on LinkedIn um under my name

57:05 Morty obstein I'm on X as well my handle is at Morty overin so look for me there I try to be really you know responsive

57:12 so if you reach me out to me there I try to actually answer you so I will answer you if you reach out to me okay and uh

57:19 the listeners can reach out for their Wix pins as well yeah absolutely I'm

57:24 happy to take feedback and questions right right right okay thank you once again for joining us Marty it's been a

Thank You Note

57:29 fantastic conversation and I'm sure our listeners have gained a lot of value from me until next time thank you