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The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.
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Hey, what's going on? My name is Tyson Stockton from Pre Visible IO and joining me today is Alex Silverberg, friend of the podcast and also President and SEO strategist at AP SEO. With a decade of industry experience serving B2B B2C E commerce websites, AP SEO's mission is to empower business owners to make more informed decisions about their digital marketing future. In today's episode, Alex and I are going to be discussing how to optimize for sge. With that, here's my conversation with Alex Silverberg, SEO Strategist and President at AP SEO. Alex, welcome to the podcast.
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Tyson. Thank you for having me. Been wanting to get on for a while, talk shop with you and you know, get that SEO knowledge out there. So excited to be here.
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B
Yeah, I've been looking forward to having you on the podcast. I think it's been a little overdue, so I'm glad that we finally got the time and I'm really excited to hear what you have to share with our listeners here. Of course, SG is a hot topic. The much anticipated. Depending on Google's plans for this, maybe it's already started to roll out in a larger form with this, but I think it's very timely for where we're at on it. So maybe to start things off with the listeners and I'm sure a lot of SEOs, whether they're in house or in the agency kind of function, are getting questions from clients or upper management of what's going on, what to expect, first level set. Should SEOs be significantly concerned by this?
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C
That's a great question, Tyson. And I think it's something that again, we are getting from a lot of our clients, companies we work with, anyone who's interfacing with us. This is a very, very hot topic. Like you said, sge. Sg, what is sge? Well, sge, in my opinion is another experiment by Google. And Google has a lot of experiments out there when it comes to search. And as SEOs know and anyone who uses the search engine on a daily basis, anything they roll out isn't really going to be fully complete until they iterate update after update and after update. So go back to your question. Should SEOs be concerned with this? Yes, because anything Google does is going to affect SEO. I think there's a lot of anxiety, I think there's a lot of trepidation, I think there's a lot of apprehension about SGE just because of how fundamental it's going to change how we view search results and how users click through search results. I've heard a lot of concerns about I'm a small website. Is my content just going to get thrown out the window and is Google going to steal my content here? Maybe, maybe not. I've heard a lot of questions about, hey, I have this really great featured snippet right now and we worked really, really hard to get this. We invested a lot of money into research and getting to this where it needs to be. Am I going to lose my future snippet to that? I would say maybe, maybe not. And you're seeing a pattern here, right? And the reason for that is no one really knows what SGE is going to be at the end of the day, the final product. But what we're seeing right now, there are some things to be concerned about if you're not optimizing your site correctly, if you're not investing in things that are going to help SEO today and in the future.
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B
So I guess with that I completely agree that it's like what we've seen so far may not be or is not the final state of this. And there's going to be iterations, there's going to be testing of how overall intent is being satisfied by these different elements being brought in. What recommendations would you have for whether it's a business owner, an in house again like across the board of just trying to make sense of like what the potential impact could be like on the business. And I know we were not going to know exactly what it is, but it's like I feel like there's probably a pretty significant variation in like types of queries and you know, how prominent SGE or elements of it could be on different queries. So like how do you think about like potential business impact on of a larger rollout of sge?
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C
That's a great question and I think you need to ask yourself, does your organization invest in a lot of short tail keywords? Right. Are all of your rankings tied to keywords that are very Generic, for lack of a better term, are they tied to pieces of content where you're just kind of giving general information and not really providing very specific sources? Any type of information that could be pulled from the website that is super, super specific. Is that happening? All these things are going to really matter quite a bit with sge. Now to your point, the machine's not done doing this. There's constant changes to the amount of text presented, the size of the SG window and the visible sources across multiple queries and different queries. Everything is different. For example, if you're trying to buy something online, there's an idea that, well, maybe this will SG will be a good thing because it's going to highlight your product imagery a little bit more and get your stuff out there. But then for someone who's just more content marketing driven, right. And trying to get leads and other sources from expert information, these are where I'm seeing a lot of the anxieties come from in that, hey, my content is good, but I don't know if it's great right now and I don't know what SG is going to serve here. So really, you know, what is the impact that would depend on your business, that would depend on your vertical. For something like E Commerce, I could see it being very helpful because it's going to present the user, your product in a way that they don't have to go to your website and it's going to refer to your website for something that's more content driven. It's going to be a little bit more difficult to predict. And really there are some things you can do within your content to make sure that you are prepared for this change.
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Interesting. I love that you made the call out there on the keyword portfolio of which your domain is ranking for. And to me that makes a lot of sense because obviously on the top of funnel head terms is in my opinion, I mean, sounds like we share this is going to be more likely to have these integrations or at least larger elements in the integrations. And the longer tail may be a little bit, you know, trickier and I feel like during the buying cycle, like, yeah, you're not going to be purchasing directly through any of these, you know, let's just call them cert features. So the long tail is probably a little safer. And so I think that's a great recommendation to whether it's business owners or SEOs out there to be, you know, having that honest look of what are you ranking for what's driving traffic and also like what's driving value to the website. Not just kind of like the the fluff traffic. But you kind of ended that last piece on some content elements that may perform stronger with this type of integration or rollout. What are you seeing and what are your recommendations along like content that's going to succeed and kind of like live past the test of time with these kind of shifts?
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Sure. And a lot of those elements are things that are just best practice for good SEO, good content SEO as well. One tip I've seen across SG predictions and kind of experiments is use important keywords early on in your title tags if you can. This helps the machine really understand what your page is about off the bat and they don't really have to go in there and pull the content itself within the content itself. Try to leverage the long tail keywords that align with the queries that you're looking for. This is going to be a little tricky because the SGE will have to be live for a little bit. So you could do some analysis. But say your competitors are ranking for a hot chocolate recipe and you can see that they're using very specific words of content in there, very specific elements in terms of how the data is structured both on the page and in the background and the schema. These are things you want to pay attention to to see if you can replicate. This one has been a hot topic for the last six to 12 months, but AI content, that's fine, but make sure that it has a human touch to match the tone of the rest of your website. Make sure the language is natural and that it's fitting the rest of your website's tone. And then this one is huge and really big even before sge and I think it's going to be even more important after it's rolled out. But quality content that aligns with your search intent. So make sure every page on your website has a purpose and that the content matches that purpose to a T. So if you're trying to sell something, maybe it's not a good idea to put all the informational content on that page. Maybe that informational content would be better suited for a landing page or a blog or something like that. Same thing with transactional content. Make sure the transactional content lives on the page where the user can purchase or submit their information to get get more info on your services site websites that have really reputable sources and stuff like that. So anything that you're talking about, especially within the your money or your life category, that is anything that is related to your health or Anything that's going to be related to a purchasing decision. If you are writing content and you are making claims, it's really, really important you put a link with a reputable source there because the machine is going to be taking a look at this and it's going to be kind of scoring you for quality. In the sge there I talked about structure. So stuff like headings, subheadings, bullet points, lists, everything that you would use to try to gain a featured snippet, for example, in the past, is going to be helpful here. Double down on your structured data and your schema markup. I think that's really, really important. I think that's an element that is very underrated in the current SEO landscape and it's only going to help you with SGE and the further large language models that Google is going to be rolling out because quite frankly, a lot of times it's not even going to look at your content immediately. Right. It's going to look at your structured data, it's going to look at your back end stuff, it's going to look at everything that it can to kind of pull a big picture there. So if you could just maximize those elements, it's going to help you in sge. There have been some additional studies that say that if you invest in attractive imagery in your content, this does help with sge. The theory here being that SGE is a visual search model and having good images can help you within that search.
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Amazing advice. And I mean there's a lot in there too. I'd like to double back just a little bit on the schema markup or structured data. Like I think that's a great call out. I mean, you said it. It's not just on sge, but it's something that that's going to have significance within search in general moving forward. Any general best practices that you give to the listeners on making sure that they didn't miss anything or they've satisfied the box here on the structured data.
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C
Sure. And structured data can be tricky and it can be its own discipline in and of itself. So I would absolutely recommend you go to schema.org you kind of see what they have there in terms of documentation. Also go to Google Search Console and look at Google's documentation itself for schema and structured data. Take that one with a grain of salt here or there as they could sometimes contradict themselves, but it's going to guide you on the right path. As with content, schema is unique to the pages that you are putting it on. Right. I would say a lot of the concerns with SGE are from content creators and people who are using content marketing. From that, I would say blog schema is really important on every single post you have not only to summarize what the blog is about, but to provide EeAT information to the search engines about the author. So constantly referencing the author, the author page, kind of tying back these elements to say like, hey, not only is this a good piece of content, but this person knows what they're talking about. And here's the page where you can see this person knows what they're talking about. That's going to do really well to reinforce your content there. I would say past that E Commerce, there's a whole, whole mess of schema you could use for E Commerce. I think the one piece of advice I would have for E Commerce store owners is not to overdo it. Really, really follow it to a tee. If there's anything that you're unsure about, including such as certain pricing or stuff like that, just, just exclude them. You don't want the machine getting confused. You don't want your products misrepresented in a way. From there, you really, really want to make sure that schema is there to reinforce what you have on the page already, to make sure that the machine understands that this is what it is. And here are all the elements. There have been some experiments of using schema for things that aren't on the page here. That's very much, very much experimental. So I would say just stick to the basics. Make sure you have your definitions, make sure you have your dictionary, and just do it the best you can.
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B
That's great advice. And I feel like across these, you know, kind of content recommendations within sge, there's some, like, common themes through it. And I love that you kind of broke it out to be like, more specific. But it sounds to me like you have or you're making the recommendation of first and foremost useful, helpful content. That's hitting the intent. You steered us away from just using, you know, maybe 100% generative content at least with having like a human kind of QA element or additional pieces added. And then I think it's interesting to call out too, that a few of your other recommendations are hitting on, like, putting structure to it. And so whether that's through your recommendation on headings, through schema markup that we just talked about, it seems like it's a nice kind of blend of the depth of the content, but then the structure to ensure that it's being Understood. And you're kind of like, I guess, making it a little bit easier on these systems. And it seems like across it, the quality of the content that you're advocating for, the EEAT factors with it to give that authoritative, but then putting the structure behind it is, you know, ultimately setting up your content the best for success with this, like, shifting landscape.
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C
Exactly. My philosophy as an SEO is make it as easy as possible for the search engines to accelerate, contribute value to your site. And that's gone through a lot of changes in the last five to ten years for sure. But one thing that hasn't changed to your point is helpful content quality content, content that matches the intent of your page and the intent of the user that is landing on that page, that is always going to be a winner, that is always going to help you through organic search. But what we're seeing now is like, okay, you have that, that's great. But they want more. They want elements that'll help the machine pull it in a way that makes sense for them, that'll make it quicker, that'll make it faster, that will spend less crawl budget on their end to try to figure out what your site is about and what it can attribute value to. So really, it's just kind of an evolution of what's always been good for SEO. It's just getting a little bit more technical and a little bit more format heavy.
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Absolutely. 100%. Any kind of final words for the SEOs out there, you know, that are maybe a bit nervous right now with the rollout or like, can you, can you put us at ease as far as how to survive this kind of next phase within search?
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C
Well, as SEOs, we're never going to be at ease. Right. And that's kind of the beauty and the terror of working in this channel. We always have great opportunity for creative success and there's also potential for things that are outside of our control that just kind of tank all our efforts and all our blood, sweat and tears that we put in here. So I want to leave viewers here with a couple of kind of pats on the back and assurances here. Google has said in their documentation that SGE is a jumping off point for topic inquiry research. They say it may provide the initial answer, but the idea is to provide places for users to go deeper on a particular query. Now, everything we've seen from the experimental phase of SGE has shown us that. Yeah, okay, wow. Sometimes the sources aren't there. That's not good that my website's gonna tank now. It's gonna take all my traffic. Or like, why is it showing this? This is wrong information. Just know anything you're seeing is not final, it's not what we want to see, and it's not what Google wants to see. And they're constantly working on it. That's why there's been so many core updates. They want to prepare the data for this LLM. They want to make sure that everything that they're showing is not only the best query for the user, but is also meeting their quality guidelines as well. And then the other point I would have for any SEO is if you're a good SEO, no matter what these changes, you're going to be okay. Because good SEO isn't really about adapting to the changes that Google makes on a monthly basis. It is, don't get me wrong. But being a good SEO is knowing your audience and knowing what's going to connect with your audience and then also knowing what Google wants to see. There's not going to be a scenario where this is going to be rolled out where you're doing everything right, right? You have your quality content that's sourcing multiple reputable sources. You have your page intent dialed in. You have all your elements to a T. You know everything. Your technical data is very low. There's not going to be a scenario where you're not going to get those search results eventually. Right? So even if this is a rocky rollout from start, if you're confident in your plan, if you have success and a good track rate of things that are going well based on your strategies, be confident in yourself, be confident in your skills and be confident in your strategy. Because if it's good for the user, eventually it's going to be good for Google.
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Excellent advice. And with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Alex Silverberg, SEO Strategist and President at AP SEO, for joining us in part two of this conversation, which will be published tomorrow. Alex and I are going to continue the conversation and discuss the importance in taxonomy for large websites. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Alex, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or you can visit him on Twitter where his handle is Alexander Silverberg, or visit his company's website at apseo Co.
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Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter, where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that that's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is Voices of search on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jayshaph B E N J S A S and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.
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C
Sat.