← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Should SEOs Care About PR & Marketing?
00:21:20
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- [00:00]
Ben Shapiro
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.
- [00:25]
Morty Oberstein
A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
- [00:32]
Ben Shapiro
Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
- [00:38]
Morty Oberstein
Here's today's host of the Voices of.
- [00:40]
Jordan Cooney
Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Morty Oberstein, who is the founder at Unify and head of SEO Brand at wix. Unifi is a brand strategy consultancy helping digital brands scale their online presence and brand reputation.
- [01:00]
Ben Shapiro
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over a hundred technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT Today.
- [02:20]
Jordan Cooney
Morty and I are going to discuss Should SEOs care about PR and marketing? Okay, here's my conversation with Morty Oberstein, Founder at Unifi Brand Marketing and Head of SEO Brand at wix. Morty, welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast.
- [02:36]
Morty Oberstein
Hey, how's it going?
- [02:37]
Jordan Cooney
I'm doing well. Welcome to the show. You're a repeat guest, so love having those. Excited to have you on and Talking about something that I think should be at the forefront of everyone's minds right now. I think this whole concept of how we think about our offline presence is becoming way more important than it ever has. Not just in the SEO world, in the search world, but really in the discovery world. How people discover things online is, it's like critical right now. We used to just think about it from an SEO perspective as just backlinks. Right? But it's so much more than that now. And as we think about lms, as we think about AI, as we think about how consumers have changed over the last 20 years, their ability to find and search for products, this whole need for how we build a brand, build our online presence is super important. So, you know, Morty, why don't we just dive right into here? What? Like, why is PR and marketing becoming a central part of how SEO should think?
- [03:38]
Morty Oberstein
I think the LLM thing is a great, It's a great place to start with that. Right? Because the LLM is basically everyone's. I know, everyone's looking for a hack. We're going to reverse engineer the LLMs by giving it feedback and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think that's like a funny way to. That's a very SEO way to approach optimizing for an LLM.
- [03:54]
Jordan Cooney
Right, right, right. We're always optimizing for the probably the least possible gain or at least the least tenure of that gain. Right? Because obviously at some point in L.
- [04:03]
Morty Oberstein
A, we got you Sam Altman.
- [04:05]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, exactly.
- [04:06]
Morty Oberstein
Idiot. You didn't figure out you need to figure an SEO's reverse engineering this thing and optimizing by giving feedback? Hahaha. Fool. I think it's a little bit. Yeah, hyperbolic.
- [04:16]
Jordan Cooney
Let's just pay a bunch of M. Turkers to start clicking on our LLM anyway.
- [04:24]
Morty Oberstein
Like, amazing. Like SEOs don't stop SEOing.
- [04:26]
Jordan Cooney
Hey, hey. You know, once you learn how to do something, well, why, why stop? Right?
- [04:31]
Morty Oberstein
I guess I hear this, I hear this like it's worked for so long. But the issue is an LLM is basically going across the web and scouring the web for information, pulling back whoever has the biggest digital presence. Right. And the issue is getting that digital presence, I think is a little bit different now than it was back in the day, like last year. And part of that reason is there's so much. I don't know if you feel like. I feel like this. There's so much noise and I. I tune everything out like LinkedIn. LinkedIn's a great example of this. Do you ever read the feed?
- [05:02]
Jordan Cooney
Never. Never.
- [05:03]
Morty Oberstein
No, I never read. I just post stuff. I never read the feed. And whoever interacts me, I interact with them back because I like interacting with people. I never. It's just noise. And then when I do read it, like, this is completely worthless. Is there's no value, or if I go on X, Like, I do not want to see that. I came here for memes and SEO. I don't know why. Like, politics and like, whatever is happening around the world is in my feed. I don't get it. Even though I'm looking at the following people I'm following. Like, yes, I follow people who talk about politics, but that's not who I'm predominantly there for.
- [05:33]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [05:34]
Morty Oberstein
So why. Why is that? Constantly. It thinks there's so much noise. But you know what I find? Like, I don't tune out TV commercials, which is pathetic.
- [05:43]
Jordan Cooney
Don't have much of a choice. Right. Captive audience there.
- [05:46]
Morty Oberstein
Yeah, you're. That's it. And it's not like it's the same stupid thing. Congratulations on your new role at Wherever River. Big announcement. It's. It's something different every time. Or I completely ignore. Okay, it's a bad commercial on those Patrick Mahomes commercials about bundling your auto insurance crap. I tune those out. They are awful.
- [06:05]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, they're so awful. Agreed.
- [06:07]
Morty Oberstein
Agreed.
- [06:07]
Jordan Cooney
100%.
- [06:08]
Morty Oberstein
It took me, like, a good, like 50. Like, what are they talking about? Oh, they're bundling their. Oh, it's terrible. But, like, the halfway decent commercials, I'm sitting there, I'm watching a football game. I'm a captive audience. You have me at a moment where I'm not even thinking about being sold to. I'm just like, I'm sitting with my kids watching a football game, right? You give me something. You're in, you're out, it's done. There's less noise. And I count that, by the way, as an offline interaction because it's happening in my real life, not in my digital life. And all the things that happen in my digital life, I completely tune out. I hit a landing page the second you use the word ultimate or best or all. I just. You've lost me. I said I've tuned you out a long time ago. So the offline thing really comes into focus because I think that's what's. Obviously not exclusively. I'm not saying don't do digital marketing. That's crazy.
- [07:00]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [07:01]
Morty Oberstein
But the offline marketing thing, if you go to a conference and you were just a Brighton SEO. You network with somebody now, that person mentions you and talks about you or mentions you on social media and somebody else picks it up. It's real and it has a, even though the reach is smaller, let's say the resonance is way bigger.
- [07:18]
Jordan Cooney
That's right.
- [07:18]
Morty Oberstein
And that has an impact on what happens on the digital side eventually also.
- [07:22]
Jordan Cooney
No doubt. And I want to bring you back to the whole LLM piece and us talking about Sam and just the whole, the whole concept of, you know, SEOs gaming this system. Right? Because I think that that's right. Now when we think about AI optimization or AI search optimization, whatever, we want to coin this thing, we think about our old behaviors of just trying to find the fastest way to gains, which is how do we get, how do we get clicks out of this thing? How do we get a way to get traffic? Right? Because that's the way we've measured everything, which I think is in and of itself. That's where the failure is. Right? Because if we're trying to measure off of clicks, we're not thinking about our presence, we're not thinking about if we even show up or if we're even in existence within the LLMs. Right. Which is in my opinion where the conversation should be at right now. Because presence matters more than like the number of engaged clicks you get. But anyway, so that's one piece of this question. The other real piece to this question is for years the way that SEOs have lived is by the next Google algorithm update, right? We've like lived in the threat of the next update. But that's the second mind shift that we have to make. Because the reality is that we're not playing a game of the next Google Update anymore. We're playing a game of an evolutionary technology that is rapidly changing and in some cases very soon, maybe self adherent to updates. What I mean by that is it's not going to be, you know, here's a date in time where we're going to do an update and we're going to be out for a week or two and then it's going to all change and then all of a sudden everything's going to shift. No, no, no, no. This thing is self generating its own updates. So the reality is, is that if we're, we're, we're in this belief that we're just chasing these games, these hacks to the next update that's not happening. There are no updates. It just makes itself better. And so my question to you is like, how do we as SEOs evolve from this optimization mindset to this true genuine growth mindset in the way we work.
- [09:20]
Morty Oberstein
That's like you're, I'm a, I'm a marketer, not a miracle worker. I don't. But that's really, that's really the whole problem is that it's not a tactical shift or skills shift, it's a mindset shift, which is the hardest thing to do. And look, the thing you're talking about, the updates, that's legit. Like if you look at the, the SEO weather tools, like the Semrush sensor, that thing has been read for like months. And then Google said, I love when they have these things. Google had a, I don't know, like a summit in Sweden or Switzerland, some country that starts with an S and has only white people. Danny Sullivan's like, we're gonna have continuous updates that are just constantly rolling out. We're not like, it's not gonna be like it is now. And then no one say anything. Of course someone took a picture of the slide and then put it out there on the Internet. But that's where we're headed. There's no update anymore. The thing is continuously evolving.
- [10:11]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [10:11]
Morty Oberstein
And by the way, you see this on the social side also, like those algorithms are also consistently evolving and getting by the way, worse over time. Like Google's algorithm is worse.
- [10:22]
Jordan Cooney
Worse, yes.
- [10:23]
Morty Oberstein
Right now I don't know if that'll stay like of the social platforms also. But for right now, the algorithm, the.
- [10:29]
Jordan Cooney
Social platform for sure.
- [10:30]
Morty Oberstein
Yeah, horrible.
- [10:31]
Jordan Cooney
But, but isn't that the interesting thing? I mean if we could learn of like the last 15 years from social, like the influence of false human interaction in social has literally crippled social experiences.
- [10:45]
Morty Oberstein
Yeah.
- [10:45]
Jordan Cooney
I mean half of what you see nowadays in social media feeds is purely just garbage. It's made up content. It's, it's just nonsense.
- [10:58]
Morty Oberstein
That nonsense stupidity.
- [11:00]
Jordan Cooney
I mean we don't even have to go down the news path and have that debate. We could just go down like are the photos and images that you're looking at real? Are the, the messages that are posted up from these, you know, share your banking information with me messages. I mean, I got one the other day here in the state of California, because I'm in California, that was literally about the fact that the state run, you know, systems for like tolls to pay toll here in Northern California, that I had a refund and that that refund was waiting for me because I had overpaid when I crossed the bridges here in the Bay Area. Total scam. Just trying to get my banking information. And the thing is, thousands of people fall for this, which is terrible. But, like, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. This is a real problem.
- [11:50]
Morty Oberstein
Can I say I feel like the Internet is ruined. Like, the digital space is just ruined. It's ruined. And it needs like a market correction kind of thing. Like in 2008, we had like a financial meltdown. I feel like we have a, we're heading into a digital winter. And the whole thing is a huge correction. So if you're asking, like, to go back to your question of, like, what's going to get SEOs to switch mindsets? It's when the entire web, forget this SEO, hits an enormous brick wall and nothing is working the way that it used to work anymore. Nothing's really working at all anymore. Nothing is functioning the right way. And then you're going to have to switch your mindset. And I feel like, and I'm biased, I'm a brand person, you're going to have to switch your mindset to actually making a connection with the actual audience and developing a relationship and resonating with them.
- [12:33]
Jordan Cooney
And so let's, let's segue to that. Because as we think about marketing as a whole, and we even think about PR as a component of that, how does that change as the way consumers discover brands, products change?
- [12:49]
Morty Oberstein
It's so much more autonomous, right? Because no one wants to be nudged the same way as they, you know, back in the day, you did a landing page and had like final, like two lines of content cta. Two lines of content cta. And you know what I'm talking about, like, left side, a small paragraph cta. Right side, small paragraph cta. And it like escalated down. No one wants to be nursed like that anymore. And I don't know if you probably saw this, like Rand Fishkin did this great study or post about how everyone attributes traffic to Google, but that's not what's actually happening, is that they're seeing it on social media. They're seeing it wherever they're seeing it, or they're seeing you wherever they see you. And then they Google you and then you attribute that traffic to Google. That autonomy of being able to discover the brand or the product or the service on your own, in your own time, in your own way is enormous. I think, like, if you think about the web as like, on a continual, like a child, it was an infant, it was a small child. Now it's maybe like a teenager and it's looking for a Little like independence which you see by the way in like the E for experience. Like Google didn't pull it out of its ass.
- [13:53]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [13:54]
Morty Oberstein
Google saw like that's where consumer behavior was going to. They're looking for actual first hand knowledge, firsthand experience, which means you need to tone down that marketing facade kind of thing. So people are looking for something genuine. They're not looking to be pushed and prodded. They're looking to be able to have some, some kind of commercial autonomy.
- [14:12]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [14:13]
Morty Oberstein
So being top of mind and being and having that awareness is everything. Which is what SEOs can't wrap their mind around. Not saying, just I don't want to crap just on SEO like PPC performance marketers because you can't see the connection but you know that it's there.
- [14:30]
Ben Shapiro
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Pre Visible IO that's Pre Visible P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [15:58]
Jordan Cooney
So the next piece to this though is like, where do we use real skills that we have in SEO to make this change? Because I do believe that there are certain skills the SEO community has. We're capable of great things. How do we deploy those now in a marketing PR brand presence necessary way to still help our companies, help our agencies, help our own personal careers develop and grow.
- [16:26]
Morty Oberstein
This is a good question by the way I just want to point out, that's actually a legit good question. But no one's talking about, no one.
- [16:33]
Jordan Cooney
Talks about the skills we need, just the hacks we have.
- [16:37]
Morty Oberstein
Hey, I'll sell you five links for a dollar and the Brooklyn Bridge, all in a LinkedIn message. I think SEOs are good at a lot of things, right? First off, that, that mindset of like, hunting opportunity, forget, like, particular, like, skill, but like, like we're, we're like the, I don't know, like the, the stock brokers of the Internet. Like, we will, we will get high up cocaine and endlessly pursue whatever that thing is that we want and grab it and get it. And that's a great skill to have. Oh, that's a great mindset to have. Like looking for opportunity. Because that's what brand ultimately does. It creates opportunity. SEOs or performance marketers should be the ones who are saying, okay, you've created this brand equity. What are the opportunities that are now there? How do we leverage them? How do we capture them? How do we go for them? And I would say, second, SEOs are really good at refining and targeting, which is a huge part of this. Huge part of this. That idea of like casting a wide net across the Internet is over. It's all about refinement and targeting. And SEOs can be really good at that.
- [17:34]
Jordan Cooney
Oh, great. I mean, I think the one additional thing I'll add to this because I feel like it's a super important topic. Like the skill shift we need to make as professionals is super critical right now. And the other one is we're one of the few individuals in the marketing suite that has true, genuine technical skills. Like, we have to use those technical skills because the AI discovery is far more technical than we all pay a credit to. Like, you know, even as we are where we are today. Like, building an agent is not just simply like pushing a couple of buttons. It is a process and a set of technical skills on how to deploy that process. And so it's really a, a critical need for, for SEOs to, to really continue to grow their skills. And even, even the fundamental ones, whether it be like little things like learning Python and understanding what JavaScript is, all of those basic fundamentals are going to pay off in the long run.
- [18:31]
Morty Oberstein
By the way, even on the data side, like, the information that you have can be huge. All of those branded searches are. Google still is the largest driver of traffic out there, whether or not they first came from social. But those doesn't, that doesn't Matter. All of those navigational searches, forget the amount of them, but what are they searching for? Like your brand plus X or whatever. I remember looking one time at the NFL and looking like, wow, there are so many branded searches for the preseason, which if you're not an NFL fan, like the NFL, Google, the NFL threw the preseason out the window and so we don't care about that, but people still Google that thing.
- [19:07]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [19:08]
Morty Oberstein
So as, as an SEO, like I would go to the comms, say, hey, I know you all threw out the preseason from the vernacular and you don't care about it, but people are still interested in some way, shape or form. Maybe you should do something with it.
- [19:19]
Jordan Cooney
Right. So as we kind of segue into our next episode, I'm kind of curious to get your take on, you know, as SEOs care more about marketing PR, we will gravitate towards measurement. Like, how do we measure these things? Are there new ways that we should be thinking about the measurement of our work, the impact of what we do and do. We need to broaden our scope from just the traditional KPIs that come out of our favorite tool, Google search console.
- [19:53]
Morty Oberstein
So I have a big thing that brand can be measured. So my homepage on my, on my website, like you can measure brand and the fact that you think you can is already a misconception. It's just a little bit different. Like, you know, like correlation doesn't equal causation and brand. It does. Yeah, because you can't pinpoint exactly everything. So by the way, looking at things like branded traffic, branded searches, like that's a huge part of it, looking at engagement. But don't look at just, okay, the number of likes or the number of comments, like how many of those are AI comments, or how many of those are just like, great post versus there's actual engagement, there's a thought process, a back and forth between you and the audience and what are they talking about? What kind of engagement is it? What are they interested? So qualifying the reach and qualifying the engagement qualitatively also. So all of those things. So yes, there's tons of data. It just all needs to be qualified. So social media search data, don't look at the number. Okay, what's how many, how many users came to us through branded search? 5 million. Okay, but what were they searching for? Like what were the actual terms? And categorize, look at those, look at them thematically. If you're looking at like when you have like a. People also ask about your brand, like what are those questions? There what does that say thematically? So there's tons of data points and you can get super creative with it because everything is a data point in a way. But you have to be able to have your finger on the pulse and be able to say, I know it's not a direct causation, but it paints a picture. And I'm not going to deny reality because someone on Twitter one time said correlation doesn't equal causation.
- [21:25]
Jordan Cooney
Right, Right. I mean, it's an interesting evolution that we're embarking on here. Right. And I think as we think about not just the other KPIs, we have to think about how we partner within that suite too. So, I mean, in kind of closing here, where are you seeing those partnerships work the best for SEOs to uplevel their capabilities around PR and marketing and ensure that SEO, or what was considered organic, let's call it, is still relevant.
- [21:54]
Morty Oberstein
Yeah. By the way, to the idea of partnerships. Look, who's partnering with you now versus who was partnering with you in the past. Or unwilling to partner with you in the past is another way to measure it. The SEO is the ones that I see are doing the best job are the ones who are sitting with comms. Right. Who are really trying to understand, okay, like, what's the positioning that you're trying to go after? Assuming the brand actually has positioning isn't just farting out their branding, but what are you trying to achieve? What's the messaging that you're trying to go for? Where's that sweet spot? How are you trying to position the product or the services or the brand itself overall? And how can I help you do that? By targeting keywords the right way. Those are the. That's the. It's very holistic. It doesn't. It's not rocket science. You're just unifying, no pun intended, the two parts of the marketing picture, comms and the performance side.
- [22:39]
Jordan Cooney
That's right. And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Morty Oberstein from WIX and Unifi Brand Marketing for joining us in part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow. Morty and I are going to discuss should SEOs pay more attention to offline marketing for SEO. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Morty, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his company website, unifi brand marketing.com okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney.
- [23:10]
Ben Shapiro
The founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Pre Visible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT 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 voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is as Ben Jayshab B E N J S H A P 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.