Schema + Sitemaps w/ Crystal Carter, Head of Wix SEO Communications

This transcript is machine generated and has not been edited for errors.

[00:00:00] Crystal Waddell: hey friends. Welcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast. 

[00:00:04] Crystal Waddell: I'm here with my friend B, my awesome co-host, and one of our newest friends, Crystal Carter from wix.com. 

[00:00:14] Crystal Carter: Hello. Hello to B and hello to Crystal. Thank you so much for having me on.

[00:00:18] Crystal Carter: I am always pleased to meet another Crystal SEO and another honorary Crystal SEO B.

[00:00:23] Crystal Carter: So thank you very much. 

[00:00:24] Brittany Herzberg: Thank you, indeed. 

[00:00:26] Crystal Carter: So yeah, thank you for allowing me to jump on your podcast. 

[00:00:29] Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. We're stoked.. 

[00:00:31] Crystal Waddell: So I have to explain how our paths even crossed because we both have podcasts and I'll let you tell a little bit about your podcast in just a second, but we ended up on a roundup list of best SEO podcasts that a person put on 

[00:00:45] Crystal Waddell: LinkedIn and we were flattered and what, just so surprised. And then I saw Crystal's name on there and I was like, oh, she looks really nice. I'm gonna, I'm gonna reach out and message her, and so I did. And you responded and you're, you've just been so gracious.

[00:00:59] Crystal Waddell: So do you wanna tell [00:01:00] us a little bit about, yourself and what you do in your job and about your podcast, all those things? 

[00:01:05] Crystal Carter: Yeah. So my name is Crystal Carter. 

[00:01:07] Crystal Carter: I'm the head of SEO communications at Wix. I say that a lot and I am also the co-host of the SERPS Up SEO podcast on Wix. 

[00:01:16] Crystal Carter: And we talk about SEO O and SEO trends and seo, deep thoughts and lots of things that are happening around search and things like that.

[00:01:25] Crystal Carter: And yes, I work in seo, o for Wix, so I do a couple of things there. Really it's a company that really admires and it really enjoys people exploring different things and and getting involved in lots of different ways, which is something I love about working with the team.

[00:01:38] Crystal Carter: And so I get to work with our product team who are developing new products for Wix new SEO products all the time, and adding to our SEO stack and I get to help celebrate the amazing things that they do all the time. I also get to speak to wics users. So we have our webinars and people will say what does that mean?

[00:01:54] Crystal Carter: And what is this? And how do I do that? And we answer those questions and talk to folks there. I also [00:02:00] get to spend a lot of time talking to SEOs who, who may not be familiar with wics and the SEO capabilities that we have. And that's something that I really enjoy as well, because people say, oh, can you do that?

[00:02:09] Crystal Carter: I'm like, yeah, you can do it like this. I'm like, this as a matter of fact. I did it yesterday. So that's a lot of fun. And I also get to do a lot of going around the place, talking about w at conferences and talking about SEO generally at conferences and on podcasts like this and on webinars and in articles and all sorts of fun things.

[00:02:27] Crystal Carter: It's a I enjoy my work. It's a good time. 

[00:02:29] Brittany Herzberg: You can tell. And I, it's really fun to meet other people who love SEO and who can break it down and make it simple. So I'm so excited to dive in. And my favorite question to ask anyone who joins us is this, how do you define seo? Especially since you're, going around talking to people.

[00:02:43] Brittany Herzberg: What do you say when someone is like, what is s e o 

[00:02:46] Crystal Carter: To me, SEO O is bending the internet to your will. Basically you set about with a hypothesis of what you want to happen with your website or with your rankings or [00:03:00] with your, a piece of content somewhere, and you say, I want people who search for this to arrive at my website here, or to go to this piece of a piece of content there, or that sort of thing.

[00:03:10] Crystal Carter: And if you're able to do that's sEO. Yeah, there's 

[00:03:13] Brittany Herzberg: we're Dr. We're drooling over here over this because there's no right or wrong answer, but that might be my favorite. 

[00:03:19] Crystal Waddell: What I loved about what you said is that you said people have an hypothesis.

[00:03:23] Crystal Waddell: And I love that so much because I think a lot of times when people talk about SEO or anything, SEO related and content and all that type of stuff, they want this like absolutely. Proven path that this is exactly what you have to do. And these are the exact results you're gonna get.

[00:03:41] Crystal Waddell: I struggle because I'm like, look, I can't promise you that, like this is 

[00:03:45] Crystal Carter: right 

[00:03:45] Crystal Waddell: a essentially a scientific method. We're gonna test it, see if it works, and then if it doesn't, we're gonna do something else.

[00:03:51] Crystal Waddell: We're gonna make strategic, decisions here. It's not just let's put a word out there and see what happens. I love that you said hypothesis. 

[00:03:58] Brittany Herzberg: I was just gonna say, that [00:04:00] reminds me, like, when I was starting out, that for me that was a huge hiccup to get over for charging for my services because it's like we're testing this hypothesis together.

[00:04:09] Brittany Herzberg: But yet I'm guiding you. I'm using my knowledge, I'm bringing my expertise. So it was a little bit of a road bump to get over for me. 

[00:04:15] Crystal Carter: And I would say that like when you, when I say hypothesis, I don't just mean outta nowhere. Like it's not based on nothing uhhuh, you're gonna look at your search volume and you're gonna say, okay, there's this search volume for this keyword.

[00:04:25] Crystal Carter: These people are ranking for that, for these people are the people who are ranking for it. I've looked at the SER P and I can tell that they haven't updated that content in four years. 

[00:04:32] Crystal Carter: I also know that we as an entity, we as a blog, as an entity, if you think of your blog or your website as an entity.

[00:04:37] Crystal Carter: I also know that we as an entity we rank for a lot of keywords in that area, in that sort of, that ballpark. So that means that we will have a high likelihood that Google already understands that we're generally in that neighborhood. If we put out a piece of content for this based.

[00:04:52] Crystal Carter: All of the data that I've seen based on all of the analysis that I've done, based on all of the experience that I have, based on, how we're optimizing it based on SERP features, based on a [00:05:00] bunch of other things. I'm looking at this, and this isn't a hypothesis that I've pulled out of thin air.

[00:05:04] Crystal Carter: This is an intentional act that, that you expect to see some kind of return on it. And when you're testing you, again, you're gonna test it. You're gonna put it out. 

[00:05:13] Crystal Carter: And it's different from I think people who come from a traditional marketing background. Will think about it as if it's like you're just printing a leaflet or you're printing a book, or you're printing a brochure, something like that.

[00:05:25] Crystal Carter: That's not how SEO works. 

[00:05:26] Crystal Carter: if you publish a piece of content, And you see it on the SERP and that it's hovering around 20, let's say it's hovering around the 20 keywords or whatever. 

[00:05:33] Crystal Carter: It's indexed, great. It's it's hovering around the sort of 2020 ranking mark and you're like, you know what?

[00:05:38] Crystal Carter: I've looked at this and there's actually this, and this, and if we add that to it, then it'll bump it up. And these are things that you do because it's not just that. It just sits there and that, and then you never touch it again. 

[00:05:47] Crystal Carter: The beauty of SEO is that you can go back and you can refine and you can use the data that you're getting for.

[00:05:52] Crystal Carter: What people are, how people are searching for it now, how people are responding to it now, and how you can pivot it and bend them [00:06:00] to your will to make the, to get the outcome that you, that works best for your business.

[00:06:06] Crystal Waddell: Absolutely. That is so great. I appreciate that and I appreciate you breaking that down.

[00:06:09] Crystal Waddell: Like just providing the roadmap to the hypothesis, and doing the research first. So important. And I think, and this is a good lead in because Wix is a website builder. 

[00:06:21] Crystal Waddell: Correct. That's a primary 

[00:06:23] Crystal Carter: Yeah. 

[00:06:24] Crystal Waddell: Function or whatever. I think a lot of times people think, oh, I'm gonna use this website builder, and they may not understand exactly what 

[00:06:32] Crystal Waddell: SEO is, but they expect the SEO to come with the website builder.

[00:06:37] Crystal Waddell: So how do you respond and help those people who are like, This isn't already done for me. 

[00:06:44] Crystal Carter: So in Wix we have a general ethos that where we expect everyone to have a basic baseline of SEO starting points. I've worked on self-built websites as an SEO consultant, and sometimes they have no site map.

[00:06:58] Crystal Carter: Doesn't exist, like [00:07:00] regularly speaking. I worked on places where, they don't have they don't have menus in place on all the pages. They don't have a bunch of things on in place. So on a, on Wix, for instance every website has a site map, has a dynamically generated, dynamically updating.

[00:07:13] Crystal Carter: Site map. And it's really easy to manage certain tags, and it's really easy to have certain things. Additionally, we build in structured data for a lot of our, a lot of our pages. So for instance, if you make an event, pages an event page, it will come with event structured data. If you make a blog, it will have blog structured data built in.

[00:07:30] Crystal Carter: If you make a product page, we'll have product page structure, data built in, and that will that means that you're allowed to start from a certain point without having to do too much of that or too much technical SEO to get off the ground.

[00:07:42] Crystal Carter: The other thing I would say is that we also allow you to customize those things. So like I'm a big structured data nerd. I love structured data. You can get in and you can fine tune the structured data on each individual page. You can also set it back to the default if you break it.

[00:07:56] Crystal Carter: And the default will always work, but you can always, and the default will [00:08:00] always work, but you can customize it as well. We also have. In the c m s, we allow you to we have a guide, we have a check, a setup checklist. So if you're completely new and if you want some SEO that's built into your c m s, we have that available.

[00:08:12] Crystal Carter: So there is a sort of make sure you have your title tag on your homepage. Make sure you have this and make sure you have that so that you can get going. However, we have a lot of tools built in that allow somebody who is professional and if you get a professional to come in to fine tune those things.

[00:08:25] Crystal Carter: And I think also what a professional brings whether it's an agency or a consultant, is that intentionality is that being able to pivot and being able to position a particular content for a particular audience, which is something that. A lot of business owners struggles to do. A lot of business owners are like, yeah, I just like fix refrigerators.

[00:08:42] Crystal Carter: I don't know they just write their blog about, or they just publish their website and it says, oh, I just, hi, this is me and I do this and we are smart and we do great things. I'm like, say your name, say your business name. Say your name. Stop saying we. Stop it. Oh my God.

[00:08:58] Brittany Herzberg: Just gotta do a hand clap for that [00:09:00] one.

[00:09:00] Brittany Herzberg: Thank you.

[00:09:01] Crystal Waddell: I can't remember who it was, but they were 

[00:09:03] Crystal Waddell: talking about a lawyer's website that they were helping and there was, 

[00:09:06] Crystal Carter: yeah. 

[00:09:06] Crystal Waddell: Was it you did, were you? 

[00:09:07] Crystal Carter: Yeah. 

[00:09:08] Crystal Waddell: Okay. Yeah. I'm like, I'm having this conversation. I can't remember who said it, but Yeah, you were like, You're a lawyer, put the word lawyer on your website.

[00:09:16] Crystal Carter: And it might seem redundant to you, but like the internet that like the, the bots don't know. They're like, you would just say, we do great things. It's we are lawyers who do great things, we are attorneys that do stuff like think about what? Think about how. Think about yourself in the third person.

[00:09:29] Crystal Carter: Think about your website a bit in the third person. Like how would you describe yourself to someone else? And make sure that you have, sometimes there's a saying in England, which is, it does what it says on the tin, and make sure that your website does what it says on the tin. 

[00:09:40] Crystal Carter: And I think sometimes with it's something with meta descriptions a lot where people try to be like, really creative with the meta description.

[00:09:46] Crystal Carter: Nah, sum it up. You got a hundred, right? You have 155 characters. Sum it up. What is the key point? What is this actually about? 

[00:09:54] Crystal Carter: This is this is a blog about refrigerator repair. Boom. Not, you don't wanna wax poetical about [00:10:00] oh, once upon a time I saw a refrigerator. Nope, nope.

[00:10:04] Crystal Carter: Like just lay it out. Say exactly what it is cuz I think, with AI and stuff, everything's super, super clever and there's lots of things, different things, but one of the things we're finding, one of the things that's really apparent when people look at chat g pt, and I know they keep adding more features.

[00:10:16] Crystal Carter: So by the time I say this is, or by the time this goes out the, the bots have probably completely taken over and stuff that I, who knows, I could be about myself anyway. But but one of the things that's apparent is like when you talk to chat G P T, I remember I was like, can you.

[00:10:30] Crystal Carter: This piece of text into 150 characters, and they're like, yes, here you are. And it was 263 characters. And I was like, I'm like, I was like, can you try it again? Make it shorter? They're like, of course. And they made it longer. And I was like, y'all this is not what I asked you for. So I think remember that like the bots are very smart, but they're also dumb.

[00:10:47] Crystal Carter: Like they don't, yes, they're not un they're not understanding it in the same way. So you have to give them clues. You have to give them the appropriate tools. And these are the things that you. Through practice in seo. So as an SEO, you are intentionally focusing your attention to make it so [00:11:00] that users can find what they need using search engines and that, and you have to learn how search engines understand websites in order to do that.

[00:11:09] Brittany Herzberg: I feel like clarity is so underrated and everything you just said was like, Please be clear. Just please be clear. Clear. You can get cutesy further down the page, but please, with the love of everything, be clear. 

[00:11:21] Crystal Carter: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. 

[00:11:24] Crystal Waddell: So you've said a couple things that I just wanna clarify because a lot of people listen to our show and they're similar to us.

[00:11:29] Crystal Waddell: They're like solopreneurs and they're maybe, probably being introduced to SEO or, just building on their basic knowledge of seo. So I just wanted to clarify a couple things. Can you tell us why a site map is important? Because it's one of those things that I take for granted because you also mentioned the acronym c m.

[00:11:48] Crystal Waddell: Which is content management system. And a content management system is like a Wix or any sort of website builder that manages all your content and you put all your texts and pictures and products and all that stuff in. But I [00:12:00] thought, let's talk about the site map situation. 

[00:12:02] Crystal Carter: Yes. Okay. So a site map is a tool, a site map is a tool that helps a web crawler to understand your website.

[00:12:09] Crystal Carter: The way I describe it is if you were in a restaurant. Then let's say you had a restaurant and Google shows up for lunch, right? And they sit down and they ask you what do you serve? And if you don't have a site map, you you're essentially saying to them, have a look like, look around and this, you're essentially asking them to look around at o at the other tables and see what other people have ordered, which is basically like what people and from a website point of view, that's like things that people have been shared on social media or things that have had links to them or things that have had that sort of thing.

[00:12:34] Crystal Carter: So they're just, you're essentially, Depending on other people's links and other people's stuff to get that content visible. Or you could just give them a menu. 

[00:12:45] Crystal Carter: So essentially they sit down and it might be that you have this fantastic chicken salad that nobody at the moment has, right? That nobody at the moment has seen.

[00:12:53] Crystal Carter: But if you put it on your menu, then they can see. There's a chicken salad. I like chicken salad. [00:13:00] Great. I know other people who like chicken salad. I can recommend it to them. So think about it that way, right? And what happens when you don't have a site map is it just makes it a lot harder.

[00:13:08] Crystal Carter: You can also use your site map to to take an all killer, no filler approach to your seo. And essentially for some CMSs, they generate a lot of extra pages. Or content. So sometimes they'll generate like extra pages for tags or extra pages for images or 

[00:13:24] Crystal Waddell: Yes. 

[00:13:24] Crystal Carter: Things like that. And they, and if you leave that on your site map, then essentially what you have is like tons and tons of pages that mean nothing.

[00:13:31] Crystal Carter: Yes. And you can, instead, you can just point the, you can use the site map to just point to you the most important pages, like to your category pages, to your blog pages, to your main product pages, to those sorts of things. I'll tell you an interest, very interesting site map actually is Beyonce's site map.

[00:13:46] Crystal Carter: Beyonce's website has millions of pages, millions and millions. Her site map has about a hundred, which is really interesting. And I've seen it before where I've taken somebody's site map who that had. Thousands and thousands, and I paired it down to a couple of hundred.

[00:13:59] Crystal Carter: And it actually is [00:14:00] really useful because if you go onto from a if you're getting into, if you're gonna get it stuck into your SEO and you wanna take it a little bit seriously, you should check out Google Search Console. It's totally free and it will tell you how Google's crawling your website.

[00:14:11] Crystal Carter: Also useful to remember, you can also, if you go to Bing Webmaster Tools, if, and you already have a Google search console account, you can do one click. To connect your Google search console account to bing webmaster tools. And you can also see how Bing is crawling your website, which is useful in the new era of New Bing and Bing actually being something of a thing.

[00:14:30] Crystal Carter: So go to Google Search Console and you can see information about which pages Google has in their index. And people ask me what's the difference between being indexed and being ranking and all that sort of stuff. So what happens is, first Google will crawl your. And they'll, and they'll go Look at all these pages, right?

[00:14:45] Crystal Carter: Okay, I can see all these pages. And then they'll say, okay, I want this one. That's essentially the index. Now, when it comes to ranking and indexing, it's a little bit like having a platinum album. Which we've all done, obviously multi. So for instance, [00:15:00] if you were gonna be, like, if you were gonna, if your album was gonna go platinum, if you were gonna have a hit album, getting played on the radio doesn't necessarily make you.

[00:15:07] Crystal Carter: A hit record, but all, most of the time, I know TikTok is in like a v a variable or whatever, but most of the time you can't get to be a hit record until you've been played on the radio. So being indexed is like essentially your song getting played on the radio, whether or not you rank is whether or not it's like a hit record, whether people are like, yeah.

[00:15:25] Crystal Carter: We like this song. This is really good. So it, so being indexed is like being in the game, and that's the first step to being able to rank. If you're not indexed, then you can't rank, but you have to get indexed first. And so you can see in Google Search Console which pages are indexed and which pages aren't.

[00:15:40] Crystal Carter: And if your pages aren't indexed and there's things you can do to move that around, we have a great tool within wic within the WIC c m s content management system in our SEO stack that allows you to see that. From Google Search Console within that the right within Wix, and you don't even have to go into Google Search Console to see it.

[00:15:56] Crystal Carter: And it's it's really useful because it can also impact which pages you [00:16:00] use, you think to optimize. So for instance, if you have let's say you've got 20 pages on your website and five of them are indexed, What you wanna do, if you want to get the other pages indexed, is you want to add internal links from the five pages that are indexed into the, that are going to the five pages or to the other pages that aren't indexed.

[00:16:18] Crystal Carter: And I, and I dunno if I've shared this on a podcast, but the way I think about it is, and I'm sorry, I feel like I'm veering off from what we talked about before. 

[00:16:25] Crystal Waddell: No, that's great. Go.

[00:16:26] Crystal Carter: Okay. So the way I think about it is nachos. Now have you've all had nachos before yet? Oh yeah. Yes. Okay.

[00:16:34] Crystal Carter: Okay. Now, there is a strategy with nachos. You cavi your nachos and you pour the cheese on the nachos, right? You go and you go to 7-Eleven or whatever, and you pour the cheese down on the nachos. This is the best nacho cheese anyway, so what happens is lots of the cheese go to goes to the chips on top.

[00:16:51] Crystal Carter: These are your pages which are indexed. These are your pages which get search traffic. These are your pages, which get a lot of visibil. Then you have pages, but then you have chips which are underneath, [00:17:00] right? When you're thinking about your internal linking. Now, if anybody who's ever successfully eaten a bowl of nachos will tell you that you do not just eat the chip off the top with all the cheese.

[00:17:08] Crystal Carter: If you do that, by the time you get to the end, you will have no cheese and a bunch of chips. Nobody likes that. Yep. So what you need to do when you think about your internal linking is essentially you take the chips that don't have cheese and you use the top chip as a reservoir. So you have the this, the pages which are getting traffic, and you link them to the pages which are not getting traffic, because then when Google crawls your website and they are crawling this page that they already know and they already link and they're already ranking, they will go.

[00:17:37] Crystal Carter: Oh, I didn't know about this page as well. And then they'll see that one and they'll get more signals that page is also important and it'll, and it adds more goodness to your website. Just like you're adding more cheese to your chips. 

[00:17:47] Brittany Herzberg: I love that. Oh, like these analogies so much. 

[00:17:49] Crystal Waddell: Yes. So I was gonna say, analogies are the best.

[00:17:52] Crystal Waddell: This might be my favorite part 

[00:17:54] Brittany Herzberg: I know. 

[00:17:55] Crystal Waddell: To all of it. Okay. So just really quick before, I know bees probably wants to jump in here with a question, [00:18:00] but you mentioned that like sometimes the tags can create new pages. And I'm actually working, like my thing is Shopify, so I'm working with a Shopify store owner right now where that very thing has happened.

[00:18:14] Crystal Waddell: It's created a whole bunch of pages from these tags. And so just, I was wondering, is there like a universal way to. Get rid of that? 

[00:18:23] Crystal Carter: So on Wix, we automatically de index tag pages. And depending on how your site is configured and how you're using your tags, you might want to, you might want to do that as well.

[00:18:32] Crystal Carter: The other and so that, that's it, that's an, it depends answer. 

[00:18:35] Crystal Waddell: Okay. 

[00:18:35] Crystal Carter: An absolute. What I've seen, what I've seen when looking at websites is what you sometimes get is really sloppy tagging, like really, like messy, sloppy, nobody's paying attention to it. Tagging. So somebody makes up webpage about shoes, right?

[00:18:52] Crystal Carter: And they tag it with shoe and shoes or capital shoe. And those are all essentially the same.[00:19:00] You do not need four different tags for shoes. If you have shoe, capital, shoe, lowercase shoe, first letter, capital first, you don't need that. So what's really useful is to go through your tags and just make sure you don't have any duplicates or any near duplicates in them.

[00:19:16] Crystal Carter: Sometimes if you have an apostrophe, if you have billy's or something. If you have an apostrophe? Then you'll end up with a space. So for instance, if it's oh, I don't know birth, I don't know, like birthdays or something like that. And let's say you have like an apostrophe, so birthday apostrophe s.

[00:19:32] Crystal Carter: Then sometimes you'll end up with a space between your tags. So go through your tags and fill them out. And and some CMSs that I've seen for some CMSs that I've seen they will create a whole, they'll create a whole feed based on the tags. And if they, and if that happens, then that also is doing something where, and I talked about indexing.

[00:19:49] Crystal Carter: One of the things about indexing is that Google only has so much time to figure out what's going on with your site, right? So they'll arrive on your site and they'll go, cool, let's see the menu. And you're like, cool, there's the menu. You're like, great. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna call these pages.

[00:19:58] Crystal Carter: And they go through da. If they're bumping into [00:20:00] 4 0 4 s, I'm gonna, Ooh, if they bump into another one, they go, oh, what is that? And if they bump into like broken pictures, they're like, oh, yuck. And then they're trying to go, let's say they're trying to go through your tags and they're like, this is the same.

[00:20:09] Crystal Carter: That's the same tag. So by the time they get through all the tags, they're like, oh Lord, I'm tired. Nevermind. And so you're, it's essentially, this is crawl budget, essentially. Like you don't wanna waste their time on tags that don't mean anything. So make sure that you have that you have tags that actually matter and that you're tagging them for a reason.

[00:20:30] Crystal Carter: If you don't expect that people will search for those tags, or if you don't expect that, that you might rank for those tags, then don't, don't tag it up. 

[00:20:36] Crystal Waddell: Okay. Yeah, that was gonna be my follow up. It's okay, what determines a good tag? 

[00:20:40] Crystal Carter: So I think it's something that's actually, so a tag is like it's an attribute essentially.

[00:20:44] Crystal Carter: So for instance, if you have and it's also, and it's also how you're using your tags. So if you have your tags, particularly for e-commerce or something like that, you're gonna think about. How it, the tax fit onto your navigation? So tax don't necessarily need to be indexed, but they might provide user value.[00:21:00] 

[00:21:00] Crystal Carter: Right? So it might be that, that, you have that you have a collection let's say you have a website about, I don't know, hats, right? And you have different tags for the different types of colors or something. Let's say you're tagging it under red. Or you're tagging it under like the fabric, like it's a, like a felt hat or some, something like that.

[00:21:19] Crystal Carter: If you're actually showing those tags on the website and they're visible, then think about that. So those tags will be they're visible to you users. So what would users expect to see? What would users expect to be able to click on? And then also and also I would say, You should think about how it fix fits into your how the bots are gonna read it.

[00:21:35] Crystal Carter: So the bots will see the tags as well. So if they're seeing tags that are relevant, then think about that. I think see sometimes with blogs, people will tag blogs with all kinds of stuff, and. The tags will will help Google to form information about what your website is about and what your business is about.

[00:21:53] Crystal Carter: For instance, if you did a blog, let's say you, let's say you were a hat seller, which I can't remember what the name A millionaire [00:22:00] is, the name of, A hat of a hat maker. So if you were a millionaire, a mil, I have known someone who calls himself a million, a millionaire, like a millionaire kind of 

thing.

[00:22:08] Crystal Carter: Anyway, oh So if you were a Hatmaker and you were writing a blog about hat making and you were talking about hats, then for instance, it might be that, that, and you, let's say you had a blog that was about a trip that you took to I think I saw this actually in a case, in one case to like Mardi Gras or something, right?

[00:22:24] Crystal Carter: And you might have said, oh, I saw great hats that Mardi Gra, somebody had this hat, somebody had that hat, oh, I talked to this person, et cetera, et cetera. You don't really need to tag it with Mari. That is, is so helpful. Yes. You don't really need to tag it with Mardi Gras because you're not gonna make any more content about Mardi Gras because that was a really, that was one time that you went to the thing.

[00:22:42] Crystal Carter: It might be that you tag it with travel or something. It might be that you tag it with with inspiration or something. But if you're not gonna, if you're not gonna do more stuff on that, you don't really need to tag it with that because it'll just clutter up your crawl. It might confuse, it might send confusing signals to.

[00:22:57] Brittany Herzberg: So are tags like hashtags? Should we [00:23:00] be using some similar ones? Do we need to does every post need to have different tags? That's where my brain is going. 

[00:23:06] Crystal Carter: I think it depends on, I, again, it will depend on how your site is configured. And I think it's worth looking at them as like one, one collection.

[00:23:14] Crystal Carter: Of information. So if you pull out, if you can do a crawl, there's a tool called Screaming Frog, which is free for under 500 URLs. And you can pull it out and you can see the tags. I think you might be also be able to you might also be able to pull out all your tags extract them. And depending on the C m S and I think it's worth Thinking about whether or not they're visible.

[00:23:33] Crystal Carter: If they're not visible and you're just using them to like, to sort the information yourself in the backend then you need to check if it's actually being shown on the page, because if it's not visible on the page, it might not actually be in the HTML of the page. And then I think also it's worth thinking about just making sure that they're relevant and that as a unit as a whole, they show they tell a consistent story about your brand, your service offering what you do so that they're not just like a bunch of random tags on a [00:24:00] bunch of random topics.

[00:24:01] Crystal Waddell: The way that this kind of sounds to me is kinda we're talking about like content pillars of a website a lot, and it almost sounds. These tags should all kind of point to the same content pillar and these tags should be in the same category, content pillar, that type of thing. Is that accurate to say?

[00:24:17] Crystal Carter: I think I would say that, I think what's important to think about is that like when when Google or other search engines are calling your website, it's important to remember that all of the meta metatags, all of the links, all of the data on your website is used to tell Google who you.

[00:24:33] Crystal Carter: So the more consistent that it is and the more sort of in the same sort of realm that it is, then the clearer it will be to Google or whoever that you are who you say you are, you have expertise, you have authority, you have trust around that space. 

[00:24:47] Crystal Carter: I was in our podcast recently, we were discussing head terms and I, so I did a little bit of research on the head term hats actually, and what was interesting is and normally for head terms, like Google's no, you can't just search for hat.

[00:24:59] Crystal Carter: They're like, [00:25:00] what kind of hat do you actually want? Are you talking fedoras? You talking like baseball hats? What are you talking? And so they'll give you like more and more bubbles like trying to filter you to different spaces. But what was interesting is that like lids showed up top for hats.

[00:25:13] Crystal Carter: And one of the reasons why is because like they know that Lids is hats. That's all they do. That is all they do for 20 years. Like they've just been selling hats. So if somebody's looking for hats, then probably lids will have something that satisfies what they need, because that's all they sell.

[00:25:28] Crystal Carter: They only sell hats. So I think it's really important to be consistent in your brand messaging and in the kinds of terms and think about your metadata, your tags, your links, your link attributes as part of that story that's essentially part of the story for the bots.

[00:25:44] Crystal Carter: So the humans will see like all of the lovely blogs that you're writing and all of the images that you're sharing and the bots can see the images as well and is certain in a slightly different way. But everything you're adding onto it, including your technical SEO type stuff, is all helping to tell that story.

[00:25:58] Crystal Carter: So it should all be in the sort of the same [00:26:00] neighborhood. 

[00:26:01] Brittany Herzberg: I love that. So one of the things that I talk about with SEO copywriting is we're writing for the humans, but remembering that the bots are there too. And I'm hearing you say a lot of things about like story and messaging and branding. 

[00:26:12] Crystal Waddell: I'm always like this, whenever we talk to somebody and they say something. schema.org, it's oh, we have to do a podcast on that. So I'm like, I can't wait to research that cuz I've been there. It's one of those things where I was like, Ooh, I don't really know enough about this yet.

[00:26:28] Crystal Waddell: To talk about it, but the best way to learn about it is to do it. So ...

[00:26:31] Crystal Carter: yes, schema org is really fun. Like you can just, you go in the search thing and you can search up what you need. And yeah, you can search up and then you can figure out all of the stuff. I have an article about schema markup on the Moz blog.

[00:26:42] Crystal Carter: I cannot remember the name of the article, but if you look up my name and laws of schema can find schema, you'll find it. And yeah, that talks about it a lot. Lays it out pretty, I think I lay it out pretty good. But you can also, what's useful is to also look at other people's schema. So if you take a, if you go to validator.schema.org, you can pop [00:27:00] in a URL and you can have a look at it.

[00:27:02] Crystal Carter: It's also the Rich Results Gallery. If you go to the Wix SEO Learning Hub it's like a. Wix.com com slash SEO slash learn. We have a great article on rich results as well, which talks about like the rich results rich results gallery and how you can see the stuff that will get you additional visibility on Google.

[00:27:20] Crystal Carter: So if you ever see like the jobs like Google for jobs that jobs carousel or that jobs widget that's powered by schema markup. If you see recipe cards, that's also schema markup as well. 

[00:27:30] Crystal Waddell: Okay, so I wanna Pop back to what you said in the beginning because you had mentioned your learning center or whatever for Wix. 

[00:27:37] Crystal Carter: Yeah.

[00:27:37] Crystal Waddell: So my first comment slash question is like, how many of your users actually. Utilize those articles and because I'm like it's such a resource no matter what content management system you use, they are such a resource. It seems so intimidating, but I remember you said that there was like a checklist to go through, so that I'm sure probably helps people.

[00:27:58] Crystal Waddell: But then you also [00:28:00] mentioned that you would talk to people. Who use your product. And then I was wondering, do you take that feedback back to the product designers and how does that relationship work?

[00:28:10] Crystal Carter: Yeah, so we're constantly having conversations with users. There are 200 million Wix users over 200 million Wick users.

[00:28:17] Crystal Carter: And we love them all. And basically we chat to people in lots of different spaces and And Yeah, absolutely. We action feedback that we get and actively engage with users and have user interviews about different things that we can do. And certainly we have a, we have an SEO board that talks to us and we say, we've got this new idea.

[00:28:36] Crystal Carter: What do you think? And they say, oh, we think this, and this. We've got some fantastic people on the board. And they have great insights. And with regards to making sure that users are able to get the Wix SEO Learning Hub, we have a monthly webinar, which we regularly promote to, to Wix Partners.

[00:28:51] Crystal Carter: We have an SEO dashboard within the c m s. And so any new content that's added to the SEO Learning Hub is also visible within the dashboard, w Wix SEO dashboard. You can [00:29:00] also see your Google Search console rankings in the Google or in the the SEO dashboard as well.

[00:29:04] Crystal Waddell: That's cool. 

[00:29:04] Crystal Carter: It is cool. We, I love I literally love it. Yeah. 

[00:29:08] Brittany Herzberg: That's amazing. 

[00:29:09] Crystal Carter: So yeah we have, we like to make sure that we are able to, we, the team as a whole really likes to make sure that. The people who are trying to do SEO on wics feel fully supported and feel like they can achieve.

[00:29:20] Crystal Carter: You're able to stretch if you want to. You're also able to chillax if you want to as well. So we make sure that all the basics are covered. But if you want to, if you're like, ah, I really wanna get into Schema, there's space for that as well. 

[00:29:31] Crystal Carter: There's also something called fellow, which is a, it's like a developer space. And essentially you can write your own JavaScript. 

[00:29:38] Crystal Carter: Fun fact. If you're not great with JavaScript, if you're like, I don't know how to do whatever you can use, and I have done this, you can use Chat GPT to help you. Because it's a no J node it's node js.

[00:29:52] Crystal Carter: Essentially I had a situation where I went to velo examples and I found something that was similar but not exactly what I wanted. And [00:30:00] so I, you can extract the code. And I took the code and I popped it into chat, G P T, and I was like, I want to change this code into something that does this. And and chat.

[00:30:08] Crystal Carter: G P T was like, oh, great, try this. And I was like, okay, thanks. So I popped that into, to to velo. On, on the Wix website. And velo has a lot of assistance on it. So if you have your syntax wrong, if you use the wrong comma, if you don't use curly braces, and if you don't do whatever, it'll say that's not valid.

[00:30:25] Crystal Carter: Or if you leave out a, if you leave out a variable or something, it'll say, that doesn't work. So it was like the error in your code, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, okay. So I popped it back to chat g pt. I was like, Hey, Velo says that there's an error. 

[00:30:37] Crystal Carter: Chat was like, oh, try this. And so I popped it back and forth in between the two of them.

[00:30:41] Crystal Carter: Like I got ended up with something that worked really well, even though I'm not a JavaScript wiz. 

[00:30:45] Crystal Carter: So that's really really useful and really interesting. So yeah, there's a lot of really great opportunities to flex or chillax in WIX. 

[00:30:52] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, man, I love that is like the coolest thing because that's one of the best use case scenarios I've heard for chat G P T.

[00:30:58] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. And and [00:31:00] that was gonna be my other question because you'd mentioned chat, 

[00:31:02] Crystal Waddell: G P T earlier. Have you integrated that with Wix or do you guys encourage your users? 

[00:31:08] Brittany Herzberg: She's dancing. She's dancing.

[00:31:10] Crystal Carter: I am. I'm, because we have, I've showed it to a few SEOs and we're dealing it all out. Basically like Wix has been in the AI space for a while.

[00:31:16] Crystal Carter: We have something called a d i, which is an oh, a Adi. I. Ar, artificial design intelligence or something essentially where we would somebody would put in a certain prompts and then we'd spin up a, a sort of first draft of a website. That was one, one thing that we've had going for a few years recently, we have added into the editor, which allows you to edit the sort of main pages of your website in our sort of WIS gig builder.

[00:31:38] Crystal Carter: It allows it, we have a section that says create create AI text. And what you do is, let's say you've got let's say you've got your about page. And a lot of people I know, a lot of people are like, I don't wanna write my biography. It makes me want to like crawl into a hole and hide. I know people some job security, so I know some people really don't like that.

[00:31:56] Crystal Carter: But what you can do is you can say, you. You [00:32:00] say create AI content. And then there's a couple of boxes and you can say what is this for? It says, oh, it's a product. What does it need to include? And you can say, T-shirt, size five blue cotton. And then it, then you click the button and it'll whizz around and it's chat, G P t backed or chat, chat, G P T powered.

[00:32:16] Crystal Carter: And then it'll put. Three different versions of the text, and you can, and it'll be like, oh, this t-shirt is amazing, or This t-shirt is great, or this t-shirt is fine, or whatever. And you can go I would like select to select number three. And then it, then you can say, use, and it'll pop it into the space and it spits out about a paragraph or so.

[00:32:33] Crystal Carter: And it's always worth to my dear listeners to check and to edit and to assess. The AI content that you use because the bots are clever, but they're also dumb and random. It's essentially right. It's a essentially like a really sophisticated version of predictive text.

[00:32:54] Crystal Carter: It's essentially what it is. It's a, it's trained on millions and millions and million, and so that's great, but it doesn't actually [00:33:00] understand in the same way that a person would. So just, double check, make sure you're happy and put a little sauce on it. If. Okay. So the last question related 

[00:33:09] Crystal Waddell: to AI is there's been lots of chatter about, okay, if you use ai, is Google then going to penalize you because it was generated by ai. 

[00:33:18] Crystal Carter: I think this is the other reason why you need to add in, make sure that you're adding an in yourself and that making sure that you're editing it yourself and making sure that you're putting it in your own tone, voice and things like that.

[00:33:27] Crystal Carter: Also so that it has some unique positioning. I think one of the things that's, that people are going like SEO is dead. Which is the thing that happens every few years. People go, is SEO dead? What's going on? Like it happens every few years. And to be honest, I think that in the H V I I think SEO is gonna be almost more important than ever because there's gonna be a lot of very samey content coming out.

[00:33:46] Crystal Carter: So how do you differentiate? In that space. And I think that SEOs are going to need, to manage that well. And I think that the AI content is useful. But I think it, it's, it should be useful [00:34:00] as a tool. It is a tool. And I don't think it's the final thing.

[00:34:03] Crystal Carter: I think it is a tool. So use it as a tool. The other day, I had a list of something and I was like, and I was like, can you add or can you remove all of the everything after this slash on this list of URLs? And it just did it. And I was like, yes, thank you.

[00:34:18] Crystal Carter: Or can you turn this into a, can you turn this list into a CSV for blah, blah, blah? And they were like, yeah, great. Like the, that's really useful. So yeah, it's a tool or also sometimes if you find yourself I found it before where I was searching for something that like, I just couldn't articulate in a couple of words and I was and so I had a combo with chat G B T and I was like, what is this?

[00:34:36] Crystal Carter: But what and I just kept it going until it gave me something that was a hint and that I could then actually research that more detail on search. 

[00:34:45] Crystal Waddell: I was just wondering, I'm like, I wonder if it could generate the schema mark up? 

[00:34:50] Crystal Carter: I have tried this, I have tried this, and what one of the problems with AI is AI hallucinations, because as I said, it's a very sophisticated [00:35:00] version of predictive text.

[00:35:01] Crystal Waddell: So large language models, essentially they're, they predict the next word based on all of the words that they've read, which are millions. So I found for one, what you could potentially use it for is to create a framework for schema. If you were rolling it out across multiple URLs, for instance.

[00:35:17] Crystal Waddell: So let's say you had 75 pages that had videos on them and you needed video schema for them. For instance, it might be that you used it to help you make the framework for your video schema. But, I wouldn't, what I found when I used this, cause I tried to do exactly this, what I found was that it like made up a bunch of URLs cuz for a video schema, for instance, you're supposed to add in the the u r l for the image, for the, for the thumbnail, for the video.

[00:35:43] Crystal Waddell: And and it was like, yeah, this is the url. It's like that, that URL doesn't exist. You just made that up. 

[00:35:47] Crystal Waddell: And so then I was like, what else did you make up? And then I had to go all the way back through like all of the things. 

[00:35:52] Crystal Waddell: So for one thing, like it's gonna take you twice, it's gonna take you just as long to check it, to make, to QA it? Yeah. As it would for [00:36:00] if you just wrote it yourself. 

[00:36:01] Crystal Waddell: However, if you were planning to do lo loads of things and you were like I'd like this to include this attribute, and that attribute, it could potentially format something that you could then use, you could then plug in variables to and that, that sort of thing.

[00:36:13] Crystal Waddell: So I think that, Just make sure that you check everything. Everything. 

[00:36:18] Crystal Waddell: Particularly anything technical. Cuz I had someone and they were like, oh yeah, I asked it to spin up code for a web application. And it just did it. 

[00:36:24] Crystal Waddell: I was like, did you check it? And he was like, no. So how do you know that works?

[00:36:28] Crystal Waddell: It's if someone was like, it was like, oh, can you build the house? I'm like, yeah, I can. It's oh, I asked this lady and she said she could build me a house. 

[00:36:34] Crystal Waddell: I can't build a house. You have to check these things. Like you have to check. 

[00:36:40] Brittany Herzberg: Yeah, we can be a little too trusting with some of these things, so I think that's a good reminder because it can be a helpful tool, just check your work..

[00:36:47] Crystal Carter: Yeah, check it. Check it before you publish it. Don't just publish it. 

[00:36:49] Brittany Herzberg: Check it before you. Check yourself, before you wreck yourself online.

[00:36:53] Crystal Carter: Indeed. To quote Ice Cube. Great Ice Cube. 

[00:36:58] Crystal Waddell: Okay, so before we leave, because [00:37:00] I know we're gonna wrap up here in just a second, what do you see as like the top three trends in seo?

[00:37:06] Crystal Waddell: Or maybe the top three things to focus on if you're a small business owner wanting to maximize SEO for your business. 

[00:37:15] Crystal Carter: If you're a small business owner, I think that it's worth thinking about multimedia. And when I say that, I mean like videos, images if you can do podcasty kind of things, like that's great as well, but.

[00:37:27] Crystal Carter: Think about, don't just think about your content, particularly on your website as just text. Make sure that you're thinking about other things as well. So make sure you're thinking about images as well. Google can use image recognition to understand the images on your pages in a different way.

[00:37:42] Crystal Carter: The second thing I would say is pay attention to AI in your space. everyone is talking about ai. It's affecting us in lots of different ways. Pay attention to it. I hesitate to give specific recommendations around it because there's so much, it's changing so rapidly.

[00:37:56] Crystal Carter: But one of the things I would say is that Bing is becoming a player, [00:38:00] and one of the things that people don't realize is that new Bing, which is seeing 15% uptick. And they're seeing growth while Google is seeing some decline and it's a little bit of decline, but it's some decline.

[00:38:10] Crystal Carter: So they're seeing improvements and what I'm seeing is that like people think that if the, that when they go on Bing and they use the ai that because they're on Google, that they'll rank the same. And what happens on New Bing is that you ask it a question and it will give you an answer with links to websites.

[00:38:28] Crystal Carter: All of those links come from Bing's Index. Bing's Index is different from Google. Everyone's been paying attention to Google for years and years. Nobody's been paying attention to Bing. So if you are a business and you are not on bing webmaster tools, do it. If you're a business and you're not on Bing places, do it.

[00:38:44] Crystal Carter: If you're not paying attention to where you're ranking on, on, You should probably do that because it's gonna be a little bit of low hanging fruit. A lot of people are seeing more conversions there yeah. And a lot of people are starting to use Edge because they have to, in order to get the new chat, G p T powered search. 

[00:38:57] Crystal Carter: And then finally, I would just say it's [00:39:00] worth making sure that you're that you have your brand in in a few different places. So not just on your website, but also that you're connecting the dots across all of your digital spaces.

[00:39:09] Crystal Carter: This is something I've spoken about in a few places and it's something that I think is really important is making sure that you're spreading yourself around in different places because it can help with indexing on your website. It can help with your overall digital footprint, and it can help with your seo.

[00:39:23] Brittany Herzberg: This is gonna be my, like biweekly plug: sign up for HARO.

[00:39:27] Brittany Herzberg: Oh, this is amazing. Thank you so much for being here. I feel like I have four tasks that I need to add to my Friday. This is absolutely incredible. 

[00:39:35] Brittany Herzberg: Okay. Where can people connect with you? And I know you mentioned you had a checklist or something, so let us know where can people connect with you?

[00:39:42] Crystal Carter: Okay, so I am on Twitter way too much, and my Twitter handle is crystal on the web. And if you go there, you'll find information about me. You'll also see lots and lots of information from the Wix SEO Learning Hub. I also have a podcast on the Wix SEO Learning Hub which is called SERPS Up. And and I also published on the Wix SEO Learning Hub.

[00:39:59] Crystal Carter: I [00:40:00] published a lot of content there, so do check me out there and oh, I'm on LinkedIn as well, very rarely, but. I am. 

[00:40:06] Brittany Herzberg: It clearly paid off because I think that's where you too met, so Yay. Yay LinkedIn. This is awesome. 

[00:40:12] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. I'm about to pop over to Twitter, though, so Crystal's gonna be like, oh my gosh.

[00:40:16] Crystal Carter: Come through. Tag me up. 

[00:40:17] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. Crystal's be like, oh my gosh, this crystal is falling me everywhere on the internet.

[00:40:21] Crystal Carter: It's fine. I'll introduce you to the other S SCO crystals. Shout out Crystal Tang. Shout out Crystal Oda. Shout out Crystal Horton. Shout out Crystal Ortiz. 

[00:40:31] Crystal Waddell: Awesome. Thank you Dad. I know you're listening right now, but thanks for naming me Crystal.

[00:40:35] Crystal Waddell: And on that note, I think we're done here, so.

[00:40:37] Brittany Herzberg: I think so. 

[00:40:38] Crystal Waddell: Thanks for listening. 

[00:40:39] Crystal Waddell: Crystal. Thanks for being here and yeah, we will catch y'all next time.

[00:40:44] Brittany Herzberg: Bye.