Managing Digital Entities: Tools + Tips with Crystal Carter

0:00Crystal CarterA lot of the, a lot of the core concepts of being consistent with your digital presence being consistent with how you describe yourself.

0:07And that you understand the USP. And are consistent with your USP about your business. That's, that's not going to change going forward.

0:15But, people who are like, Oh, I'm doing this this week. No, but this week I'm doing this. No, but I also, did you know, I also act like chill with that. Pick one.

0:23Do you know what I mean? You know what I'm saying?

0:25Crystal WaddellYeah

0:26Welcome to the third season of the simple and smart SEO show the podcast dedicated to empathy driven brand building SEO. I'm your host, Crystal Waddell. I leverage my obsession with user experience to help business owners just like you optimize your website with confidence. Thank you so much for being here.

0:43Let's jump into another great episode.

0:45Crystal CarterAll right, guys, I am back with one of my favorite people in SEO.

0:49It is Crystal Carter, the head of SEO communication at Wix. She is here to break down something that often sounds very complicated, but in fact is a little bit more common sense than we might think. But Crystal Carter, thank you for being here on the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast. Welcome back.

1:06Thank you so much, Crystal.

1:07It's always a pleasure to be here. And yeah, well done with a wonderful show.

1:11I don't, are we recording now? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Now. So if we're recording now, there's there's some folks.

Understanding EntitiesKey Figures and Tools

1:16Crystal CarterSo people that I think I look to, to understand entities are Gus Pelogia. He's got a great article on the knowledge graph on the Wix SEO learning hub.

1:24So do check out what he's written there. Okay. Also lots of other folks have talked about it as well. I'm pretty sure that Jamie Indigo has discussed it. There's lots of stuff around the knowledge graph. That's really useful. So so Carl Hendy has a great tool. It's a knowledge graph checker.

1:39So if you want to see whether or not you have a knowledge panel, for instance. You can check that out. And you can see what that looks like the team and links also have a really good tool that helps you map out the the knowledge graph and the knowledge graph and entities are really closely related.

1:53So that's why I'm bringing that up.

1:54Okay. For instance, if you were to look up Beyonce, for instance. On Google, then she gets like a special panel, right? And it's like her, and it'll say her spouse is Jay Z, and her child is Blue Ivy, and her other child is Rumi, who's on the new Cowboy Carter album and so it will say those things, it'll say how old she is, and it'll say where she, that she was born in H Town.

2:14I'm like, shout out to H Town. I've never been to Houston, but I'm a big fan of Beyonce and Megan Thee Stallion, so shout out to H Town. Anyway so it will say those things, right? All of those things in themselves are also entities, right? And the TLDR of what an entity is essentially a noun, right?

2:28It's a person, place thing. Even a concept.

2:31So a really, another really good way to get your idea, your head around what is an entity is if you use Google, if you use if you use Google Photos, when you go to the explore page, they categorize all of your pictures into stuff. So they, so Google years ago, wrote this article about things and strengths and stuff like that.

2:49And I can't remember the exact name of it, but I can look it up. And basically. If you go to, if you go to your photo reel, then it will say it will sort everything into category. So it will say these are pictures of dogs..

3:02These are pictures of coffee. These are pictures of of shoes.

3:07These are pictures of chairs, but it will also sort them into things that are a little bit more ephemeral. Like these are mountains. Or this is fog. Or these are sunsets.

3:15And so Google understands, understands that those are entities. Those are things that exist.

3:20So if you see something that shows up that gets like a special treatment on the SERP on the search engine result pages. If when you type in blog, it has like a knowledge panel on the side that says blogging is this: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

3:32That means that it's part of the knowledge graph and there's something like 8, 000, 000, 000 entities. I think that are part of the knowledge graph.

3:37And another way. Another way to if you're not sure if it has a Wikipedia page, generally speaking, it's an entity. So there will also be like an entity for blogging.

3:45What is blogging? And there'll be an entity for headless CMS. That'll be something as well. There'll be an entity for I don't know pick something microphones.

3:52They'll be things like that as well.

3:54And so when you're thinking about how an entity relates to your website.

4:00And your digital presence, you should really think about the entities that are related to who you are.

4:05For instance, if I was to think about myself. It would be like, my name.

4:09Or we think we were talking about Beyonce, her name and some people will have so she's Beyonce Giselle Knowles Carter.

4:15We all know that's her real name. And but if she was somebody who's who that wasn't her real name. If maybe she was born as, I don't know, Becky, but she wasn't.

4:22But maybe she's born to something else. Then it would say that she's related to that. So when you think about the entities that are related to you, you want to make sure that they're consistent and that you're consistently showing that across your digital presence.

4:34The example that I really like to use.

4:36is is the Barbie movie. So if you look up the description for the Barbie movie, it says something like, and I'm not quoting exactly, but it says something like Barbie and Ken go on an amazing adventure and hilarity ensues or something, right?

4:49It says something to that effect. Never says anything about a toy. Never says anything about Mattel. Doesn't say anything about a doll. Doesn't say anything about her car or her, the Barbie dream house.

4:58Doesn't say anything about that. But if you go into a tool called TextRazor, Is something that is an, it's an NLP tool.

5:05So it, and it extracts, entities and extracts, the relationships between the entities in a particular piece of text. It's free to use, you can try the demo for free. It's an oldie but a goodie. It's been around for ages.

5:16Because that's the other thing is that a lot of this machine learning stuff has been around for a long time.

5:19And basically what, when you put that piece of text from the Barbie movie through text razor, for instance, it says the entities that it pull out, pulls out our fashion doll. Mattel. Toy.

5:30Things like that. Now why it's doing that is because the named entity the name entity that it understands that Barbie in proximity to Ken is Barbie, the doll, right?

5:41There are other Ken's there's Kenny Rogers. There's Ken Griffey Jr. There are other Kens in the world, right? I'm pretty sure there's other Barbies in the world as well. It's a shortening for Barbara. There's gonna be other people called Barbie in the world.

5:52Crystal WaddellMy MUM

5:52Crystal Carteris

5:52Crystal Waddellnamed Barb.

5:53Crystal CarterExactly. Okay. So when you get, but when you get Barbie and Ken in proximity, they're going to assume that if you're talking about Barbie and Ken, you're talking about Barbie and Ken the doll.

6:00Now, if you go in and here's where it comes in with with chat GPT etc. If you go into chat GPT, and you said, can you tell me a name of a fashion doll? It will say Barbie. So the entities that it understands to be associated with Barbie and the entities that ChatGPT understands to be associated with a fashion doll are similar.

6:18I tested this as well with Wix, for instance. Wix's entity is is related to a cloud based CMS. That's what it says on a Wikipedia page. That's what we do. And if I go to ChatGPT and I say, can you name me a cloud based CMS? They say Wix. And I say, can you name me a cloud based CMS? They say Wix.

6:31Right that's 1 of the 1st ones there.

6:33Now, that means that our entity is in good condition. That means that's that we're doing something well there. But this is also something that you can do that.

6:40You can do for yourself as well.

6:42Today, literally today because I don't know, because I'm self obsessed or so, I don't know who knows don't quote me on that, but I Google myself and I, so I don't have a knowledge panel.

6:52My colleague, Mordy has a knowledge panel. And I think part of it is because he's been writing. He's been a writer for a long time. And he's written in a lot of publications. And I've written in, in, in a few, but not as many as Mordy has. And so he has a knowledge panel and it says he's an author and it goes to his page and it goes to the things, right?

7:08I don't have 1 yet. However, when I go to, if I went to chat GPT today and I said, who is Crystal Carter? And it came back and it's, they've updated. So previously the first iteration of chat GPT had data that was going up to, I think, 2022.

7:22And so they only had so much data.

7:24My career probably didn't start getting, like getting bigger or, particularly noticeable until around that time anyway. So it makes sense when I first did this, they were like it's like that Mariah Carey meme. They were like, I don't know her. Like basically, so I, but I did it today.

7:36And they were like, Crystal Carter is this person. She's currently working at Wix. She does SEO. She's da. And I was like, cool. This is good. This is promising. And basically it's referencing a number of of reputable sources.

7:48So it knows that I have my website, which has, schema markup which designates the entities that I'm related to.

7:54It says that I am, that I have a website here, it says that I work at Wix. It says that I have this specialism.

8:03It says that I do this podcast. It says that I do this in that. And then I've worked with these other named entities. It says that I've spoken at Moz. It says that I've spoken at Brighton SEO. Which are also again, they're entities, LLMs can recognize.

8:16Similarly on my and on my Wix, Wix page.

8:19I also have it have a bio page that also says that I've done this. I've done that. I've done this. I've done that.

8:24Now for businesses, particularly for local businesses. This might seem oh, my God, what am I going to do? How am I going to do that?

8:34But actually, it can be less daunting than you think.

8:38So it's really important to be super consistent with how you describe yourself. And how you understand the entities that you have. I looked at Dairy Queen, for instance. Dairy Queen is very consistent with their entity and how they describe themselves. They are a national food, fast food chain and they, they sell ice cream and la.

8:54And they are very consistent with that.

8:55But like you need to be, you need to be consistent with how you describe yourself on your website. You need to be consistent with how you describe yourself on your Google business profile.

9:04Because your Google business profile is also feeding into the knowledge graph and your Google business profile has lots of areas where you can add an attribute.

9:12So you can say it's female led. You can say that it's LGBT friendly. You can say that you have delivery. You can say that, if you're a hotel, you can say you have a swimming pool, you can like add in all of these different things, all of those attributes are all going to be contributing to what Google understands for you as part of the knowledge graph.

9:27And that's super, super useful. So don't overlook that.

9:30Additionally you can on your website declare your organization schema. I've worked with loads of small businesses on their digital presence. And your organization schema, which is a lot easier to do now. We have now we have LLM tools.

9:43For instance.

9:44What you essentially do, you can say. You can make a list. So if you go to schema. org and you type in organization schema, they will give you like all of the different parts of an organization, right? And you're nodding along. I realize I haven't let you speak.

9:56Crystal WaddellIt's okay.

9:57I'm like, Hey, she's got to get this off her chest. So go ahead.

10:00Crystal CarterOkay. So you go to organization schema and it will give you a list of all of the different things. Now. Historically speaking, you would have to go through and you would have to, you would have to add all the code and sort out all the code and this, and that.

10:10Now, what you can do is you can make a CSV and you can make a list. One column is the information that you that it says you should have. Your address, your phone number, your website, your social media handles your customer service phone number, which services you provide, that sort of thing.

10:26And then the other column, you just fill it in, right? And you can literally copy and paste those two things, those two columns, into ChatGPT and say, can you make this into organization schema? Like JSON LD organization schema. And then they will spit out the organization schema. What you have to be careful of is that they don't make up additional things.

10:41So double check that they haven't added anything in. For instance, if you don't add in your your image, like your logo, you need to have your logo in order to show in order to show in order to be valid for Google rich results for that sort of thing and be, or, have valid information there.

10:55If you don't add in your logo image, sometimes I've had it previously. I haven't checked this recently, but previously I've seen it where sometimes they'll just make up a URL that doesn't actually exist. So be careful of that. But you can take the information, take the list, and then pop it in and say, make this into JSON LD schema markup, and they will do that for you.

11:11And that's super useful. And then you can pop that into your HTML and that, that will help you. If you're on Wix, then we have tools to help you to add your organization schema as well, but you could also edit it. And if you want to do more custom things, then you can edit it using some of those techniques and that will help you to make sure that you're pointing Google to the right entities and your point pointing the LMS, et cetera, to, to the right entities as well.

11:34What's really useful and I've got a blog on this that I did for dealing with sorting out your biographical entity. Is

11:41just a 2nd,

11:42is like thinking about things that are unique to you. So one of the things is one of the things that's useful is I was looking at like Steve McQueen. So here's an example. If I had this biography that said Steve McQueen is someone who is active in films, or was like has, is involved with films.

12:01That's totally true for two people. There's Steve McQueen the back in the day action star sort of person. Yeah, generic entities Steve McQueen is a man famous for his films. That applies to 2 people. That applies to the director, Steve McQueen.

12:13Who's currently active now, and that applies to Steve McQueen the previous the, a guy from the 60s, 70s like classic movies. Whereas, if you had Steve McQueen famous for his, instead of Steve McQueen, a man famous for his films, you said Steve McQueen, Academy Award winner, film director, and Turner Prize winning artist, that's specific, that's just him.

12:33That's just that one guy. The other thing that it has within it is it also has additional named entities. That's why my biography on my Wix website or my Wix website and also on my Wix page. I have Crystal Carter has spoken at Moz. She's been on Google. She's done, she's done this for Semrush.

12:49She's done that sort of thing. So that's my named entity attached to other named entities. For instance, you would say this, if you had a business, a smaller business, you would say this business was founded by was founded by, I don't know, Jane Smith.

13:01Who attended Vassar college and previously worked for previously worked for, I don't know, this ex law attorney or something like that.

13:11And that ties you to those entities. If you, even if you are a smaller, and if you are smaller, or have a smaller digital presence, you can attach yourself to, to other folks who have larger digital presence presences. And you want to prioritize folks who have a knowledge panel.

13:25Who have who, when you Google them, they, they've got a Wikipedia page, they've got good content on there.

13:30And so there's lots of things that you can do that, but basically it's just like name dropping. It's really what it comes down to. So like name drop strategically is something that's useful, but it's something that's worth thinking about and making sure that, I think it goes back to a few classic principles.

13:45When I was working with a lot of small businesses, what I would find is they would very often say we, I, us, we. No like I know who you are, you know who you are, but put your name on your page. And I have people who are like, my website isn't on, on Google. And I'm like, what's your domain? And I do the site search and I can find their website.

14:02I'm like, your website is on Google. I can see it. And then they say, no, but I, when I searched my name, I can't find my website. I'm like, that's because you don't have your website. You don't have your name on your website. You have it in a picture, but you don't have it in the text on your website. So think there's a little bit of common sense that comes with it.

14:17And I say that in the kindest possible way, but basically, it's not that it's. It's not that it's that everybody needs to know all of this stuff, but also, the bots are both very clever and very basic. They're very literal. So you need to say exactly what you do and you need to be consistent about it.

14:33The other 1 that's really useful is your LinkedIn profile. Google will very often use LinkedIn to to shore up the knowledge panel. If there isn't a Wikipedia page on something, very often they will show a LinkedIn content. I've also very often seen people's names show, show on LinkedIn.

14:50If somebody, if you type into Google who is and and maybe they don't have a Wikipedia page. They don't have a huge presence, but they do have a LinkedIn profile. Very often the featured snippet will be from LinkedIn and it might not even be something they said about themselves. It might be something that might be a recommendation.

15:05Previously. I've seen it for my own name where it showed up as a recommendation. Somebody else said for me. So it's a question of managing your digital reputation consistently. And that should help you that should help you to perform on LLMs. In that sort of in a sort of reverse engineered sort of way.

15:22So think about which entities you want to be associated with you. For instance, if you were to think about oh, I don't know, Baskin Robbins, right? Baskin Robbins wants to be associated with ice cream, right? They sell ice cream. That's a fundamental thing. They also sell ice cream cake.

15:35I think sometimes they might even sell coffee sometimes, but their core entity, you're like, yes, they do sell a coffee. I love coffee.

15:41Crystal WaddellThey merged with Dunkin.

15:43Crystal CarterOkay. Okay. Okay.

15:44So think about your core entities, right? You might do these other things or whatever, but at the end of the day, like your core entity is, Think about what that is.

15:52And make sure that's always at the front and always at the fore of when you're talking about yourself.

15:57People on TikTok do this as well.

15:58If you have a TikTok video or something that everybody who starts their TikTok video goes, hi, I'm so and so and I'm an expert nail technician. I've been working in nail technicians for 10 years or something. They always start that. Like people who are successful on TikTok will do that every single video.

16:12And I've heard people say about this. They're like, I'm so tired of saying it myself, but it is what's required. You have to do this. And it's similar with with those sorts of things.

16:19Similarly, it's worth connecting your different profiles. Like a Lincoln bio is really useful where you can say this is my LinkedIn.

16:25This is my Insta. This is my Tik TOK. This is my Facebook. This is my whatever. And you have all of them connected. That helps Google to join the dots. And also please. Please. Make sure that you use the right URLs for that.

16:38Okay. If your website is an HTTPS website, use the HTTPS link in your link in bio, please.

16:46If you have the Facebook thing link directly to the Facebook, don't link to some other other, you can add a UTM at the end. But make sure that you're linking to the actual page. Don't link to something that's redirecting because that's going to lose you data and that's going to make it complicated.

16:59It's just, there's no reason for it. So absolutely do that. And link across your post as well. So the other thing is things like Twitter.

17:04Twitter is particularly useful because because Google has a little bit of a connection with Twitter that can help you to shore up your entity as well.

17:11But yeah, I think. A lot of the, a lot of the core concepts of being consistent with your digital presence being consistent with how you describe yourself. And that you understand the USP and are consistent with your USP about your business. That's, that's not going to change going forward.

17:28But, people who are like, Oh, I'm doing this week. No, but this week I'm doing this. No, but I also, did you know, I also act like chill with that, pick one.

17:35Do you know what I mean? You know what I'm saying?

17:38Crystal WaddellYeah, I've been very guilty of that in the past, okay. Pinterest, SEO, Shopify, blah, blah,

17:44Crystal CarterSummarize it just be like, I do digital. Just so yeah summarize it. I'm an entertainer. If you're like, if you act and you dance and if you're a triple threat.

17:52I'm an entertainer call it a day. Just it's all good.

17:54And so yeah, summarize it pick something you can use it.

17:57You can use an LLM to help you if you need to please to help me help me optimize my LinkedIn profile, et cetera, whatever. These are things that are useful. But yeah, think about your, about the entities that you want connected with you.

18:08And have a look at that.

18:09Text Razor is a great, it's a great way to do this. So Text Razor gives you a score. So I've had it before where I've dropped in a piece of text and it was like, this is about, we think this is about video games. And I'm like, this is not about video games.

18:21This is this is, this piece of text is not about video games. And then, and I look back through it and there's a list, there's a list that somebody's giving us an example, just as an offhand example. That's Oh yeah, for instance, if you were like looking at PlayStation or like this or that, and I'm like those are named entities.

18:36And they're messing up the information that like, they're messing up how the machines are understanding my content.

18:41So I need to take that out.

18:42So you can put your bio or whatever into TextRazor or into SEMrush has a great tool. That they have a great tool as well that I've used and for reverse engineering as well. So where you drop that in and they'll pull out the keywords that you're like, and then they're like, Oh, what keywords do you want to optimize for?

18:55And I go, no, tell me which keywords so I'm like, tell me, what do you see? Which entities are you seeing?

19:01And then they tell me these things. And I was like, those are not the entities I wanted. We need to change that around

19:05Crystal WaddellGo back and revise?

19:06Crystal CarterRight? Move those around. Yeah, think of some of those tools as well.

19:10And yeah, I would say, focus on, understand which entities you want related to you.

19:14And then proceed accordingly and don't waver. And make sure that it's apparent in all of the things you do.

19:20So in your schema markup. In your bios.

19:22In your links, in the core work that you're doing. Obviously, if you are basking Robbins and you are also selling coffee.

19:29Then like it's fine if you have a couple of blogs about coffee, right? Like it's not going to, it's not going to ruin everything for you, but like your Wikipedia page, your Wikidata page should say we sell ice cream. Like we are ice cream sellers, et cetera, et cetera. That should be the core of it.

19:43If that's what you want to do. And if you want to change your entity that's going to take a little while. So that's and that's worth bearing in mind as well.

19:49Crystal WaddellYeah, okay. Wow. So my 1st question for you was going to ask about the tools. So you've already named some tools that we can use to check on this, which is great.

19:59I wanted to make a comment that Gemini. Is not good at this in my experience, just the small little tests that I've been doing, right? Gemini, I. Tell me something to do and because I'm like, okay, if I want to do something with my schema and something's wrong, let me put it in the LLM.

20:16Let me put it in Gemini and figure out how to fix it.

20:19I put it in Gemini and then the directions that come out, I go try to put it in, Shopify and it's that doesn't even exist.

20:26So I go back to Gemini and I say, Hey, That didn't work. And it's Oh yeah, that's right. Sorry about that. You're right.

20:32This has been updated.

20:33Crystal CarterOkay.

20:34So I have a blog all on the Wix SEO learning hub, all about validating schema. And there's lots of tools that you can use that will help you figure out that.

20:42There's, I should probably do something on prompts or whatever, but in terms of sometimes it's syntax.

20:46But in terms of in terms of the scheme of properties sometimes they will make up and then 1 of the things I said, I say in the article is sometimes they'll just tell you what you want to hear.

20:54You're like, I wanted to have this property and I wanted to do this and the other. like, Sure. Okay. And you're like, no, little bot. That's not yeah, it doesn't exist. It's not a thing.

21:01So it's useful, if you're starting from a position of strength.

21:04But if you're still learning then, or if it's a new schema type for you then that can sometimes be tricky.

21:09So what I generally recommend is that if you take the, if you look at the list on schema. org for whatever it is that you're trying to do.

21:16If you look at that list. And say, and let's say you have like a starting bit of schema that, is right. And let's say you want to add something to it.

21:24Then I would look at the list and make sure that the list has the thing you want to add is on there and then I would say, can you help me add this to this? If you're having a tricky time with validating, like the validators.

21:34In my article on structured data validation, I share a lot of tools that you can use to help you validate structured data.

21:40A lot of them are not AI powered but they will give you, they will give you, but they're machine powered, so they will say on this line, you've got, there's something wrong, and then you can look and you can go, oh, I have two commas there.

21:50Or, oh, I didn't do that. I used I, I didn't, put the quotation marks or whatever it may be. So it will tell you and will guide you through that. And it's very often useful to, to combine the 2. Because that will give you some guidance in terms of schema.

22:02Crystal WaddellI went to just go look in my Google search console, because I remember you talking about Google search console, being able to help with this as well, to some extent. So I was hoping you could maybe talk about that for a second.

22:13But it was interesting in my CMS a lot of the schema has already set up all the structured data is.

22:18Set up. But then I received these emails from Google that said, these pieces are missing and so I was like, what's this about?

22:26Crystal CarterIn the article, I talk about this as well, because I've had this from people too.

22:29Because it makes people panic and basically there are warnings. And there are like, and there, then there are things that are like bad.

22:36So a warning it is something that is like nice to have. Oh, so sometimes you'll get like warnings that are like non-critical issues. If it's yellow, then it's a non-critical issue.

22:45And that's means that like we recommend that you do this. But I think it's also important to remember that these are nice to have recommendations.

22:53That are general guidelines and they may or may not apply to you.

22:57So they're generally saying that it would be good for you to have reviews on your products. Not every product has a review. That's just how it is.

23:05And not everybody has a review. Yeah, sure. It'd be great to have a review on the product, but I ain't got it right now. So calm down. So if that's the case, if that's the case, don't worry about it.

23:13Right? And that's worth thinking about.

23:15So ways you can respond to 2 warnings. 1 day is you can update it to address the warning. If you if it's valid. Or you can set a plan to update it. So you can say maybe it's a case that you're like, I don't have this.

23:25I don't know how to do this right now, or I don't have time for this right now. Or this isn't applicable because we don't even have a review on this right now.

23:32So you can make a plan where you can say in six months time, we're going to relook at this, et cetera, et cetera. And the other thing is you can, again, you can ignore it.

23:38If you don't have a field that matches that, if it's just not applicable to your piece of content, that's okay. If you see a warning for a product listing.

23:45Particularly if you're working in e commerce, it's worth double checking if it is a requirement for Google Merchant Center's structured data.

23:52Because the Google Merchant Center structured data requirements for it will change depending on what kind of product it is.

23:58So for instance, if you have something that's clothing, then you will have apparel requirements. And they will ask specifically for like gender or size or the material or something like that. So we want to know, is the shirt red? Is it size 12? Does is it for female or is it unisex or is it kids?

24:16Is it, et cetera? There are certain requirements that they will specifically ask for certain products.

24:20And that may or may not show up depending on which search structure data validator you're using, but double check it on the Google Merchant Center one.

24:28But I think that there's going to be some that you should worry about, but if it's yellow,

24:31that tends not to be like a deal breaker. If it's red, it's broken. If it's red, it is broken. And you need to fix that now. Like straight away.

24:39If it's yellow, take a view, right? If it's yellow, have a look at it, see what's going on. And I go into that in the article. And I go into exactly what you need, but if it's red, like it's probably not even showing on Google.

24:50If it's red, it's broken.

24:51Crystal WaddellYeah, and that's so great because where these errors or, warnings were coming from was Google Merchant Center. So.

24:58Crystal CarterRight.

24:59And Google Merchant Center has different requirements because not everybody's using Google Merchant Center.

25:03But in order for them to serve in order, because a lot of it has to do with the ads ecosystem. And in order for them to show the ads, they need to be able to say oh, this is what We're going to show shirts for like women.

25:12So yesterday, literally yesterday my, my son needed shoes.

25:16So we went to the sports shop and we bought him some shoes. Then afterwards, I was looking at my, I was looking at the thing for the shop and I Googled the shop and I got the ads at the top. And I was like, wow, these ads are really, these are really good. Because I would buy all of these bathing suits and I would buy all of this thing.

25:31I was like, how did they know? But like your girl likes loud prints and bright colors. Because I'm here. I'm in like, I would like to purchase all of these things. But then I asked my husband to Google the same thing. And all he got was like t shirts, jeans, like basketball shoes.

25:44And I was like, ah, this is the wheels in motion.

25:47So they need to know. They need to know all of those things so that they can, so that they can send the ads to the right people. And so they don't end up like burning through people's ad spend for no reason.

25:56So it's really important for them to be able to categorize so that people can sort and all of that stuff.

26:01The more information you can give them on Google Merchant Center, the better your your free listings and your ads will be shown.

26:06Crystal WaddellOkay. That makes sense. Guess my last question, with all of this is in relationship to vector embeddings.

26:14Vector embeddings. Yes. This is something I learned about from Mike King and ipullrank and Garrett Sussman.

26:21And Mike put out a video last year about vector embeddings. It basically encompasses everything you're talking about. It's almost those things that you can look at and zoom in on and they're like, pictures and you zoom in on the picture and then there's another picture in there and you can just keep zooming in and zooming in the Russian dolls of digital art or whatever.

26:40That's what it seems like to me, where it's taken these entities and putting them all together, calling it a vector embedding. And then, just that's like this, not reorganization, but like a 3D organization of this data.

26:55And when I saw that, it also made me think of you and of entities. And so I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that, or if you saw a relationship there between them as well.

27:07Crystal CarterYeah, so this is, I'm not going to, I'm not going to profess to be as machine learning savvy as Mike King.

27:14He is, he like, King by name, King by nature. In terms of this. And I would also, but I would also say that, the ways that people visualize digital relationships, entity relationships can vary.

27:25So I. As far as I understand it, it's a, it's a way that people are, presenting this data the relationships between them, but the relationships between entities and things like that can be depicted in many ways. I don't think that most people will need to have actual hands on involvement, particularly with vector embedding.

27:47But Mike King is a great place to start in terms of that.

27:50My understanding is that the way I tend to approach it is to approach managing the entities directly.

27:57And in terms of, what knowledge is out there and what is. What search tools are pulling out.

28:03Yeah, and I think that there are a couple of tools that can be quite sophisticated. I think I mentioned inlinks, which talks about a lot of different modeling for relationships between entities and things like that.

28:12And I think that's worth looking at. And also another person who's really good to follow is data is Brittany Muller, who talks loads about all of the different systems and how they all relate.

28:23For instance the way that chat GPT understands knowledge is different from the way that previous machine learning models have understood a knowledge.

28:31And there's something called Bert and there's something called MUM and they're, they understand different data points as well.

28:37MUM is multimodal and that can understand information from images. And also from from other different media points and and all as well as text. And then I think Bert has more of a text relationship, so it can understand the different text as well.

28:51But you can go way, way down the rabbit hole in that regard.

28:54Brittany Muller is a great person for that. She started off at Moz as somebody who was interested in machine learning, and she's now fully fledged, like, all, all up in it.

29:02And she has some great examples of that. She recently did a talk on LLMs and how that, how they work. And she, I recently saw her speak at MozCon and she was brilliant.

29:10She also does writing for Hugging Face, which is a great place to explore some of these sort of more more in depth topics..

29:17Crystal WaddellOkay, so going back to the search within say, chat GPT or whatever, say, you search yourself or and or your business and it's wrong. Then what? Can do you feed it new information?

29:29Will that help correct it? Or. How does that work?

29:32Crystal Carter1 of the things is it depends on whether it's a live LLM. So perplexity. Bing, Gemini, they are working with live data.

29:41Yeah, Bing's co pilot is working with live data from Bing. Perplexity is searching the web in real time.

29:48Gemini is searching the web in real time. But chat GPT, the free version of chat GPT is I asked them today, like I literally asked today, I was like, what can I ask you questions about you? And he said, sure, I'll tell you all about me. I call it chatters. Anyway. So I said, all right, chatters, tell me all about you.

30:04And and it said that it was now that it had now been updated since its last update.

30:09It had data up to 2023. Now, if you're looking on the free version, and let's say it's telling you're wrong on the free version. Then I would not panic.

30:18Because if you hadn't updated anything before 2023, then it's probably going to stay wrong until they have their next update.

30:24If you were looking on bing's copilot, or if you're looking on Gemini, or if you're looking on perplexity, you're searching there and that's incorrect. Then that means that you can take some steps to update that. And again these are things you can do with reputational elements.

30:40So taking into consideration, like the, all the things I was saying about your entity, making sure you have bio pages, making sure that you have good data about your business in the places where you should have good data, like your Google business profile, like your about page, like your webpage, like your wiki data page.

30:55If you have one. That sort of thing. So I would take those steps. And you can audit like where they have it. The other thing is if you're looking at one of the live LLMs, co pilot or perplexity or Gemini, you can ask it.

31:07Where did you hear that?

31:08That's good. So Perplexity will give you all of their sources. And you can say where did you hear that? And then you can go and you can fix that page. Or you can say to that person, I never said that. Or you can say, or you can tell the people like, hey, we don't sell, we're not a barista.

31:21We're an ice cream shop. But fix that. So you can see their sources and it's worth following up and correcting those.

31:27I have a project that I work with and they recently asked me to update my bio and I was like, oh yeah, good. 'cause actually this has out of date information and I can update that. And bring some of those things together.

31:36So that's worth doing as well. But I think that for the chat GPT, if you're looking at the free version anyway, which is what most people have access to.

31:42If you're looking to update that, you're going to have to wait until they do the next update. And to be fair, it's only been about, it's only been about 18 months.

31:48I think since they launched it like widely and they've already done another update. So they're probably going to get quicker with that as they go along as well.

31:56Crystal WaddellSo for the paid version of chat, GPT is does it function more like Gemini and perplexity then?

32:02Crystal CarterIt can do. Depending on your settings.

32:04Crystal WaddellOkay. Gotcha. Cool. Okay, so this was crazy. I know people are going to be like, what in the world crystal, but crystal and crystal.

32:12But I'm so glad because I know that this is the future of SEO and, from a, just a marketing standpoint or like digital marketing standpoint, we've talked for a long time about having, social profiles.

32:25That mirrored each other and that we're consistent and all of these things, but I love the fact that there's now this SEO component that backs it up to say, okay, not only is that common sense, but this is also why, like, when insert why it's important.

32:39Thank you for, just sharing and solidifying it and all that.

32:43But, if anybody wants to follow you. You're probably speaking soon again, somewhere I'm sure. So I'd love to hear about that and then, where people could connect with you online.

32:53Crystal CarterGreat. Yeah.

32:54I just finished speaking at MozCon.

32:55The deck is online. And I can't remember if you can buy the videos there, but I was just sharing some stuff about about discussion forums and Reddit and all that stuff.

33:04Additionally, I will be speaking at local you summit in New York in September.

33:10That's going to be at the Wix playground.

33:11We're really excited to be hosting that at our venue in New York.

33:14And then I'm going to be at San Diego, Brighton, San Diego. I'm going to be at Brighton, UK as well in the autumn. And I'm also speaking at an event for SEMrush in October.

33:23Yeah lots to look forward to and always happy to chat with folks and.

33:27Stop by and say hello. Oh, and online.

33:30So online I'm active on LinkedIn and I'm also on Twitter and X, Twitter, X, Twitter, and then, and also you feel free to join my 200 Fairy Elite followers on TikTok. Thank you.

33:44Crystal WaddellYes, I've seen those TikTok videos. I love those. Those are so fun. How you show your day in a life of like wherever that city is that you happen to be in at that time.

33:53I really enjoy those. I will follow you on TikTok.

33:56Crystal CarterThank you very much. Thank you. Yeah.

33:57Crystal WaddellI'm going to be 201 or 241, whatever. I don't know. Yeah. Awesome.

34:02Crystal CarterWe have discerning taste.

34:03Crystal WaddellThank you very much. It's so good to see your face again.

34:06And I will see you in november. In

34:09Crystal Carteryes, in San Diego.

34:10Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. Thanks again.