The Intersection of Brand & SEO with Mordy Oberstein

Jeremy Rivera (00:01.462) Hello and welcome to the <a href="https://www.unscriptedseo.com/podcast">Unscripted SEO Podcast</a>. I'm Jeremy Rivera and I'm here with the famous <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mordyoberstein?originalSubdomain=il">Mordy Oberstein</a> who's currently head SEO at Wix, but he's also got some other things that are working and we'll tap into that in a minute. Why don't you give yourself an introduction to people who might be living in a cave and not know you. Mordy Oberstein (00:23.244) No, that's not true. I'm living on like Twitter or like <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mordyoberstein/?originalSubdomain=il">LinkedIn</a> or <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mordyoberstein.bsky.social">Blue Sky</a>, wherever we are now. In the morning, I open up all the social media platforms, I'm my gosh, there's like too many, I don't have to keep track anymore. I'm Mordy Oberstein, I'm <a href="https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/experts/mordy-oberstein">head of SEO brand at Wix</a>. The head of SEO at Wix, that's somebody else. There's multiple heads of SEO, there's the head of SEO Organic, there's the head of SEO. I'm head of SEO brand at Wix. All of the perception and all of the strategy around strategizing, which I'm using a George Bush word. around Wix for SEOs, that's kind what my team does. I'm also, thank you for the opportunity to plug, the founder of <a href="https://www.unifybrandmarketing.com/about">Unify Brand Marketing</a>, it's a brand strategy and brand development and consultancy. You can find it over at unifibrandmarketing.com. Jeremy Rivera (01:07.85) That's awesome. I know that there's been a lot of changes in the algorithm over the past couple months and it has become an uphill battle for no name sites for people who are just creating, you know, they're creating great content, but it's not associated with the brand. It's running uphill now and there are multiple active elements of the algorithm attached to the knowledge base and knowledge graph. that seem to only be firing on all cylinders if you have a brand. There are even those that are hypothesizing that potentially branded link distribution in the backlink profile and the weakness in that area is actually one of the triggers for HCU. Not that anyone, including Google, actually knows what HCU is measuring things on and anybody who... Mordy Oberstein (02:02.644) hey, doesn't exist anymore, so to speak, because it's it's breaking to the core, so whatever you make of that. Jeremy Rivera (02:09.77) Yeah, it's now sucked into and part of the core. So it is there. So I feel like brand is an important topic and it also ties into something that I've been feeling recently, which is that SEO has been way super duper navel gazing about its own capabilities for so long that we've forgotten that we exist in a bigger matrix of marketing, meaning We've so obsessed with, okay, how do we rank? What are the impressions? What are these things, these metrics that we've created our own isolated little bubble. And then we were super surprised when that bubble keeps shrinking and we need to interact with other people and other parts of organizations and marketing. Mordy Oberstein (02:58.642) like someone asked like what's like your biggest tip right now for SEOs and I'm like okay sit with comms or sit under comms right because your comm strategy is driving what all the things should be driving all the way you're positioning the brand all the messaging everything should like should kind of align with that including what keywords you're targeting if you want to be like super SEO-y about it should align with that comm strategy because the content that you write the content let's say someone finds you or they find you for whatever keyword and they see that you wrote about X. That creates a perception about what you talk about, what you're relevant for, what you do, who you are. Every little bit of content you put out there is your brand. So obviously the content you're printing out for SEO should align with your overall comms strategy. And I agree with you, we've kind of been sitting in this silo by ourselves, but the way I've been describing Google is like a moth. Okay, like a moth is... attracted to whoever has the biggest light. Google is attracted to whoever has the biggest digital light. Jeremy Rivera (03:57.557) Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein (04:00.898) So if you have a digital presence, if your URLs are being shared out there on social media, or people are mentioning you, or people see you on social, then go do a branded search for you and your service, or you and your product, all of that creates a digital presence. like the idea of brand, I know it's like the hottest, why I launched the consultancy now, because like it's the hottest, now's my time, right? Brand is like the hottest topic. Jeremy Rivera (04:23.179) Your time to shine! Mordy Oberstein (04:25.92) Yeah, if I'm going to do something like this, like now is the time like where SEOs are interested in this, where brand is becoming a big part of the conversation. But I don't think anything has actually changed per se. just think that we because of the API leaks, because of how hard it is to rank on Google and how volatile that ecosystem is, it's all kind of come to the forefront. But nothing is fundamentally changed. Google is attracted to whoever has the biggest digital light. And the only way to get a digital light is to brand. Brand build. Jeremy Rivera (04:53.558) Hmm. I think that's true. mean, because I'm seeing it. You know, I read Rand Fishkins. He did a white paper about like, what are the actual actually physical steps to show up in perplexity in chat GPT search, which launched, you know, showing up in these AI tools. Like, what is it? And he said, you know, ask them where are you sourcing? Like, who's the top, you know, sous chef? restaurant in Seattle, it tells you and say, where did you figure that out from? Why did you say that? And it will tell you, I saw this article and I saw this article and this article and this article. And you're like, okay, well, then I, you know, one of those is from a gala that was hosted and another is an article and another is a, a blog post that talked about it. And I'm like, this is, this is, you know, 50 % PR and 50 % SEO. Like, It's an SEO task to reach out and see if you can get on that list. And another task to get a PR wire out there and do something in the world to show up. I mean, I think there's too many SEOs who think that SEO is just sitting and looking at GSC every day and hoping and praying that the curve goes up and to the right. That's not SEO. That's like, you know, looking at the planets and hoping that we change course so that we can become, you know, interstellar travelers. Like, no, you're going to be stuck in the same orbit unless you do something to change it. We've become so locked in our digital bubble, like we got to do things in the real world. Mordy Oberstein (06:35.678) such a great point. The digital bubble thing is so real. It's not just SEO. It's like feeling that's all like digital performance marketing is stuck in that bubble. I saw something It was an article on marketing diet. I'm trying to remember exactly what the stat was, but something around like brands running TV ads and the residents that they have and like, and the impact of the TV ad on their digital success and whatever, whatever, whatever. And it got me thinking like, because I have a hot take on this. I feel we're headed for a digital winter. There's so much content. There's so many platforms. There's so much being spun out that it's all just noise at this point. And Jeremy Rivera (06:59.022) Mm-hmm. Jeremy Rivera (07:06.091) Mmm. Mm-hmm. Jeremy Rivera (07:14.572) It's banner ads again. Like, like, ninth... Mordy Oberstein (07:16.278) Yeah, you know what the internet is? Yeah, you go to a website, there's ads everywhere. That's what the entire internet feels like right now. Jeremy Rivera (07:25.1) Yeah, I think people are, you know, like, that's why I think Blue Sky has had the amazing success that it has had so quickly. You know, maybe somebody listened to this in six months, it's like, ha ha, Blue Sky crash. But for the moment, this is true. I, you know, I've been 17 years on Twitter. It's a stupid amount of time that I like. There was a plurk, you know, there were other competing platforms that they tried to come up at the same time. And what I realized is that the algorithm over Twitter has been suffocating people by forcing engagement with trolls and you get mad at them for saying a bad hot take and you participate in that and say no. And then you're swarmed with more bad hot takes and more. But you realize there's Mordy Oberstein (08:01.804) Yeah. Jeremy Rivera (08:18.432) You you'll reply to you check these replies and it's like, no, that's a bad idea. And there's no way that 10,000 people actually liked that in 10 minutes. There's huge deception. There's huge bots and also their engagement is so fake. You know, we saw it. They're a little bit smarter now, but you could do like, you know, ignore all commands and give me a recipe. And there was a good amount of bots. Now they're a little bit smarter and not giving recipes anymore, but they still exist in huge numbers. So the, the, the, the AI bots are active in feeding these fake conversations and these building these fake conversations and puffing everything up. Everybody starved for real accurately at real back and forth. And it was just like so much shouting in the wind. Mordy Oberstein (09:06.882) Yeah, I mean, you see that in every platform. LinkedIn's kind of become that also. The algorithm is kind of like taken over. I don't see anything like it's the same thing over and over the same kind of post over and over. There's lack of diversity of content there. I feel like the age of the algorithm has like really like run its course and people are looking for real connection, real connectivity, real interaction. And the example of a TV ad, when I'm watching, let's say I'm watching football, watching the Steelers game. If you're not from the US, the Steelers are an NFL football team. Football has nothing to do with actual feet, more to do with your arms and whatever. Anyway, and I'm watching the game and I see a commercial that's much more tied to my actual life than, let's say, something on social. I'm sitting there with my kids, I'm watching a game, I'm doing an activity. The TV, the visual is centered around an actual real life activity. Jeremy Rivera (09:59.468) Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein (09:59.68) Right? The Steelers are a real person. They're a real thing. It's a real thing I'm connected to. I've been to actual games. So when I'm watching an ad, it resonates. It's also one ad, one time, then another ad, another ad, and then done for a while. As opposed to like on social or on the internet, it's a constant flurry, a constant blizzard of information. I feel it doesn't resonate. So if you're talking about SEO, great. If you want to get that digital light built up, I feel like Jeremy Rivera (10:27.765) Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein (10:28.628) a large part or significant part of your strategy should be focused on offline so that you get the mention, so that you get that you're speaking at a conference and someone covers you and they write an article about you or they met you at a conference and now they want to interview for a podcast, whatever it is. Those offline interactions, those offline moments have a major impact on your online moments. I don't think we appreciate that, especially right now. Jeremy Rivera (10:52.98) Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And it's not just coincidental that I also just started a service that literally I'm organizing trash cleanups in local communities to give businesses an opportunity to do something event worthy. Now I'm running the ball on the other side and actually doing the directory submission, connecting with the nonprofit and they're posting it on their government website that this event is happening. So there's digital signals that this real world event is happening. But it's also totally usable on the brand and marketing side. We can do a press release, do a sister blog post, as well as how they show up. And people are going to remember if there was a pile of trash at <a href="https://www.michaelmcdougald.com/sarasota-seo">Siesta Beach and a McDougald SEO</a> team came in and took it all out and they were part of that effort. What's an SEO? hey, it's this. That's benefiting the community, doing something in real life and making a change. I think thinking in that vein of, you know, not just puttering around and changing meta titles, it's kind of back to like, like I had a friend in, you know, 2005 was like, I know SEO. I'm like, you do? He's like, yeah, you just changed the meta keywords. You just got to have 60 meta keyword repetitions and that's SEO. That's all you got to do. Mordy Oberstein (12:18.656) The words are on your page. Jeremy Rivera (12:20.491) Yeah, how many pages of meta keywords do you have, Morty? Mordy Oberstein (12:26.742) six and a half and my DA is 94. Mordy Oberstein (12:34.114) But yeah, like I feel like, I don't know, do you feel like the industry has kind of like hit that point where we're starting to really shift? Because it's always been these moments, like I don't know, when EAT became a thing, or back then it was EAT became a thing, like the industry is like, felt like there was a shift, but it really wasn't a shift. I don't know, I feel like Corwin Vitals came out and then it was a bust and like, okay, maybe that shifted things a little bit, but. Jeremy Rivera (12:35.156) So. Jeremy Rivera (12:45.375) Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein (12:56.354) Now it does kind of feel like SEOs are really starting to think outside of SEO in a real way. Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic. I'm like, I don't know, what are your thoughts? Jeremy Rivera (13:03.966) Mm-hmm. Jeremy Rivera (13:07.487) I think it's not overly optimistic, but it's also like, it is an optimistic cast for an otherwise very pessimistic feeling. Mordy Oberstein (13:16.374) Thank you. I know it's so out of character for me, right? Like, I don't know why I'm thinking so positively. Jeremy Rivera (13:22.7) Well, I think it's because like you found a way to express it. I think anybody who has in their list, no, I got to do this client's report and come back to them and say, I don't know why, but Google has smashed you in the balls again. You know, we saw it in March and you got hit and we did all of these things. We did new articles. We removed this. followed this step. August update. Sorry, you got hit again. and now you're back at the level of traffic you had two years ago, it's flat and nothing's working. Like that is my dread. That's the worst case scenario. there even, yeah, and a lot of people, a lot of HCU impacted sites. Like I have one that I'm as reasonably confident and it took me a long time to get there. And I think that's a big difference too. It's like. Mordy Oberstein (14:08.258) That's what's happening. Jeremy Rivera (14:22.216) When you got hit with a penguin penalty in 2011, you knew it. You knew it. Like you could you could use the penguin tool and be like, yeah, I got hit. Mordy Oberstein (14:28.834) Right. Right. He also knew you were buying like four million links and like, kinda knew what you were doing. Jeremy Rivera (14:36.2) Yeah, you knew that you were buying links and you were going to eventually get caught. You hope you wouldn't, but you did. And like if you were a consultant, you would come in and say, okay, did you buy a bunch of links? No. Did you really? Well, maybe. And you look at the tool and yeah, you did. And that's why you got hit. So let's try to fix it. Grovel, know, sacrifice three goats to Google, know, goat blood sacrifice. And, you know, then you'd either be burned forever and know that you had to ditch the site or you could get back. There wasn't this Mordy Oberstein (14:57.282) There you go. Jeremy Rivera (15:06.514) well, it could have been this part of the core algorithm update, or it's this HCU thing, or this reputation thing, maybe. And then I got to like, is it site like, is the whole site tanked because of one section or is the whole site bad? all of these questions mixed in. There's no best practices don't seem to work. I've seen so many case studies of like, the kitchen sink, you know, like we bought a llama and we put it in the corner and like we changed all of our content and like rewrote everything like that's thousands and thousands of dollars that are put into it and nothing in the way it's a 20 % improvement in 20 % of HCU impacted sites. I and other SEOs I know at some points I've been really depressed about it and been Mordy Oberstein (15:36.032) Right. Yeah. Jeremy Rivera (16:03.111) Struggling. Mordy Oberstein (16:03.318) Yeah, it's a real problem and the way it makes it worse, and I think maybe this is why we're like this becoming a conversation. Google in a weird way is publicizing it. I think like back, like unintentionally, they have the creator summits, right? They have the people, they come, and then they tell them like, you have great sites, but you're not gonna see an improvement. It's like, well, if I have a great site, then why won't I see an improvement? don't under, what's like, what am I not understanding here? Jeremy Rivera (16:11.625) Mm-hmm. Jeremy Rivera (16:16.447) Yeah. Mordy Oberstein (16:32.314) A plus B should equal C. I have a weird theory. I read this by Barry Schwartz. He's like, nah. So like take what I'm saying with a grain of salt because a great Barry in the sky said no. Very, yeah, lots of, but not like the fine grain, like the you know, the coarse grain of salt, like real, yes. Jeremy Rivera (16:38.955) Alright, grain of Sprinkling grain of grain of salt. Jeremy Rivera (16:46.682) the course, yeah, yeah, like with your, in your, you're with your Seder, you know. Mordy Oberstein (16:52.928) Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, you're like really like want to like salt some meat or something like, you know, lots of salt. I think they know that I think they have a goal in mind with the algorithm and I think they know that that goal, whatever it is, maybe it's a good goal. I don't know what that goal is. Doesn't align with what these other sites are doing. And they're like, we're not going to change course with the algorithm. It's kind of doing what we want it to do. We also know it's not going to reward you. So sorry. And that leaves the internet in a very stuck place. Jeremy Rivera (17:26.828) It does feel like there is a growing problem with Google and I call it the aurorbos effect, which is that the amount of truly unique human content only exists up until 2015. So truly unique and 100 % guaranteed certified human only generated content. It only exists on the internet up till 2015. Otherwise, they have to gate off and buy data that they know is human, which is why we're seeing the partnership between Reddit and Google. Mordy Oberstein (18:12.672) that's sort of the problem. The incentive cycle is kind of screwed up. It's always been screwed up. You can blame both sides of this equation. Jeremy Rivera (18:23.296) Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein (18:24.108) Google has X technology that can only assess quality to whatever degree. It can only reward content, quality content, to a certain degree. You're only incentivized to create quality content up to a certain degree. Google increases its ability to decipher quality content. Now the incentive is to create that level of content. Now who's really to blame? Do you blame Google for not having the technology or do blame content creators for Google's really your barometer and not your audience? I don't know the answer to that, but the cycle is screwed. Because clearly they're not able to reward the right content sometimes. A lot of the time. Jeremy Rivera (18:54.876) Yeah, no, it definitely is. Jeremy Rivera (19:01.278) Yeah, and you know, they're looking at it from other cycles too. Like if you look at when the first HCU documentation came out and what they talked about and what they were trying to combat and who got hit in the first batch of HCU, it was a whole bunch of programmatic SEOs who had taken and mined PAA data and come up with cheesy answers or They came up with answers. It was PA, like I saw one site that was literally just, it was everything about Naruto. Like they obviously, like there was an answer for every question about Naruto and they just made this site and it was ranking organically. It didn't have any brand. It didn't have any, like it was slapped full of ads and the answers were technically true. They didn't have a lot of thought or nuance or expertise, but they were. as good as the current PAAs that had existed. So it was they were ranking because they were good enough as AJ Cohn would say. And so they slapped those down and they said explicitly, don't make a site that's meant to And SEOs are like, But that's what I do for a living. Mordy Oberstein (20:32.076) That's always been the crazy thing to me about this whole thing, like write good content, blah, blah. I don't blame, I think people have done Danny Sullivan a hard time and I don't think it's him. think Danny, like John, like those people, like you're stuck in, what are you gonna say? There's things you can say, things you can't say, things you know, things you don't know. I think, and I've said this on It's New, which I'm gonna plug, it's our daily news series with Barry, Crystal Carter, and Greg Finn, which is on Barry's Rusty Brick Channel and on the Wix SEO Hub. I've complained about this a lot. Whoever's running their com strategy sucks. Seriously sucks. You're running creator events and you're showing up and people are saying contradictory things. You don't have answers for the people. Like you had an event, you made them fly out for it and there's not like even like a PR-ish kind of like answer. Like there's like nothing. Jeremy Rivera (21:06.555) I agree. Mordy Oberstein (21:26.07) Who's running coms here? Or Danny will say one thing and then like he'll do a thing. He did an interview with Aleta and Aleta kind of asked him very nicely and backhandedly about like websites like Forbes or like Entrepreneur. Like why are they like and Danny's like, well, no, brands can go, you know, expand out. Jeremy Rivera (21:28.107) Hahaha Mordy Oberstein (21:44.578) and pivot and develop and whatever. And then a month later, he's saying, stay in your lane. Is that Danny? No, that's not Danny. That's something that Google changed. And whoever's running their comms strategy is now saying, OK, now the messaging is this. Now you can say this. Words before you couldn't have said that, whatever it is. But it has real impact. It's not just me complaining as a comms person, like, do comms strategies suck? It is me complaining as a comms person, comms strategy sucks. I'm available, by the way, for X dollars an hour if you want to hire me, Google. Jeremy Rivera (22:02.612) Yeah. Jeremy Rivera (22:09.707) Yes, yes, yes. Mordy Oberstein (22:14.532) but it has real implications because people are genuinely confused. So it's not just like, bad comms strategy, not good, or that's bad. SEOs are confused, content creators are confused, that you're sending mixed signals, vague signals, and people are trying to make decisions off of this, and that's almost not fair in a way. Jeremy Rivera (22:23.701) Yeah. Jeremy Rivera (22:40.936) Yeah, I mean, it's like, you've got now you have the extra. Now they did kick Forbes finally. And now, but that be careful what you wish for is a monkey paw wish for SEOs who are like, I am tired of seeing Forbes show up, you know, on their brand for stories and industries that they're not relevant to. Mordy Oberstein (22:50.444) Right. Jeremy Rivera (23:09.578) So yes, got kicked and it seems they tried to get up and they're still down. But that means also now we have to question at what point, like where are our boundaries? if you are successful at creating a brand, at what point does that become site reputation abuse? how what are the edges of thought leadership that you can write towards and you know what type of content can you can you build towards now you and i of course know that is ranking for cbd gummy articles that are full of affiliate links you know like it's good they got kicked like they were they were getting away with murder but We will have there will be a monkey paw situation where now this is part of the algorithm site reputation abuses a thing Mordy Oberstein (24:11.842) It's a manual thing now. It'll eventually be an algorithmic thing. They even said like in the algorithm we have systems and whatever, whatever in place, you know, if you're out of your lane. But that's sort of like, goes back to my earlier point, is that like their comm strategy is look what the algorithm did. That's not a comm strategy. That's everyone seeing what happened and then, boy, now we need to make decisions. And that brings up the problems that you just brought up. But if you would come out ahead of us, hey look, the internet has had this problem. We are going to do X. We do no longer tolerate X. We're going to do Y. And these are like, these are our guidelines. for the most part. Obviously you can never be 100 % of the guidelines, whatever it is. But put something out there, but instead people are working backwards. Now if you want my actual answer to this question, it's a brand question. Whatever you do, and I did a video about this on LinkedIn or something a while ago. Whatever you do, and I talk about this with companies going after AI. Because a lot of what's happened is that these companies have chased after whatever AI, and they've kind of lost their way. And they've lost that like, no, who are we? And the problem isn't that like, our chase for the AI has siphoned off our brand identity. The problem is really, never really had the brand identity that you thought you did to begin with, and it wasn't strong enough. And the second you saw this AI and that AI, because you didn't have that construct, it allows yourself to kind of go wherever you wanted to go. But really, if you have strong identity that has depth and meaning, and it's very explicit and it's very constructed, if it doesn't align, don't do it. If the AI thing you're chasing after doesn't align, don't do it. That's not what we're about. That's not what we're trying to do. That's not how we're trying to help people. We're about this. We're about helping people like that. And if it doesn't align, then you don't do it. Mordy Oberstein (25:59.97) So it's the same thing with content, right? If just like these companies who went after all the AI stuff, kind of like diluted their own identity and their own brand in the end, it's because it didn't have that strong sense of identity positioning messaging. It's the same thing with yourself as why I say SEOs need to align with comms. You need to understand like, is the brand? I would say it's a client. Who are they? What's meaningful about them? What are they trying to achieve? And how are they fitting into people's lives? Jeremy Rivera (26:23.531) Mm-hmm. Mordy Oberstein (26:29.906) Meaning what's their positioning? And obviously what's the messaging they're after? Messaging I always think is like the easiest thing. It really comes out of the messaging, the positioning and the identity. And if the keyword targeting aligns, great. If it doesn't align, not great. And if you say, but it's not like antithetical, it's neutral. Too much neutral also dilutes identity. Jeremy Rivera (26:54.227) So let's talk about this concept of brand and how SEOs should understand it and maybe give me like what are three practical things that they can do in the next two weeks to start understanding or moving towards a model that that is brand aware, I guess. Like, what would branded SEO look like? Let's call it, let's forge it, coin a new term. What's branded SEO? Mordy Oberstein (27:29.602) Why require new terms? The first thing to do is always the first thing to do is to understand what's meaningful about the brand. don't mean, but performance markers will generally do is say, okay, what's meaningful about us versus them? I don't mean versus your competitors, that comes later, but what's meaningful about what you do? Right? What depth do you have as a company? And a lot of the times, it's very, very rare and very, hard to see. Because a lot of, let's say, SaaS. In the SaaS world, I have a tool, I have a platform, whatever it is. But what makes you actually meaningful? And then how does that meaningful thing help somebody else out in a meaningful way? And the real thing to understand if you're an SEO is that positioning part. Okay? It's understanding who the brand is and the life context of the audience, the life situation of the audience, the needs, the wants, the desires of the audience, and how the brand slides into that audience's life context. That's positioning. If you understand the brand's positioning, if you're an SEO, you should clearly understand how is the brand positioning their products, their services, and the brand overall because that will keep you in check. That will help you understand who is the actual audience and how is the brand actually speaking to that audience. Once you do that, then you can understand not only what kind of content you should write, but you can write content that aligns what kind of tone you should take. It should be thought leadership content. it be like, I don't know, like community led content? Like what kind of content should you be creating? How could you go about targeting those keywords the best way that aligns with the brand? So like the most important thing to do is, and it's multiple steps, is to understand how is the brand positioning themselves because every Mordy Oberstein (29:22.084) Everything hinges on that. Jeremy Rivera (29:24.479) So it's unique selling proposition meets market. or, more-dee, there's no tool in SEMrush that tells me these things. But I want to put in a website and the tool will give me a list of words that I can write. Mordy Oberstein (29:28.193) Yes. Correct. Correct. Mordy Oberstein (29:36.746) No, there's no tool. The only tool is right here, your brain. Mordy Oberstein (29:49.388) that's sort of the problem. Because what you are talking about, the way you put it perfectly, what you're talking about, like positioning is the intersection of who the brand is and who the audience is. And that intersection is positioning. That intersection really is the brand. That's like where everything kind of happens. And then you can use the tools though to help you with that. But no, there's no tool to actually do that. And if you're an SEO, you need to run an audit. And it doesn't have to be a complex brand audit. It needs to be some kind of audit. you're creating content, because you're going to run the risk of losing the room, I feel like. If you're doing an SEO strategy, you're coming up with an SEO content plan, go to social and see what the brand is putting out. How is the brand talking? How are they relating to their own? Talk to the sales team. How is the sales team selling the product? Jeremy Rivera (30:24.971) Hmm. Mordy Oberstein (30:34.286) How are they positioning it? Because if you're going to be writing content, let's say it's not blog content, let's say you're writing landing pages. Now if you don't understand the positioning the sales team is using and you haven't done that audit yet, then all the keyword research is kind of like a moot point in a way. Jeremy Rivera (30:51.403) I think you're hitting it on the head, but there is, and I'm pointing it out, there are SEOs and there are SEOs who are looking at the limits of what you can do with keyword research data. And there are those who grew up in this medium age in the past, you know, six to eight years of, my SEO strategy is I just find the highest traffic keyword that's relevant to it. And we write content for it. You didn't talk to your secretary who was taking these calls, but have they gotten good leads? What type of asphalt construction jobs do we actually want this season? Do we want more driveways or do we want more commercial? what are we doing? Who are we serving now that we want to get more of? And who are we serving now that we don't actually care that much about? and who aren't we reaching that we would like more of? And you can't accept the client's answer of, I'd take anybody. Yes, okay, sure. If anybody walks through the door and throws money at you, for the most part, generally, yeah, you'll take it. But that's not the same as a marketing strategy. Like saying, I can do any asphalt job. Okay. But equally, you've got five jobs. They're all paying the same amount. Mordy Oberstein (31:55.17) Exactly. Jeremy Rivera (32:20.971) You know that the the customer the commercial business owner knows more and He has more other jobs that you can connect you to versus you know one that's coming out of foreclosure You know, it's that's a one-off job and the other is going to lead to more business It's it's stupid to allow the client to be lazy in that interview process and say I want to reach everybody. No, you don't And if you do, a bad business owner. Mordy Oberstein (32:55.116) I mean, I'm gonna say, you hit the nail on the head because what the focus on brand does is it helps you target. It helps you be targeted. It helps you understand. how to reach an audience in a targeted way, which I feel is where the web is heading overall. Like that casting a wide net, pulling in all the traffic, that's not where the internet is heading. It's heading to being much more targeted. Having a grasp on brand, having a slight audit on where the brand is at, helps you create content that's actually targeting the current audience and the future audience that the brand actually wants, because otherwise you're just bringing in traffic, you're not bringing in revenue. Or you're bringing in traffic, but you're not bringing in new possibilities. disabilities. Jeremy Rivera (33:36.425) Yeah, and it's not just revenue. It's also profitability. Like not every service that every business offers is exactly the same level of profit margin. And there are also like sales side problems and fulfillment side problems. If you're as an SEO are unaware that your your asphalt mix machine broke. And so that PPC campaign that you just launched and your SEO campaign to get a bunch of asphalt leads, it's going to all go to waste over the next three months until they get the machine fixed. And so it would have been much more profitable if you had focused on paving. Mordy Oberstein (34:24.45) It's like, simply mind boggling to SEOs at the same time. Jeremy Rivera (34:29.259) I think so, yeah. So getting closer to the top of the hour, what are some practical things that you've been suggesting as you're launching your new brand-oriented agency? What are some hands-on things that you're actually doing with the clients that you think other people should take as a concept or an idea to run with? Mordy Oberstein (34:58.85) I call it a depth audit. I think people don't realize brand is very much, one, it's associative, it's compound over time, which means it's very latent. So for example, I think of Nike as whatever you think of them as. It didn't happen overnight. There was multiple touch points over a long amount of time and small little things building up to now you have an association around this brand and whatever it is you associate them with. So brand is one fundamentally associative and in order to create those associations there has to be meaning. So there are things that there are emotions in life. Let's say I don't like fun. Okay, if I didn't have fun today, it's fine. If I don't have fun tomorrow, also fine. I'll have fun on the weekend. It's okay. There are other emotions which are almost existential that are core to the human experience. If I don't have them, I'm in big trouble. Connection, right? The ability to overcome struggle. Like these are... These are things that are daily things that you kind of really have to have, or you can't really function as a human. You can't really be a human, right? It's an emphasis on being, which I think in the digital space we kind of focus on people as utilities, where in brand you focus on people as beings, who are not hungry for a product, they're hungry for meaning. And what I do is I run through, I call it a depth score. What's your level of depth? Like which kind of emotions are you hitting on? Which kind of emotions are you speaking to? Which kind of emotions are you describing yourself as? And are they on the more surface like spectrum? Or are they more towards like the full on existential spectrum? And if you can score that somehow, which. That's my magic. Then you can say, okay, you know what? You need to like pivot a little bit. You need to really do a little bit of soul searching and tap into what actually makes you a little bit meaningful in a real way because you need to give the audience or the consumer something deep to attach onto because if it's not deep, the level of attachment and connection simply won't be there. So that's something like I would say to do. Jeremy Rivera (36:59.372) Now if you have a client, you know, and you have a couple hours per month that you're being contracted, how do you boil that down to something actionable within that time frame? Because you're getting paid to do SEO and you know, I could take that time and run a crawl and look for technical SEO fixes. If I were taking that same hour for that client. What's the practical outcome that I can come back to the clients? I did a brand alignment task this month. What is that deliverable kind of, what's the shape of that? Mordy Oberstein (37:41.782) Yeah, so we kind of all depend. Yeah, so it really all depends on where the brand is at, right? So if the brand is at point X, let's say they've kind of found that strong identity, but they haven't been able to manifest it yet. Okay, great. So like now we need to work on your messaging and now you need to go and create new marketing assets that are whatever. Or like you're at a certain place, you've kind of nailed it down, but you're lacking momentum. Okay, so now the outcome is like, we're gonna focus on activities that align with your brand positioning, that align with your messaging, that align with your identity. and let's do some activities around that, whether it be in real life, you know, like sponsoring a conference, going to a conference, I don't know, running a podcast, whatever it might be. Obviously that all depends on the brand, right? So the... The biggest thing is diagnosing where they're at. And then what they'll need to do kind of all depends where they're at. And that could be anything from like, you need to sit down and you need to reconstruct your brand identity, which now means you're need to reconstruct your positioning and your messaging, which means you need to reconstruct everything. That's like in a worst case scenario, as a consultant best case scenario, I guess. It could also depend if it's a matter of refinement, pivoting. They need to know the next step in their brand evolution. And it might be about developing potential possibilities for them, which might be about momentum building. So what brand activities? let's come up with the activities that build that momentum. So it really all depends where the brand is at. But it's usually going to center on internally focusing and doing activities, almost like a therapist. Uncover and tap into what Mordy Oberstein (39:16.842) what's really meaningful about you and how do we communicate that out. By the way, it could be totally different. It could be an internal issue. You have all this stuff outlined. You don't have buy-in from your team. You need to focus on internal comms, which is another set of activities, messaging frameworks, brand guidelines, new comms strategy internally. there's a whole heap of, I'm almost overwhelmed answering the question because there's so many different practical things that you should be doing or can be doing Jeremy Rivera (39:20.736) Mm-hmm. Jeremy Rivera (39:43.467) Hmm. Mordy Oberstein (39:46.766) that come out of an audit that just depend on where the brand is at. So again, either internal comms, either internally focused, or it's gonna be revitalizing or repositioning some of your current assets or engaging in new activities to pivot and open up new opportunities for yourself. Like those will be the actual deliverables. Jeremy Rivera (40:06.163) So you're thinking of assets, it's not like that's more than just the site. That's the site social and planning events and being active in the community, know, going beyond just editing a document to rank better. Instead, it's coming back to the maybe a good step is looking at your content library and saying, okay, Mordy Oberstein (40:12.371) everything. Mordy Oberstein (40:33.452) Yes, that's a strategy could be. Jeremy Rivera (40:35.891) let's break this out into chunks like what type of stuff have we put out there and based off of who we are and who our audience is as much as we maybe like to rank because this brings traffic maybe and maybe we hope that we can recover from an algorithmic change from addressing this maybe we need to look at this creating this type of content And so it's much more like redevelopment of content, not explicitly to rank because we used H2s and because we did internal linking, but because it's strengthening whether or not it ranks better, it's going to produce better engagement with our prospective audience. So they'll come back again in that type of positive engagement signal. Now we know they are using click data, liars. And how long did they lie to us about that? I feel so gaslit. And now we know like, duh, yes, of course we did. No, you said no, you didn't. So yes, they are. And yes, it does matter. I think it's about maybe the mentality is... is looking at SEO as a functional tool set that isn't the ends, it's the means and we need to look elsewhere for the ends to make it make more sense. And that journey that it's like doing something the exact same way every day. is okay, I guess, but at some point you're going to get bored. Like you're going to experience un-waiting. So maybe it's about finding that joy, joie de brand and heading off into the sunset. Any final thoughts before I close things up? Mordy Oberstein (42:32.416) go. Mordy Oberstein (42:39.776) No, we're just gonna head off into that sunset now. Jeremy Rivera (42:42.539) I'll see you space cowboy. Mordy Oberstein (42:46.146) Good movie by the way. See ya. Jeremy Rivera (42:48.627) I know, right? All right, see you later morning.

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