072: Intersection of Brand and Performance Marketing: Transforming SEO at Wix with Mordy Oberstein

C: Podcast




In this episode of The Digital Marketing Mentor, Danny talks with Mordy Oberstein, Head of Brand SEO at Wix, about his unique career path from teaching to SEO expertise. Mordy discusses the importance of mentorship and education, Wix’s SEO transformation, and the impact of brand identity on search rankings. He also shares insights on balancing brand building with performance marketing, along with personal stories like his love for the Yankees and ground coffee.

Key Points + Topics

  • [00:55] Mordy shares his unconventional academic path, from nearly graduating as a history major, to earning an interdisciplinary degree and later a Master’s in Education from Johns Hopkins University.
  • [3:42] He emphasizes the importance of a particular professor during his grad school who influenced his views on teaching and education, highlighting how small moments can shape one’s path.
  • [04:47] Mordy defines a mentorship as a deep interpersonal relationship, more like a parent-child dynamic, rather than just teaching a skill. A mentor shares their life experiences to guide and shape someone’s personal and professional development.
  • [06:26] He discusses three key mentor traits: forgiveness, communication, and vision. He explains that mentors must allow room for mistakes, communicate effectively, and have a clear vision to guide their mentees.
  • [09:44] Mordy says Barry Schwartz, an SEO community leader, and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, a prominent Jewish thinker, as two of his major influences. Barry shows him how to navigate the professional SEO world with integrity, while Rabbi Soloveitchick’s work provided deep philosophical guidance about life and meaning.
  • [15:47] Mordy compares mentoring in SEO to other marketing fields, noting how debates within SEO can become highly polarized, making mentorship challenging. However, he stresses the importance of open-mindedness and dialogue in the field.
  • [18:21] He recounts how he fell in love with SEO while working at an educational software company, where he had to write website copy aimed at ranking on Google. This led him to explore SEO as a career path, eventually joining RankRanger and later Wix.
  • [22:13] Mordy describes Wix’s early marketing missteps and how they learned from them, leading to a major focus on improving SEO and brand perception in collaboration with the SEO community.
  • [29:24] He reflects on his role as the SEO community liaison at Wix, likening it to Danny Sullivan’s position in Google, working to rebuild Wix’s reputation within the SEO world. 
  • [31:54] Mordy discusses the relationship between brand marketing and SEO, emphasizing that brand plays a crucial role in SEO success. He argues that strong branding creates a connection between a company’s identity and its audience, which leads to better search results and long-term SEO benefits.
  • [35:39] He explains how social media and brand visibility outside of SEO directly influence a website’s performance in search engines. He gives the example of Nike, whose strong brand presence helps it rank better.
  • [38:11] Mordy advocates for small businesses using brand marketing as a way to compete with larger companies. He argues that building local connections, even offline, can translate into SEO success by driving momentum and creating relationships that lead to backlinks and mentions online.
  • [40:01] He explains the tension between performance marketing (focused on immediate results) and brand marketing (focused on long-term association building). Mordy says the focus on immediate metrics can sometimes clash with the longer-term strategy needed for successful brand marketing.

Guest + Episode Links

Full Episode Transcript

Danny Gavin Host

00:55

Hello, I’m Danny Gavin, founder of Optige, Marketing Professor, and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today, we have a special guest, Mordy Oberstein, head of brand SEO at Wix, an Israeli-based free, user-friendly website-building platform. That’s also great for SEO. Mordy transitioned from a Baltimore public school teacher to a passionate SEO expert. He’s worked in two roles at SEMrush, Rankranger, and now Wix. Besides his SEO work, Mordy’s an avid podcaster, hosting the SEO Rant, and he currently holds the record for creating, hosting, and contributing to more podcasts than anyone else on this planet. So much so he will be on another one right after this; he’s also a prolific writer for publications such as SEM, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, MOZ, Deep Crawl, and many more. 

Welcome Mordy. How are you?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

01:42

Great, you know, when you put it that way, I went from optimizing other people’s children to optimizing websites.

Danny Gavin Host

01:45 

That’s a cool way to look at it. 

Mordy Oberstein Guest

1:47

Yeah, I would just change their title tag so they’d rank better, that’s all.

Danny Gavin Host

01:49

I hope you had permission from the parents to do that.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

01:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had to get a whole sign-off. Before you touch on people’s content, you have to change it. You have to get permission.

Danny Gavin Host

01:58

Well, today we will talk about the intersection of brand and SEO, how brand development leads to growth and many other cool things. So let’s start with where you went to school and what you studied.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

02:08

I went to Truro for my undergrad. I was originally going to be a history major, which is completely useless.

Danny Gavin Host

02:17

So where did that come from?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

02:17

Where did that come from? I like history. I like history, yeah, and it seemed easy. And they told me a week before I was supposed to graduate, or something like that, like, oh, we screwed up. They didn’t say we screwed up. They said you screwed up. They screwed up, and you don’t have enough credits for a history major. I’m like, well, I have to come back for another semester. They said you could do that or get an interdisciplinary degree and be done. Now I’m like, let’s do that. So, I have the one thing that’s even more worthless than a history degree: an interdisciplinary degree. I don’t know what that means, but I also have a master’s in education from Johns Hopkins, a real school, and an actual degree, as opposed to the last one.

Danny Gavin Host

02:52

I knew you were in education, so is that something you went in to get right away, or was that after you already started teaching?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

03:01

I’m already in my fourth career. I’m like a cat. I have like nine careers. Since I was 18, I’ve been working, or maybe earlier? I was working for a property management company in New York. I was there for almost nine years, something like that. I was the COO of the company at one point, which is ridiculous. It was around the time of the. I’m also old. At this point, I’m dating myself the crash in 2008. The real estate market was a ginormous disaster a year or two after I was burned out. I always wanted to teach and said I would just do it. I was going to go for it. And I did Teach for America, where they kind of throw you into the classroom, into underprivileged school districts, this one in Baltimore, and you go for your master’s simultaneously. So that’s how. That’s how that happened.

Danny Gavin Host

03:42

That’s cool. So you got a two-for-one, yeah. So when you look back at university, whether it’s your undergrad or master’s, are there any experiences inside and outside the classroom that were impactful in directing your path?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

03:52

Yeah, you know, I think it all depends, on the teacher. I mean, you’re your professor, right? You? You know this. There was one professor. I had her multiple times in grad school. During my undergrad, I went to night school and was just trying to get through. But for grad school, that was meaningful for me, and I had this professor, and I don’t know if I can point back and say like, oh, she taught me this, and that one thing changed my outlook or my practice or whatever. But all those tiny little micro-moments that sort of compounded over the many semesters that I had her were influential on how I looked at teaching, how I looked at education, how I looked at it as a practitioner in the classroom, a million percent. That one person sticks out above all else because of who she was and how she went about things. Again, not the big things, all the little things she did.

Danny Gavin Host

04:42

Not everyone is lucky to have someone like that when they go through school.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

04:49

No, I was very fortunate, 

Danny Gavin Host

04:47

Mordy. How would you define a mentor? Thanks for asking me an easy question. How would you define a mentor? I’ll say it’s someone who guides you, but I don’t think that’s really what we mean. I don’t think it’s a utilitarian sort of thing. Like, oh, I need a mentor to teach me to. You know, I’m a, I’m, I want to be a blacksmith, so I’m going to go for an apprenticeship and that’s how you say that word and to learn how to be a blacksmith. Like that’s just someone just showing you how to do something. I don’t think that’s what a mentor is.

05:13

A mentor is a…. I’ll say this as a former teacher: there’s only one other relationship and as a parent, where, where the dynamic is so deep that it’s almost like a parent and child, and that’s a student and a teacher, and that’s because it’s not a practical thing. When you’re sharing knowledge realistically, you’re sharing yourself, right? You’re sharing your experiences. It’s E-A-T; it’s the E for the experience. You’re trying to show your experience around something and how you’ve experienced it and the problems you felt and dealt with along the way to prevent that person from going through those problems and those hardships. So it’s a much deeper sort of existential kind of relationship. It’s not like I will show you how to do X. That’s not a mentor. A mentor is someone who guides you through the crises that you might have or the difficulties and the struggles that you’re going to have so that you can develop not just a skill but you can develop as a person in the context of whatever it is you’re trying to learn.

Danny Gavin Host

06:11

I love that, and I love how you build it up from being a teacher, Because in a sense, a mentor is a teacher, but, as you said, it’s not about teaching a skill per se, but it’s more about transferring over that experience. So we spoke a little bit before, but what are the most essential traits of a mentor?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

06:26

As someone who’s screwed up many, many times, this is why I listen to this. But at my kids’ bar mitzvah, I said this to them. I have twin boys who were recently bar mitzvahed. I’m like, you need to forgive yourself. Like you’re going to, life is going to throw curve balls at you sliders, sweepers, knuckle curve balls, all kinds of breaking balls, and you’re going to miss, and you need just to forgive yourself and move on.

06:48

And it’s the same thing for yourself, but also for a mentor. If you have someone under your tutelage, they won’t get it right. You would do it this way, and they ended up doing it that way and you sort of have to let that person make the mistakes and forgive them. But also, when I say forgive, it means carving out their path. At the same time, in my mind sort of like the same thing. I’ll think back. I was a mentor; I was a fourth-grade teacher. But those kids would mess up all the time, and they’re fourth graders, so obviously, you let it slide. They’re nine years old; what are they supposed to do? But it’s a mentality you could have. You could hold them to the, you know, be a stickler and hold them to the nth degree on everything. But to be a good mentor, you have to have that slack. When I say forgiveness, I mean giving them slack.

Danny Gavin Host

07:36

Number two, you mentioned was communication.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

07:38

Yeah, so obviously, if you’re going to be a mentor, you can’t communicate. You can’t be an effective mentor like it’s just like it’s not. You might have the best intentions, and you might be the greatest forgiver on the entire planet because you’ll be doing a lot of forgiving, and no one will know what you want and what you mean. They won’t be able to. You won’t be able to effectively transmit all of your experience knowledge and know-how to that person. I almost feel guilty saying that as a trait because it is the thing. You’re a mentor. You are communicating.

Danny Gavin Host

08:08

You’ve dealt with many people throughout all your businesses and areas of work. Do you feel like communication is something people can learn, or is it more of a trait where you’re naturally a good communicator?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

08:19

I think it’s like anything. If you’re not good at it, you can improve. But I think it’s an art. If you are a good communicator, that is not taught. That’s probably taught from your childhood. The context of how you grew up and what you needed to do as a kid is probably what makes you a good or not a good communicator. Now I know that’s kind of like a Freudian hot take for you.

Danny Gavin Host

08:43

No, I believe it. So, you know, I’ve got a couple of kids, and my youngest, my daughter, you know, she’s just so good at communicating, like when she feels sad, she says why, right? And my other kids, you know, you, just, you see them in a bad mood or whatever, and it’s like, just let me know what’s wrong. So I see it; I see it in the kids. So that makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

09:01

I mean, if you’re not a good communicator, I’m not saying there’s hope for you. There’s hope, but not so much hope, just a little hope.

Danny Gavin Host

09:09

That’s all you need, all right. And then, finally, vision.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

09:11

Think of a manager you had that was good versus a really bad manager. It’s probably because that person had a vision because you’re following them as a mentor. You’re a leader. If you don’t have a vision, where are we going? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? What’s the plan? Where are we going to end up? Why is this meaningful? If you don’t have it, can you ask somebody to follow you? Impossible, it’s just not possible. Vision is, I think, under-discussed, underrated and underutilized.

Danny Gavin Host

09:39

So, Mordy, who has been some of your most influential mentors? 

Mordy Oberstein Guest

09:44

Oh man, now you’re putting me on a hot. On the hot, I’ll drop a quick hint. There’s someone out there called Barry Schwartz.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

09:52

I was, you know, I was gonna say it’s either by Joseph Silvachuk or Barry Schwartz, so both had goatees. So, it kind of works In my professional space. Barry has been a mentor to me because, you know, listen, Barry’s a prolific writer. Barry’s just a fundamentally good person, and Barry kind of showed me how to be a good person in the professional SEO space when your natural inclination is sometimes not to be a good person because the people out there in the SEO community are sometimes here and there, not the greatest. So Barry has definitely been a shining light of how to deal with that in an upstanding way.

Danny Gavin Host

10:30

How did you meet Barry?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

10:31

I was working for RankRanger, which I think was recently bought out a couple of years ago bought out by SimilarWeb. One of the strategies I was trying to implement was we didn’t have a huge marketing budget, we didn’t have a huge marketing team, but we had a huge amount of data around SEO. I was trying to build up the authority of the platform by trying to get SEO data out there to the various amplifiers, as Rand Fishkin likes to call them, which is a good word for it as opposed to influencers and Barry just being a natural partner for that. Barry’s writing articles. I had data; hey, Barry, I have data, and you know what’s interesting about Barry. What’s nice about Barry? There’s no pretense.

11:07

I was a nobody in the industry. I was working for, you know, a company, maybe Barry knew, maybe Barry didn’t know, and as long as you provide substance, Barry’s cool. It doesn’t matter. You know you have one follower, one million followers. It’s the substance, and I like to think that the data we gave him was something of value that he would cover, and that’s how the relationship got kicked off.

Danny Gavin Host

11:29

That’s awesome; then I started trolling him. I think you also troll him a little bit now, right?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

11:36

Yeah, yeah, but it’s fun. It’s fun for both of us. I hope it’s fun for him.

Danny Gavin Host

11:40

No, I think it’s all in good taste. All right, well, let’s talk about Reb Joseph Soloveitchik. How has he influenced you?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

11:45

Okay, wow, okay. So, if you don’t know who Reb Joseph Soloveitchik is and I’ve never talked about this on a marketing podcast, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this on any podcast. Time Magazine said that you’ll still be reading his work a thousand years from now. I remember sitting on a bus on the way to my part of my Teach for America orientation back in 2011 and reading one of his books, and some guy was sitting next to me or across the aisle on the bus like “Soloveychik?” I didn’t know. Anybody else knew about him. He took a theology course at the University of, I don’t know, like Colorado and they read him in the course. I’m like, that’s hilarious. I had, and, ironically, you were reading like Halakhic Man, which is probably irrelevant to you but great.

12:35

I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community where my rabbi was one of his students, which was interesting. So, like, the style of learning about Judaism did not follow Rabbi Soloveitchik, so I knew about him because of the hierarchy of the flow of transmission of Judaism from him to my rabbi, but it wasn’t something I was familiar with. I remember growing up and kind of having the absolute, absolute reverse philosophy of him. I’ll get to his philosophy in a second if I can on one foot. Wow, I did not expect to talk about this. I’m not prepared for this at all. I remember like just having questions about, like you know, I wouldn’t call them like religious questions, I would call them like existential questions, like does life have meaning? Kind of questions. It is much more refined than that. That’s a very broad question.

13:27

And knowing about him but not knowing, he wrote about those things and then finding him, him, and Abraham Heschel. Heschel, you might know as being famous for marching with Dr King hand in hand in Alabama. If you ever see that picture of the guy who looks like Colonel Sanders next to Dr. King, that’s Heschel and having a lot of those questions kind of answered as a young adult, 18, 19, 20 years old, and that’s how I got into that, and that’s it. It’s a philosophy around the role of like struggle in life and how to turn things that are struggles into and redeem them into meaningful experiences, and that spoke to me at the time. That’s how I got into that. So, like that, I could take things I was struggling with and turn them into strengths. Even though, by the time I was reading this, rabbi Solovey was probably dead for 15 years, I feel like I know him, which sounds weird.

Danny Gavin Host

14:16

No, as I’m sure you know, in Judaism, the concept of books is a way for someone to live forever and therefore when you read that book, it’s kind of like you’re getting a piece of them. So I believe it. It makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

14:29

Yeah, I mean, I know you get it because you’re so immersed in it. It makes total sense. For someone who’s not, it sounds like a strange concept, but I talk about it myself. It’s a confidential community that has been going on for thousands of years. All are meeting together in one conversation that spans generations, and you feel like, you know, these people are your friends, and they lived thousands of years ago. It’s, it’s a bizarre experience.

Danny Gavin Host

14:53

It is. But you know what? What it does sort of sort of shed light on is the concept that a mentor doesn’t have to be someone who’s physically in front of you. Right, yeah, you can tap into people who may have lived hundreds of years ago, or just by reading or watching them, you can still get that same inspiration and guidance.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

15:12

Yeah, and I think we see that in the digital marketing space. You see somebody out there with innovative ideas that speak to you. You may not know them, but you constantly read them on their blog or their social media. You feel like there’s a real connection there.

Danny Gavin Host

15:24

It’s true. And then, when you, like, get to conferences and see these people, and it’s like, wow, I know you.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

15:29

You’re like, oh my God, I can’t believe that person is such a giant douchebag in real life.

Danny Gavin Host

15:33

I’ve had that several times, but most people in our industry are pretty good.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

15:36

I’m just kidding.

Danny Gavin Host

15:45

So, let’s talk about you as a mentor. So, do you find it harder or easier to mentor fellow SEO professionals than, let’s say, other marketing professionals? 

Mordy Oberstein Guest

15:47

SEO is hard because I feel there’s so much debate, and things become hot-button issues, and everyone draws these lines in the sand. It’s almost like American politics in a weird way. I’m on this side, you’re on that side, you’re horrible, and there isn’t much room for dialogue and sharing of different ideas or saying, you know what. I disagree with that, but I can see where they’re coming from, and that might be valuable. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.

16:17

Recently, someone put out a study. I’m not going to say what it was. I felt like, okay, that’s not what they’re trying to explain, something, that’s not what that is. I disagree with that, but you know what? It’s interesting, Nonetheless. There are interesting conclusions that I think are completely valid or worthwhile for marketers of all kinds to know and take away from that study, even though, like, the thing they’re trying to explain might not be right.

 

16:40

And I think, like, because SEOs don’t do that because they don’t look for the good in things ever, sometimes it feels like, I know it’s like hyperbolic, but it doesn’t feel hyperbolic. I was just on Twitter a minute ago, tweeting about something, and someone replied, “Yeah, like, SEOs make this so complicated; why do we have to do this? And blah blah, blah blah.” Because of that, talking and mentoring the wider community is very controversial. But it shouldn’t be controversial at all. It should just be like ideas flowing out, and you’ll see the old-school SEOs complaining about that. I remember when, back in the day, we walked uphill both ways of school and newspaper for shoes, and people shared ideas on Twitter. It doesn’t happen anymore. It’s hard.

Danny Gavin Host

17:29

Do you ever get any anxiety before you put something out there on, let’s say, Twitter or LinkedIn?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

17:35

I used to when first getting into the industry. I don’t know if I know anything. Now I know I don’t know anything. I’m more comfortable with what I don’t know. 

17:45

I don’t know, once in a while, like I put something out yesterday about AI overviews and SEMrush data, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, someone’s going to look at this, and they’re going to say that conclusion’s not right. And maybe it’s not right. I don’t know. Like, I’m not God. I don’t know if it is 100% or a little bit, but at this point, it’s just SEO. If someone thinks I’m an idiot, fine.

Danny Gavin Host

18:05

We will transition now, and we will be talking a little bit more about brand and SEO. So, let’s first talk about your beginnings in SEO. You say that writing website copy for an educational software company led you to your love affair with SEO. What caught your interest in this type of writing, and was there a turning point when you realized you wanted to focus on this as a career?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

18:21

So, yeah, I was working for an educational software company, which makes sense. I was teaching. I moved to Israel, and that was the job that I found. I was one of the only native English speakers at that point at the company, and they said, oh, could you? They were launching a new website. Could you write a web copy?

18:35

The mentor professor I had at Hopkins used to say, “Mordy, of all my 40 million years of teaching, you’re in my one percent of writers. I love reading what you write.”

 Like, I always had a knack for writing, so I’m like, yeah, yeah, I can write web copy. I can write anything. Go ahead. Writing a listicle, not so great at writing, but other than that which I which I think, by the way, is a strength, not a weakness, it’s like, you know, not being able to write a listicle, it’s like not being able to miss if you’re playing basketball. Anyway, they said great and that we wanted to bring in traffic, convert, and rank. I’m like, what the hell are you talking about? I remember finding search engine lands periodic table of SEO and started to get into it. And I thought it was really interesting because I see this all the time with other people who are not. I have a next-door neighbor working on a project together that has nothing to do with anything we’re talking about here, and I started to talk about SEO.

19:35

I never thought about writing content that way to rank. I never. It never entered my mind. This is amazing. It was one of those moments like. This is so interesting because I found it. I found it conceptual. I know that SEOs don’t always think that it’s conceptual, but if you look at the good SEOs, like I don’t know, like Kevin Indig, in my opinion, is a great, it’s very conceptual. Lily Rae, it’s very conceptual. Glenn Gabe, it’s very conceptual, and I grabbed that. I thought that was interesting.

20:02

Algorithms and I. I think I still do look at it this way. It’s not like there’s X element, y element, and whatever, and you’re trying to hit each one of those elements. Whoever’s programming the thing or the programmer’s making the thing, they’re imbuing it with almost an identity, and it’s operating almost like a living and breathing thing. When you look at it like that, it becomes very conceptual, and I grabbed onto that, and that’s how I got into SEO. I started. I happened to like, really like, luck beyond luck; Rank Ranger was looking for a content manager. I’m like, oh, this is amazing; I already know a little bit about SEO. They’re an SEO platform, so let’s do this thing. And that’s where it took off for me.

Danny Gavin Host

20:49

I love it. And I still see some of my students today where I feel like it’s like the matrix, the blue and the red pill. But, like, you know, before they come into the class, they, you know, they look at Google as Google, but then suddenly after the class it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s a different world and either you love it or you hate it. But yeah, like we’ve either screwed up. Every time you go to Google, it’s over, right? It’s not the same experience where it’s like, ah, I like it.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

21:15

No, it’s not. Which, by the way, is a good point, if you know. Mentor point: if you’re looking at Google as an SEO, that’s probably not how people are looking at Google, it’s true.

Danny Gavin Host

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Danny Gavin-Host

22:13

So, let’s jump into Wix a little bit. So, for a long time, Wix was like no name. Everyone said WordPress is the place to go for SEO because it’s a better platform. Then Wix made a conscious effort to become the number one SEO-friendly web platform with so many tools and things. I love just your opinion on that. I don’t know when you arrived, before or after, but I’d love your perspective on that change.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

22:41

Yeah. So it’s one of those things where, like, when things don’t go right, you can either, as I mentioned before, you can either let it dominate you and destroy you, or you can redeem it into something good, like the Wix story is about redeeming something terrible that happened and turning it into something beautiful. That’s a little hyperbolic. Also, I don’t know if you remember watching it, but I remember watching it. It was a Super Bowl commercial. I don’t remember what year the Seahawks were in the Super Bowl, so I will say it was 2017, 2018, or something like that.

23:09

Wix ran a commercial with a model named Carly Kloss, and I didn’t know who she was until after I started at Wix Use Wix. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We make SEO super simple. I forgot the exact way they phrased it. I remember SEOs going on Twitter the next day. Oh, I guess you don’t need us; just use Wix. There’s a tweet. I don’t know where it is. I’ve looked for it, but I can’t find it. I’m out there bashing Wix, just like everybody else. Yeah, what about the jerks? They don’t. They don’t care about SEOs because SEOs are so dramatic or overdramatic about everything. Now, in reality, what was it? You have a $10 million Super Bowl ad that you’re running, which, by the way, has some serious NFL memorabilia in the Wix office, and Wix is an Israeli company. What do they know about football? There’s a football with Franco Harris, Brett Favre, Roger Stolbeck signed football. They’re sitting there on someone’s desk. I’m like, this thing’s worth thousands of dollars. It’s amazing.

24:08

Anyway, you have a gazillion-dollar 30-second spot and want to touch on SEO because, to a website owner, SEO is a huge deal. I’ll probably go on a limb and say at Wix and the user point of view, maybe outside of web design, it’s the most popular topic in the company, and you’re trying to hit on. You have three seconds to do it because you have to hit design, hit this, hit that, and you’re trying to talk to your average site owner, and that’s what you come up with. Because that’s what the marketing person who wrote came up with. I don’t know; I don’t know about SEO. Right, it’s like seo’s, like oh, what’s what’s? I wasn’t thinking about you. What’s this? Like this kind of thing. How do we fit SEO into a $20 million 10-second spot?

24:56

Now, what Wix did was Wix is a marketing machine. They’re like, well, let’s market our way out of this, which sometimes is a good idea, sometimes not a good idea. And then they had a competition. Seos who have been around for a while will remember this. I remember this. It was, um, who could rank a Wix website fastest? It was Lucas Zelesny versus Marie Haynes. Marie Haynes won, and John Mueller tweeted out we don’t rank websites for competitions; we rank websites to help people.

25:25

And again, a comedy of error because, again, a marketing team is just gonna like, what are we gonna do? Okay, we’ll find a creative solution. It’s OK; whatever is needed to get out of this problem, like no one’s nefariously trying to crap over SEOs here. By the way, I was once in the Wix office. I was doing a podcast about this whole thing, and I said, like, you know, I went through the whole thing. As you know, I said that would never have been my favorite campaign. And someone, because I heard you on a podcast say this about this campaign, I’m like, oh, yeah, yeah, that was me. It’s like I made that campaign. I’m like, this is awkward. 

Danny Gavin Host

25:54

I’ve had those situations where you’re sitting next to the guy, and you’re in the meeting, and you’re, you know, trashing this idea, and then lo and behold, the guy’s sitting next to you. Yeah, it happens.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

26:07

It’s awkward, so Wix said they realize, okay, like we have a problem, and we need to hit refresh and understand the problem. At the same time, the product team changed how the Wix product was set up, but it is still set up a little bit, to a much lesser extent. It’s very siloed. The Wix stores and blog products are different teams, almost like functioning in different companies. In a way, SEO was never focused on individuals. Each sub-company or sub-team did whatever they thought was the best thing to do with SEO, which made SEO a bit of a disaster because there was no uniform standard. Lo and behold, I think it was. Yeah, it was.

26:56

My current manager, Kobe Gamliel, said we will create a distinct focus on SEO. That will be standard across the company, to the point where we now have an internal SEO score with CEO approval that you, if you have to, have, and it’s custom for each type of page on Wix. Here are the things that are important. If you’re, you know, a store page, here’s what’s. If you’re a forum. Here’s what’s important: this is your score. You have to pass this score. And the CEO of Wix says you must pass the SEO score. So we went from complete federalization we’re like America in 1777. There are no standards; having an SEO constitution is complete chaos. My history degree and my interdisciplinary degree are coming to work. It’s a good tie-in, yeah.

27:51

So, at the same time, they changed the product, and they said we have to change the relationship with the SEO community simultaneously. Again, the comedy of errors is that they were looking for someone in New York to attend the conference and work with the SEO community. Covid hit, and there were no SEO conferences, but they’re trying to figure out what to do. And a former client of mine at RankRanger, the CEO of Israel’s largest SEO agency, got hired by Wix to work on their SEO product, not the Elie Mellach, and he’s talking about what they’re talking about. He’s like, I don’t know a guy in New York who can go to SEO conferences, but I know a guy from New York with no SEO conferences. So why don’t you talk to him? And we sat down. I’m like, here’s what I would do to change that perception around SEO: take it or leave it. And they said, like, let’s take it and do this.

 

28:44

So it was a nice cohesion. I’ve never experienced before where the product side and the marketing side worked hand in hand on things together. There was a natural back and forth. I would go to the community. It’s my first role at Wix. Take feedback and bring it to the team. They would implement it. There would be dialogue back and forth through the community. It showed the SEO that Wix was legitimately serious about fixing what was wrong and not hiding behind the facts. There was never any problem, and there is nothing to see here. No, there was a problem, so let’s fix it. That was the beginning of changing the whole narrative around Wix and SEO.

Danny Gavin Host

29:18

So, in a sense, you were like Wix’s Danny Sullivan. I don’t know if you like that comparison, but I stole his title.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

29:24

They said that we want you to be a brand advocate. This is where brand marketing comes in. I’m like, an advocate feels too salesy for what you need. I understand what you’re trying to say, but an advocate is usually someone you know who is paying them to peddle the product. I don’t want to be an advocate. I’ll be like the SEO community liaison. I forgot my exact title. I should know that, but I stole Danny Sullivan’s liaison. I stole it from him. Sorry, Danny, 

Danny Gavin Host

29:48

We don’t have to discuss numbers. But those efforts of transforming Wix into an actual SEO machine and all the brand work, and we’ll talk more about brand marketing later. Has that significantly affected the bottom line?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

30:04

I think, enormous, and it’s almost impossible to measure because what we notice is that there’s a trickle-down effect. So and so Barry Schwartz, who would never do this, goes on Twitter and says Wix is terrible for SEO. It trickles down. It trickles down to the point where I’ll tell you what the average Wix user was back then. The average Wix user now is something very, very different.

 

30:37

We’ll look at the product and be like I hear all these things like Wix is not good for SEO, or someone writing, you can see it happening right because someone who’s not exactly in the SEO space but is writing an article, let’s say about like is Wix good and one of the criteria is SEO, is going to look at what people are saying in the SEO space around Wix for SEO and they see not great thing.

30:47

Then, that goes into the article and reaches a broader audience. So it’s been almost like transformational because we’ve seen the trickle down. Now, those articles were like the bridge between, you know, some SME, you know, real estate company who wants to go on Wix and is reading an article about whether Wix is good or not. The articles they’re reading shifted from saying Wix is bad in this regard to Wix is good. So it’s almost impossible to imagine the revenue impact because you’re talking about it. So I’ve never been involved in it. It’s so wide-ranging and so far reaching. It just shows you the power of community, and it all starts with this little SEO community and what they say.

Danny Gavin Host

31:33

And it is so powerful because, you know, most companies don’t get that chance to reinvent themselves right. It’s hard, 

Mordy Oberstein Guest

No, it’s super hard, so it’s very painful. 

Danny Gavin Host

31:43

It’s pretty cool how Wix was and how it can be done. You know. Mentioning brands, let’s talk about brand marketing and SEO. Why do you feel that SEO needs to adopt or embrace the former? And I guess we should start with the definition.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

31:54

Brand marketing is one of these ethereal terms. It means so many different things, and if you’re a designer, what brand means to you is visual design and tone and logo and blah, blah, blah. And to me, like that’s not brand right, but I’m not saying it’s not like it just be being like, you know, like an asshat like that’s not brand. Brand, to me, has to do with the. It’s the intersection; it’s about its associative connection between your identity and your audience’s identity: who you are, who your audience is, what you provide in terms of, in terms of who you are and what they need. And the intersection of that, where you overlap, is brand. It’s what you exude, and what’s received by the audience is brand, and that’s very conceptual, it’s very existential. It’s why I like the brand and it’s very, very powerful. Why I think SEOs need it. I think SEOs always needed it, and the conversation kind of got renewed. I don’t know if the audience is familiar with this or not, like the whole Google leaks that happened a few months ago, where there was an API call, and all of a sudden the algorithm got leaked. It didn’t get leaked, but we saw things in there like perhaps Google’s looking at mentions across the web. So it’s not just links; it’s how often your brand is mentioned. For example, if people are clicking on the web, clicking on you from results, now if you’re a familiar brand, you’ll get more clicks, so brand now comes in. So, it kind of renewed this whole conversation about brand and SEO. But all the old school, no, no, no. Brand and SEO have always been whatever it’s super powerful because forget all of that.

33:34

It’s super powerful. The web itself is fundamentally changing, in my opinion. You can disagree with me. I’m not offended. A lot of things I say are completely not true, but I think this is true. The web is changing and people are looking for something that’s much more connective. I think you see this with people going to TikTok to get information. Or you see this with Google didn’t pull evil experience out of its rear end. It saw a trend because Google’s got a massive amount of data where people are looking for that kind of content. So Google’s like that’s where we’re going to go with this thing.

34:07

There’s a shift to people wanting authentic experiences from their web content. I think web content has become more conversational. I think brands who, from a brand marketing point of view, if you’re a big brand out there. If you can be more conversational, that would do you well. They’re very hesitant to do that, which I think is a big mistake, but fine, if that’s where the web is going. They’re looking for a much more authentic kind of experience. They’re looking, for example, I think, not to be nudged into the conversion right.

34:36

So being top of mind becomes much more important. I want autonomy in my buyer journey. I don’t want to feel like I hit a landing page and like click here, buy now, get this now. That’s like a 1970s used car commercial kind of thing. If I’m looking to have that control over my buyer journey, so then me coming to you when I’m ready becomes much more important, which is obviously a brand awareness play. If the entire web is shifting in this direction which I am a little bit biased into thinking that it is because I do brand marketing then SEO, PPC, whoever you are, you need to understand brand marketing, because that’s where the web is going and forgetting, like you know, diving into the nuanced implications of that. It’s self-evident if that’s the direction of where the web is heading. If you’re not in line with that mindset because brand is a mindset, in my opinion, you will get left behind. So that’s why top level. I think it’s super important for SEOs.

Danny Gavin Host

35:31

And then I guess, to dumb it down a bit, what would be an example of SEO with brand marketing in mind or SEO without brand marketing in mind?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

35:39

I’m an SEO, I don’t care what happens on social media. Do whatever you want to do on social media. Google doesn’t care about social media. Okay, Google’s a moth, and Google will be attracted to they will have the largest digital light. And if you’re getting traction on social media people are sharing your stuff. They’re then maybe you know mentioning that in an article

36:01

Rand Fish has got a great video about this, about how, like, most traffic comes from Google. So I won’t be on social because most of it comes from Google. Yeah, but you’re forgetting the fact that they saw you on Google and then Googled you to find you and find your product or your service after the fact. So the traffic may be directly from Google, but, to borrow a philosophical remarist title, that’s just the material cause, the immediate cause, the efficient cause behind the whole thing, was they’ve seen you on social.

36:29

Social media plays a huge role in getting momentum, getting to know people, getting to search, and doing branded searches for you. There’s a whole Google patent about Google looking at branded search. Like Google’s not stupid. If Google knows, people are typing in Nike shoes, Nike shoes, Nike shoes. There must be a connection between Nike and shoes. So anytime you’re going to see something for shoes, we’ll rank Nike Obviously oversimplifying that.

36:50

But a lot of that brand building that ties into search that way comes from doing things on social, comes from content marketing practice comes from being out there at conferences and getting momentum and traction and positioning and having an identity and people knowing about you and people thinking about you a certain way and then people interacting with you a certain way.

37:09

Knowing about you and people thinking about you a certain way and then people interacting with you a certain way. All of that plays into how people go about searching for you on Google, what they’re searching for, how they’re interacting with you on Google If they see you on the SERP and then say, nope, that brand sucks. So it comes into play in so many ways. Social for me, is one of the biggest, most obvious ways to build up your brand on social, getting that brand momentum on social, and positioning yourself because social is such an easy way to position your brand directly. I’m not saying it’s a direct ranking fact; that’s not what I’m saying. It directly plays a role in what your SEO momentum will look like. Also, by the way, with big brands, SEO is like, oh, big brands always rank for everything. Google is biased towards big brands. They’re not biased towards big brands, they just have the biggest digital light because of the brand marketing that they’re doing.

Danny Gavin Host

37:57

So what about the small businesses that don’t have the budget? And I know you’re saying it’s not like it’s a ranking factor, but what do these startups or small businesses do? How can they still be effective on Google when brand is so important?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

38:11

So that’s. I look at it almost like the opposite, like brand is the equalizer that helps these small businesses. If I’m a small business, I don’t necessarily have like a huge amount of money to, you know, hire 10 content writers and five-link builders and blah, blah, blah, but I can go to the local, you know, you know fair, and sell my pies and meet other people and gain momentum, that trend that that offline translates to online. Right, I met so and so. Now they link to me. I met, or I met so and so, and now, like we’re doing a collaboration together, I’m going to do an interview on his podcast about pie making. Brand is the equalizer that, without a big budget, still lets you gain momentum. Just need to think about it a little bit differently.

Danny Gavin Host

38:53

I like that. Do you have any examples of SEO working well with brand marketing?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

38:57

I don’t know if I have a particular example. I do think, though, like one of the things that you’re going to start, I think, hopefully seeing is like brands, like I was looking at the other day you have like Nike versus New Balance, and how many AI overviews are they getting? So, yes, some of it’s going to be like overlap with organic results. Nike’s ranking gets into the AI overview, but much of what LLMs do is entity-based. If, around the topic, you’re the known entity, right, so I’m going to put you in there because you’re the quantifiable entity that I’m aware of around this topic. So that’s something where I feel like we prime for a case study about how brand impacts SEO, because all of that LLM awareness from across the web comes fundamentally. It can come from content distribution I’m not saying it can’t, but it fundamentally comes from good brand building. So that would be something I would love to see somebody do a case study on that as the AA overview data becomes a little bit more mature, kind of thing. Yeah, I agree.

Danny Gavin Host

39:54

Let’s move a little bit away from SEO and let’s talk about performance marketing. Can you explain the tension that exists between performance and brand marketing?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

40:01

Yeah. So performing and SEO is very much a performance kind of marketing thing. Right, you’re trying to get traffic. Or if you’re doing CRL, right, you want to get the conversion. If you’re doing PPC, you’re trying to get a click. If you’re on social media, you’re trying to get a like and a repost, or whatever it is. So, for lack of a better way of defining it, performance marketing wants actions to take place and wants them to happen immediately, and it wants them to happen in volume, because that’s how you’re getting measured and no one’s got the patience to wait for you, right?

40:32

I think the tension doesn’t exist because of the practitioners. I don’t think the SEO is thinking this way or the PPC person is thinking this way necessarily. I think the thing is we can see levels telling them to think this way like we must get results right now, and that’s generally because people are impatient. It’s almost like a kid, like immediate gratification. If I can have immediate gratification versus gratification down the line, I will take the immediate gratification, because performance marketing doesn’t have to be this way, but it is. A performance marketer could say I’m going to sacrifice the immediate performance of this project, whatever it is I’m doing for the long-term sustainable growth that will provide me down the line.

Danny Gavin Host

41:10

But we don’t. I feel like we have these big targets on our backs as digital marketers and performance marketers. Like man, if you’re digital marketing, you’re able to measure everything, and if you can’t, then it’s over. That’s the whole thing.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

41:21

If I can measure it, yeah, if I can measure it. If it’s not happening right now, then it must be bad. But that’s a false equation. If I can measure it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening right now that’s bad. Maybe I’m just setting myself up in the future.

 

41:33

Yeah, everyone performs smart and has a target on their back because of that, which puts them at odds with brand, with what I would call genuine brand marketing. Because of genuine brand marketing, you’re building up associations, and any association takes an enormous amount of setup and time. If you had a bad experience at one time at McDonald’s, you wouldn’t associate it as bad unless it was catastrophic. But if you keep going back, you’re like this Happy Meal is not so happy. You’re going to build up an association.

42:04

So brand, by definition, is way, way, way, way, way different of a mindset than performance. You’re really like the way I describe it is you’re not even planting seeds that will convert. You’re like you’re a farmer sowing the ground that you can eventually plant the seeds. Like the brand marketer sows the ground. The distribution marketer, which is not a real term plants the seeds, and the performance marketer grows the plant, so like you’re so far removed from the actual conversion to a certain extent which, by the way, brand marketers don’t have to be I think like momentum is a great equalizer. If you can show you’re building momentum with your marketing and brand marketing, it’s very clear to see how that will tie into performance. So there is a way to bridge the gap. But in terms of brand versus performance as a tension thing, there’s a natural tension there because the mindsets and the focus are very different.

Danny Gavin Host

42:55

Do you think it’s the job of agencies or it could even be internal teams that when they get the marching orders, hey, it’s all about performance, performance, performance? To try to find a way to start educating a pie better and finding a way to include to start educating a pie better and finding a way to include, especially now in 2024, when you know, potentially, cookies are going away and tracking is harder. What’s your opinion on that?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

43:17

I’d say it’s an education issue plus a results issue. The stakeholders, whether it be the client or the decision maker, whether it be an internal team, they don’t really want to hear it. So you can educate as much as you want, but if the other side doesn’t want to hear it, you’re talking to a wall. And sometimes it takes a little bit of education and a little bit of like, you know, like the ceiling, the sky falling in, to make a decision happen. Like, wait a second. Like we’re not converting the way we used to. Oh, let’s go ask the performance market what’s going on. They’re like we don’t know. And the performance market what’s going on? They’re like we don’t know.

43:54

And the brand’s like yeah, I know what’s going on. As user behavior has changed, user sentiment has changed, and content consumption trends have changed. You’re just out of sync with your audience right now. Let me show you how to fix this. And like, when they run through all the options, try to the quick fix on the performance and it’s not working. Do you know what that brand dude told me like a couple of months ago? Maybe he’s got something like that. So it’s like the education plants the seed when the performance stops working and they can’t figure it out that they’ll come back to you and be like okay, what do you get for me now? That’s how I, that’s my utopia of how it’ll work.

Danny Gavin Host

44:20

That makes sense. The question is can you make, can you speed that up? But sometimes you can’t.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

44:26

That’s up to the user. That’s like how quickly they’re going to drop you.

Danny Gavin Host

44:28

Guys, can you please drop them a little quicker so we can get the brand back?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

44:32

You should be advocating for your stop buying our product.

Danny Gavin Host

44:35

Oh man, this has been great. All right, let’s quickly get into our lightning round. We’re going to talk about three categories, the first of which is philosophy.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

44:41

Brand marketing comes up for philosophy right, being existential, having an identity, knowing who you are, but making sure it’s meaningful. Being meaningful, right, Like we’re all looking, like I think we’re all looking for something. We don’t know what it is, and that thing is meaning and I’m not going to get into like, where do you find meaning? I’ll leave that for you to figure out Whether you’re doing brand marketing or whether you’re doing personal marketing. Finding meaning is an endeavor that doesn’t get discussed.

Danny Gavin Host

45:03

Sports and I know you’re wearing a certain cap from Houston, Texas. I don’t know if we need to mention anything like that oh, let me get my trash can.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

45:10

Dude, Let me get my trash can.

Danny Gavin Host

45:14

Oh, that’s awesome, oh God.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

45:15

I didn’t know you were an. Oh, I never would have come on the podcast. That’d be funny, I should have worked.

Danny Gavin Host

45:19

I’m a big. Oh yeah, it’s actually. Should we just?

Mordy Oberstein Guest

45:24

Oh man, for those who don’t know, the Astros cheated and we lost the ALCS because of it. Aaron Judge lost an MVP because of it. The Dodgers lost the World Series out of it. But I’m a big baseball fan. I love the Yankees. I grew up in the heyday of the Yankees winning every year, to the point where now they lose a game. I’m like, oh, they’re trash, they’re horrible. What’s going on? When we had Derek Jeter, we won every single day.

Danny Gavin Host

45:50

Yeah, it’s hard because we’re about the same age. We grew up in a very Yankee pro time, so it’s been a tough couple.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

45:57

Yeah, evil empire.

Danny Gavin Host

45:58

Yeah, tough couple of years.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

46:00

Now you’re having the glory days and not having the tough couple of years.

Danny Gavin Host

46:03

Yeah, we’re enjoying it. It’s worth it. All right, and finally, coffee or whiskey, or both.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

 

46:09

Both. So I try not to drink as much as I used to. I love single-malt scotch. I feel it’s also very Jewish, very and coffee and, as someone who moved from the US to a European-style country, I don’t know what the hell is espresso crap. Give me a regular drip coffee. I will literally come back when I go to the States. I don’t know what the hell is this espresso crap. Give me a regular drip coffee. I will literally come back when I go to the States with half a suitcase full of ground coffee.

Danny Gavin Host

46:37

If anyone wants to send a gift, a nice case of Maxwell House I think would be good for you.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

46:43

A little higher up than Maxwell House. But I tell my father, do not even think about stepping foot in my house until you make sure you have a bag of coffee in your, and then I make him open it up, and hand it over. Okay, now you can stay here for six weeks. That’s a good entry fee.

Danny Gavin Host

46:59

Well, I know we’ve hit the top of the hour, Mordy, this has been so awesome. I don’t think I’ve laughed this much in an episode. It’s been a huge pleasure.

Mordy Oberstein Guest

47:06

Best compliment ever.

Danny Gavin Host

47:07

Thank you for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor and thank you, listeners, for tuning into the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll speak with you next time. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor podcast. Be sure to check us out online at thedmmentor.com and on Instagram, and don’t forget to subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts for more marketing mentor magic. See you next time.

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