DMIEXPO Speaker’s Interview: Mordy Oberstein

Mordy Oberstein is the CMO at Rank Ranger, a leading SEO software platform. When not marketing Rank Ranger, Mordy can be found writing original SEO insights & analysis. A Search Engine Land author, industry speaker, & host of The In Search SEO Podcast, Mordy is a ‘search marketing educator’!

 

What digital marketing changes are impacting your campaigns as you head towards the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020?

For me personally, it’s been both the saturation of content as well as Google’s ability to better understand content. To the former, it’s much harder to get your message spread across social media. There is just so much content out there. I’ve found that you really have to be patient and think long term. More than ever it pays to consider the wider marketing picture and how social media marketing is impacted by what you’re doing in other areas such as influencer marketing.

In terms of content from a search perspective, really honing in on a genuine content identity and creating deep content has been really important from an organic search perspective. There’s so much talk about zero-click searches and trying to get your content/URL within one of Google’s SERP features (like a Featured Snippet) that you’re almost forced to take your content to the next level. That is, to create a real content identity and to offer content that is amazingly deep and uniquely insightful.

 

What is the BIG next thing for 2020 that marketers should be preparing for now?

Within the search marketing or “SEO” world machine learning plays a huge role and that’s only going to continue. To abstract out to digital marketing overall, AI and machine learning are going to start to creeping into the conversation at all levels. There’s really no two ways about it. Artificial intelligence is here and all marketers at all levels are going to start thinking about it a lot more in the very near future.

Where I think there’s going to be real advances in 2020 is when it comes to marketing data and insights. One of the schisms that currently exists is that the juggernauts of the industry (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) are heavily utilizing AI/machine learning. However, the tools we use to gain insights into those platforms, for the most part, don’t. And that’s going to change. I think marketers are starting to realize there is a gap between what they need to know about the platform that is important to them, be it Google or Facebook, and the insights into that platform that are available to them at scale. We’re still using Neolithic methods to understand things like user intent because our tools are still working on integrating machine learning. I think where you can see the future now is when looking at something like Google Ads. Here, automation, such as automated bidding, which relies on machine learning, is become part of every PPC advertiser’s daily life.

 

What can our community learn from your upcoming session at DMIEXPO in Tel-Aviv, Israel?

First I want to say I am really excited to speak at the Digital Marketing Conference, DMIEXPO and share some great insights and up-to-date SEO tactics. The face is that Google has made some leaps and advances that really have to be understood. There is so much going on in “search” these days and it’s getting more and more abstract. We’re talking about seriously deep changes to how Google approaches concepts like authority and how Google looks at sites/page when considering ranking on the SERP. In a way, these changes are reflected in Google’s core algorithm updates and how Google’s algorithm has changed.

I’m going to look at how certain advances Google has made in looking at entities (i.e., people, places, things, or even concepts) is manifesting itself within the process Google uses to “understand” a site and the pages on a site. As a result of what I like to call “Google’s holistic understanding” a lot of the ideas and practices within SEO that were once relevant no longer apply, or at least not to the same extent. So, we’ll be looking into how Google’s evolution demands a different approach to your site and to web content overall!

 

Who from our DMIEXPO speaker line up are you looking forward to learning from?

The lineup of the DMIEXPO speakers is very impressive and many of them are very interesting to hear and learn from. I’m definitely curious to hear what Gilad Sasson is going to be speaking about! I’ve heard a lot of great things about him from within the SEO industry and looking forward to get his insights for search engine ranking and generating high value links. Also, I am really looking forward to Dennis Yu’s session as well.