As an SEO professional, I’m always eager to learn from industry experts who are pushing the boundaries of our craft. That’s why I was thrilled to recently sit down with Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand at Wix and the founder of Unifi Brand Marketing, on my Unscripted SEO podcast.
Mordy and I dove deep into a topic that’s been top-of-mind for me lately – the evolving role of brand in SEO. As I mentioned on the show, “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.”
Mordy echoed this sentiment, explaining that “Google is attracted to whoever has the biggest digital light. And the only way to get that digital light is to brand, to build your brand.” In other words, the days of simply focusing on technical SEO tactics are long gone. To succeed in today’s landscape, we need to take a more holistic, brand-centric approach.
One of the key frameworks Mordy shared was the concept of a “depth audit” – assessing a brand’s emotional resonance with its target audience. As he put it, “Brand is fundamentally associative and in order to create those associations there has to be meaning. So there are things that there are emotions in life…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.”
The goal of this depth audit is to understand where the brand falls on the spectrum of emotional connection – is it tapping into more surface-level emotions, or is it resonating with deeper, more existential needs? Once you have that baseline, you can then audit the brand’s existing assets (website, social media, marketing materials, etc.) to see how well they align with that depth.
From there, Morty explained, you can develop a strategic plan for strengthening the brand’s depth and aligning it across all marketing and SEO efforts. “It really all depends on where the brand is at. 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.”
This holistic, brand-first approach is a far cry from the siloed SEO tactics I used to focus on. But as Mordy and I discussed, it’s a necessary evolution if we want to truly drive sustainable, long-term results for our clients and ourselves.
If you’re an SEO professional looking to expand your skillset and better integrate your work with broader marketing initiatives, I highly recommend checking out the full episode of the Unscripted SEO podcast with Mordy Oberstein. And be sure to explore these other great resources on SEO audits, standard operating procedures, and the intersection of SEO and brand building:
My Previous Episode with James Brockbank
I hope you find these insights as valuable as I did. As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or thoughts to share. Happy optimizing!