The Impact of Reddit in Search Results Feat. Evan Sherbert, SEO Manager @ G2

Ian Binek (00:01.867)
Evan, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. How are you doing?

Evan Sherbert (00:06.008)
Pleasure to be here again. I'm doing well. Doing well. A great start to a week.

Ian Binek (00:10.979)
So happy to hear it. Honestly, the pleasure is all ours. I'm super happy to be talking to you. Obviously, you're coming from a really cool company, G2. Big name in the space, especially in the software space. It's kind of an honor to get a chance to just speak with you today, man. So I'm really excited to get into these questions.

Evan Sherbert (00:28.738)
Looking forward to it. I've been looking forward to this podcast, looking forward to learning more about your agency and all the exciting work you're doing as

Ian Binek (00:35.471)
Awesome, Evan. All right, let's dive in. I want to just start really broad here. Let's just hear a little bit more about your role at G2, what you're responsible for, and what you're kind of up to right

Evan Sherbert (00:47.692)
Yeah, great question. So my name is Evan Sherbert, as you very well know. I'm the SEO manager at G2. I oversee our strategy and lead our manage our global SEO team across the US, across the APAC or Asian Pacific region. I've been with G2 for about three years now and we've grown a lot during that time. And for those who are not familiar, G2 is a global software and services reviews website that helps, you know, software and service researchers and buyers make the most informed decisions using real user reviews.

So we do a lot of interesting work for a global audience. And so mostly I work with my team to build targeted visibility and traffic to core page types on G2. I collaborate with other teams in G2 to ensure that SEO and best practices are factored into the work that potentially impacts software buyers. I also meet with our sales team and customers to discuss SEO and to solve some problems. I do a little bit of everything. It's quite nice.

Ian Binek (01:46.381)
I love it. It kind of sounds like SEO is so, I mean, obviously it's very ingrained in what the core of what G2 does in general, right? But even inside of the business itself and what you're doing, it sounds like, hey, like if you have an employee that's making content, or they're writing content, you're going to be having your team look at that and make sure that it's optimized, right? That's like what I'm kind of getting,

Evan Sherbert (02:13.186)
Definitely across content, across like new landing pages, new campaigns. If it focuses on the buyer, if someone's going to see it, if Google's going to see it, we definitely want to make sure that best practices or at least we have some sort of just take on the process so we can have the recommendations we can provide. We also have to grapple with the fact that not everything has to be for SEO and to kind of make peace with that on the inside. But yeah, we love collaborating internally.

Ian Binek (02:39.151)
That's awesome. Follow -up question to that is there are so many things that you're kind of leading right now and that you have your hands in. And I know that SEO has traditionally been a very long -term investment, right? Like someone that's putting time in SEO, it takes a very long time to see that, you know, that success metric, right? So I'm kind of curious, how are you measured

How are you measuring success from your SEO efforts at G2? And maybe it's a segmented answer, because obviously you have a bunch of different things you're doing. So maybe in general, how are you measuring success?

Evan Sherbert (03:20.126)
And so like you said, SEO, both like KPIs, both the things we're trending towards have changed in the last couple of years. But at G2, we're definitely focused on visibility to our category pages. We have not only product reviews, information about products you'd see like Asana, like Riverside FM, like other products in the space, but also larger categories. Users searching for things like CRM software, ERP systems.

We really want to focus our visibility not only on products, also the broader categories that people drive to these pages. Maybe they're not sure what they're looking for yet in terms of product specifics, which means focusing on that category is even more important for that upper funnel sort of targeted traffic.

Ian Binek (04:02.891)
That's great. Obviously, it makes sense, right? That's what you guys are selling as G2, right? You have that whole PPC part of the business too, where you kind of are offering those paid sponsorship spots too. this kind of gets into the second question that I was going to ask, which is, you're trying to increase visibility as much as you can to these pages. So what are some strategies or tactics you're using to actually do that for G2's pages and for

those category pages.

Evan Sherbert (04:33.806)
Yeah. So this is a bit of a boring answer. I was thinking about this before this. I think timing plays into this. For our audience, there was recently a broad core algorithm update that deployed in April of this year. It's the March update that deployed in April. And since then, a lot of enterprise level sites have been impacted by this. And so since then, we've been all trying to figure out, we seen any traffic decreases? If so, how do we get that visibility back?

How do we kind of take things back to foundations and ensure that all of our pages are higher quality? And so I kind of a long -winded answer at G2, I really want to take things back to basics at the moment, kind of back to SEO foundations and content pruning, truly focus on quality and depth and also focusing on SEO A -V testing. Kind of the harder, one of the biggest challenges for an enterprise level site, especially with G2, we have over a million index pages, is how do you ensure that all those pages are the highest quality?

How do you ensure that a landing page that somebody lands on, depending on what query they search, fully satisfies the reason they landed on that page? Unfortunately, we don't have a million people that work at G2. So how do we do that with my team and still have enough energy work in the day to also be fully gripped in with the work we're dealing with? How do we make sure that all that quality is sustainable? So that's where coming back to basics, focusing on content pruning can really help with

Ian Binek (06:01.263)
That's so interesting. think it takes a large organization like D2 to kind of talk about that because most companies aren't going to have that problem. mean, maybe companies like D2 will, but the companies that I talk to a lot of times, they have maybe less than 300 pages or 400 pages max. And in your case, you have a million. So that's really interesting. I wanted to ask, so content programming, that makes sense.

I wanted to ask about SEO A -B testing. What does that look like? I think everyone that hears A -B testing, at least nowadays, or at least people that are a little less educated, they're going to think, it's landing page A -B testing, or it's changing the colors of buttons or sections or headlines. But what does it look like from an SEO standpoint, especially with the way that the algorithm has been changing a lot recently? I'm kind of curious how you guys are handling

Evan Sherbert (06:58.222)
Yeah, that's a great question. I think for the SEO community, like with most terms, we use them synonymously, even when they don't mean the same thing. For A -B testing, for example, we don't really do it in the same laboratory setting that most people would do as SEOs. We do a lot of split testing. And so, for example, if we really want to test the impact of moving content, for example, from the bottom of the page, where typically SEO gets kind of stuffed down there to the top of the page, and want to see that impact, we can create a test group and a control group of pages.

and then use tools like SEO testing, like other SEO tools available to really measure that impact to see is there a difference in click engagement and impressions and click through rate and ranking once we made these changes pre and post to see if it's really worth applying to all the pages. That's kind of a thing with scalable sites is that, you know, we have all these pages we could roll this out to. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn't, it's hard to scale back. And so wanting to really see

at a scalable level before we scale that to everything and will it work. It's definitely one of the things we want to keep tabs on to make sure we're not wasting any resources.

Ian Binek (08:04.889)
That's cool. Yeah, I like that you kind of mentioned that a lot of people think synonymously and it's a little different in the SEO space. And it kind of has to be, right? Especially with how drastically things are changing and also how long maybe these tests are. It just makes sense for it to be a little different. So, love the answer. Okay, so G2, large site, lots of pages.

And obviously you're cutting pages down, the content pruning. What are your thoughts on AI? Especially the people that are really churning out AI pages. I know that there was an update released a few months ago and I think even another one since then that basically penalized sites that were heavily pushing AI content. But then at the same time, Google is really trying to push people to use their AI for the indexed answers.

I'm just curious, what are your thoughts as an SEO professional, someone who does this all the time, where do you think AI is going to end up in the SEO space and then also how it's going to impact the digital marketing space as

Evan Sherbert (09:12.814)
Yeah, SEOs have had an interesting relationship with AI, especially when chat GBT was popularized in 2022, 2023. We've all been interested in how can we save time? How can we do the manual work we don't like at scale using AI? How can we use this to save time for us? How can we use this to not write content all the time? I think we've been trying to figure out the best way to use it. And Google has also been changing their stances on it. Initially, Google was very against AI. I think this kind of aligns with the fact

Over 60 % of the web is duplicated content right now. They want to really focus on unique information. They don't want to spend time crawling content they've already seen and costing them a lot of money. They want to focus on unique things they've never seen before. And so I think initially SEOs were all in on AI and using it to publish tons of content, just everyone using the same information, the same people also ask questions and it worked until it didn't.

recently Google chains are stance saying, you know, AI is acceptable if it's good for the user, if it's good for, you know, the content quality, we don't want to just see someone taking content from site a and putting it on site B with a few changes. and so I think with that in mind, we're still going to see a ton of AI content usage, but I think really smart marketers and SEOs will be using it for focused use cases, not for writing entire landing pages, not for entire campaigns, but definitely as almost an assistant to help you get.

I'm saying myself again, I'm more efficient, more kind of saving time on these long processes, more of an assistant instead of a replacement.

Ian Binek (10:44.877)
Definitely. I kind of agree with you. I think it all comes down to the prompt, which makes sense, right? mean, there's a lot of strategies and tactics out now. I mean, even stuff that we do at our agency, not necessarily in the SEO space, but in the cold email space, we'll use clay and then we'll have it essentially write the first sentence for

but we give it a very templatized sentence where it's like, hey, here's the first seven words in the sentence. Can you fill in the last five? And I mean, it works pretty well. We get pretty high reply rates through our emails and stuff. So I kind of see that in the SEO world. We had someone else on the podcast recently, we're actually just like two months ago now, but he has an SEO agency and it's really interesting because

He wasn't necessarily super niche and we work with B2B SaaS, but he'd work in various industries inside of B2B SaaS. I mean, that could be really broad, right? You could have health, could have financial, whatever. So the way he got caught up to speed was he would have an interview with like a salesperson and he would ask them questions, they would answer, and then he would have AI summarize it for him.

And he would use those answers to do two things, satisfy the service requests of being a really optimized page, and then also write that unique content. And I think that's sort of where, like what you're kind of mentioning here, that's where the industry's going. It just kind of sounds like some people are just ahead. Like you said, the savvy marketers are taking advantage of it. And then some of the less savvy marketers are just kind of ripping content, chat GPT,

five, 10 blogs done every day, if not more. And those guys are gonna be the ones that are probably penalized the most. And hopefully if they are agencies, they're not screwing their clients over at the same time. But that's a topic for another time.

Evan Sherbert (12:52.686)
That's the thing, it always works until it doesn't. All those short -term things like, you know, really over -optimizing keyword stuffing, link exchanges, these things can work in the short term, but eventually Google will catch on. It's really hard to come back from a penalty.

Ian Binek (13:08.821)
Exactly. And this goes into another question I had, which was Reddit. I'm really curious what your thoughts are on Reddit, especially because of how prevalent it is in the top of the search engine now, the search end result page. I'm just curious, how is that impacting G2 or how are you potentially going to

utilizing Reddit a little bit more? do you think that it's an overindex and you think that it's not worth the short term gain? It's better just to focus on your long term goals. What are your thoughts on Reddit?

Evan Sherbert (13:45.058)
Yeah, that's a really good question. think as a user before I started getting added to the SERPs, I loved it a lot more. I think now that I see it's not only in its like by itself in the SERP, but also in like the discussions and forums SERP feature as well. It takes up a ton of real estate on page one of the SERP and beyond. And we're not seeing, we don't really know if users are engaging with it and liking it or not. Google doesn't share that with us. I will say that it's probably easy to get distracted right

A lot of marketers are seeing disruptions in the SERP in the form of traffic losses because all these SERPs are higher on the page, moving your results lower, which definitely impacts conversion rates, traffic, all those great metrics we love reporting on. And so I think it's easy to kind of over index on the fear, I guess, and kind of say, I need to change my entire strategy, really pivot immediately. I know at G2 we've seen that for more informational keywords, things like, you know, is a product good or bad? Is something worth

A lot of interesting things around like categories, like, you know, what is a good CRM system? So some of these things we're seeing, you know, some more SERP competition. Um, but we also know that Google scales things back. It's constantly testing, um, to kind of go outside the question a bit, like AI overview is a great jumping off point. Uh, when they really kind of rolled out AI overview into the SERPs outside of Reddit, um, they really did so it had a negative response. I think he was in about 15 % of all queries and now that's been paired back to about seven.

percent, the lowest we've ever seen because it's still in testing. think they're very quick to deploy to kind of keep up with the rest of the industry. But, I don't know if users are fully sold on sort of that kind of content, but back to Reddit. know, it's definitely don't, don't overindex in kind of trying to change your strategy. Definitely keep on doing what you've been doing, but definitely keep in mind that it's going to be in the server for awhile. They're not going to completely abandon it. They've invested some money into Reddit.

So it's definitely going to be here to stay.

Ian Binek (15:44.227)
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I've had a couple of clients. We don't really do SEO too much in our agency. We have a few clients that we help out or advise with, but we primarily do PPC, but even still AI has an impact on PPC as well. We'll get into that at different time. It's just so interesting. When the AI overviews came out, we were doing a lot of hacky, programmatic SEO things.

Surprisingly, the AI overviews helped us a lot because we were building some, a couple of the clients were building a market, They're SaaS startup, there's not a market around it. They're disruptive. And we had hundreds of pages for these terms that maybe got one or two clicks a month on searches, but AI saw

And I don't know, it just thought that that was like, this guy's a leader. Let's push this in all of our AI responses. So anytime someone was searching about like in the telematic space is like what this client was doing. We were showing up as like related resources at the bottom. So we were getting all this like referral traffic or like direct traffic, which is so weird because we weren't doing like ads for them. And it wasn't until we like just did this like really deep competitive research and we saw that and we're like, boy.

We're big fans of the AI overview. This is pretty great, but I can see why a lot of people are like, this doesn't help me at all. I don't like this. So I could see it both ways, but I'm kind of a fan.

Evan Sherbert (17:23.502)
I know SEOs only care about SERP placement. We know how much the click -through rate just dramatically decreases from rank 1 to 2 to 5. At this point with all the SERP features, if you're below rank 5, you're probably not seeing much traffic. It's incredibly competitive out there.

Ian Binek (17:41.455)
I mean, especially are you, and let me actually just ask you just as like a maybe dummy question. But when you're mentioning, are you talking about organic listings or are you talking about just listings in general?

Evan Sherbert (17:53.71)
that clarified just organic listings, organic 1 through 10.

Ian Binek (17:57.507)
Gotcha, yeah. If you're organic, one through five, that's about as good as it gets. I mean, because you're have about, what, six other ad spots on that page, and then maybe the AI overview as well. yeah, if you're one through five, you're on page one. If you're not, you're basically not. Yeah.

Evan Sherbert (18:06.009)
yeah.

Evan Sherbert (18:14.99)
There we go. We've been noticing all of our PBC friends have four ad slots now, above rank one, and we're very jealous. Very jealous.

Ian Binek (18:24.271)
Well, I mean, all I gotta say is it's getting more expensive and so it's getting harder. So maybe don't be too jealous. Great. Evan, wanna get into two questions we ask all of our guests. This can be SEO related. It also can just be digital marketing, industry related in general. what are some overrated digital marketing strategies and tactics that you're seeing in 2024?

Evan Sherbert (18:28.61)
I bet. I bet.

Evan Sherbert (18:51.47)
Yeah. I think I still see some marketers and some SEOs even just really overdoing it with some vanity metrics. Things like, you know, like shares followers, just total traffic, not really being specific or drilling down into like the, targeted campaigns and targeted traffic. I think not focusing on your business or your clients, KPIs is definitely a miss in 2024 for SEO specifically. It's not just about overall traffic.

It's about that targeted traffic to the most important business driving pages on your website or your client's website. This is the time where clients are looking to churn looking to downgrade services. This is the time to really show targeted value.

Ian Binek (19:33.889)
Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. think, you know, just looking at the macro economic situation, we're not technically in a downturn or recession, but a lot of businesses are operating like we are. And I think it makes sense. I mean, you see all the layoffs, you see how expensive and inflation is going up, right? So you're right. And especially in the agency side, I feel it.

Evan Sherbert (19:45.912)
technically.

Ian Binek (20:02.719)
It's harder to sell people on things. And especially as someone who's starting out, it's a lot harder to sell people on things. So yeah, I totally get that. think demonstrating value to your clients is important. I think it's sort of something I call like marketing to marketing a little bit, which not in a condescending way, right? You're not just trying to like make your stuff sound better than it actually is. if you can, I think it's all about communication. If you're able to communicate that value.

to your clients and educate them at the same time, because maybe your clients don't, you know, they're hiring you for a reason. They're not experts. So you have to somehow dumb it down in a sense where like they're gonna be able to pick it up quickly on a 30 minute or a 60 minute call, and they don't have to think about it afterwards. So I love that answer. think that's, you know, it's a good one. It's back to the basics.

Evan Sherbert (20:48.014)
Exactly. Yeah.

Evan Sherbert (20:55.884)
Definitely. think also with that kind of that fear of like budget, that fear of, you know, trying to get the most efficient spend, the most efficient reach right now. I think it's definitely a mistake to train the target, the most broad audience as possible. think you could definitely agree with that. You're probably shooting yourself in the foot by not trying to get deep into your niche or do some targeted outreach or just some audience engagement. Definitely going too broad will definitely not help you out. Understanding your audience and their habits will definitely improve engagement and conversions.

Ian Binek (21:25.645)
Yes, I actually just posted about this today. Yes, it's actually like, you know, we had a guest on last week. Her name was Tass and she, man, we had a great conversation around niching down and how it has revolutionized her business. She's not an agency, she's a consultancy, but as soon as she niched down and only did B2B paid media landing pages and didn't just offer

Evan Sherbert (21:28.878)
What good timing

Ian Binek (21:55.491)
you know, overall digital marketing strategy. She saw a lot more inbound and became like the expert for big companies like Calendly to just reach out to them or her and say, hey, like, can you help us? And that helped a lot. so basically, yeah, we're doing that with our agency too. We were initially doing like technology hedging is like what we used to do. And it was like, hey, like this new technology came out, let's implement it in your business and see if we can get it to drive results.

And that was so hard to sell to people because it's such a niche thing that like, people aren't really searching for it, right? But go back to our core skillset. like, hey, like we sell PPC services to B2B companies and we have results to show for it. Let's just sell that instead. And so far it's been a good decision, but it was pretty recent. So we'll see if it actually plays

Ian Binek (22:53.111)
Alright, well let's get into underrated. What do think are underrated things,

Evan Sherbert (22:58.69)
I underrated. think trying to do things the way they are today, trying to not just continue the way you are and not changing is definitely not something you should continue. I think people talk about diversifying your content types, A lot of people talk about investing heavily in TikTok, investing heavily in video content, kind of just following trends blindly. I think that

probably an opportunity for a lot of businesses or niches or verticals for that. But it doesn't mean it's right for your vertical, right? This means we're looking for, instead of looking for like just TikTok or video, look for opportunities to diversify. Look for, you know, other content outside of techs. This could be infographics, video content, podcasts, other content that really differentiates you from your competitors on page one. Leverage your first party data, deliver insights that can't be found elsewhere.

This is sort of that unique content that Google is looking for that can't be copied by doing some skyscraping, it's been doing some SEO research. This is stuff that's unique to you and the audience you kind of serve.

Ian Binek (24:06.479)
Yeah, we actually just had Amy Stewart. She was the director of content at PayScale on a couple of weeks ago. And part of her yearly goals is to produce a 100 page report of data that they collect and it's summarized and it can be basically viewed by any of their, I mean, anyone can basically download this and

They realize they want to work with pay skills. So that's differentiated content, right? I think that that's... You're right. I think a trend that I'm hearing you mention a lot is don't go after the trendy things and don't over -index on these things that are going to be short -lived because at the end of the day, if you make great quality content, it will last the test of

Whereas if you make short -term games, yeah, you might get some clients from that or yeah, you might see some great results from that. But as soon as it kind of goes away, you're just a sitting duck. So it's sort of this FOMO of like, what's the next thing? I have to be on the next thing if you're going to live that way. So yeah, think you're right. Just quality over quantity really makes sense. But if you can do both, that's even better, right?

Evan Sherbert (25:20.6)
Definitely. think a lot of SEOs are also kind of afraid or don't know what to do with social media. It's not, you know, we don't think of it as an organic traffic driver. It's a referral traffic driver, definitely. But definitely not something SEOs think of. We think of, you know, we optimize the page, the content, build some links and then set it, forget it, essentially. Definitely lever social media to signal boost your SEO. It may think like, that's a content marketing task. That's not SEO. You're wrong. I'll say it. You're wrong.

When you publish new content, you roll on your changes to large page types, you improve your website, tell people about it. Get your teams to share those updates with their network. This will definitely boost your signals. It'll help get referral traffic and boost your brand's visibility. Don't be afraid of social media.

Ian Binek (26:06.125)
Absolutely. mean, we, and it's funny because like, you're right. So many people are scared of posting on LinkedIn and I don't know. feel like LinkedIn content gets kind of indexed pretty well too sometimes. I mean, if it's something you already produced, just kind of repurpose it and put it out on another channel. And like you said, it's a signal back to Google. Like, Hey, there's some authority here. Hey, people are talking about this.

Obviously, I don't know how the algorithm works as well as you do, but I'm sure that there's some sort of social listening or signal, I guess you could call it, that's increasing your rankings as a result. So I love that

Evan Sherbert (26:50.328)
And like, if posting scares you, you can definitely use it for even research. And we talked about diversifying your content types, doing research on what your audience actually engages with, what content they enjoy, can definitely help provide inspiration or some, even some future constant opportunities for you to prioritize.

Ian Binek (27:06.955)
Absolutely. Evan, that's all the questions I have for you today. This is a great conversation. I really appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. Before we go, Evan, how could people reach out to you if they want to learn more about G2 and the work that you're doing

Evan Sherbert (27:13.462)
It's been fantastic. Thank

Evan Sherbert (27:26.232)
Yeah, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. Easy to search. Pretty memorable last name. Sherbert, like the ice cream. You can always find me

Ian Binek (27:35.681)
Awesome Evan. Well thank you so much for being on. I really look forward to pushing this out to our listeners and I'm excited to keep in touch with you in the future man.

Evan Sherbert (27:45.006)
looking forward to

Ian Binek (27:46.777)
Awesome.

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