In this Marketing Over Coffee:


Learn the best way for agencies to manage websites, especially if you offer SEO as a service, and how to move fast enough so that you never miss opportunities.

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Brought to you by our sponsors: NetSuite and Wix Studio

She’s been on both the client and agency side. Working with a team that designed sites and provided SEO services set her up perfectly for Head of SEO Communications

Organizing clients by CMS and the joy of fixing something for marketers when it goes out to millions of users

Taking advantage of the efficiencies of scale when managing multiple sites

Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

Templates and included APIs make it easier to increase velocity, and for agencies to service their clients quickly

Template marketplace opens up new opportunities

12:38 – 14:15 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Streamlining the setup too, domain name, SSL, hosting, CDN

Simplifying all the best practices SEO

SEMrush, Wincher, SE Ranking tools included, Alt text fix tool

AI Tag Generators, AI Title Generators, Video eligible for rich results

Integrations with Salesforce, Amazon, Google Ads

Follow Crystal on LinkedIn

Wix Studio Hub and the SERPs Up Podcast

Media Recco: Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Pivot

Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on exercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!

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Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

John Wall – 00:01

Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio.

Speaker 3 – 00:10

This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall – 00:18

Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. Today we’re talking with Crystal Carter. She’s head of SEO communications at Wix. She’s an SEO and digital marketing professional who’s worked with clients like Disney, McDonald’s, and Tomy. She speaks and writes about SEO and is a regular on the SERPs Up SEO podcast. In fact, we’ve talked over there. Crystal, welcome to the show.

Crystal Carter – 00:38

Thank you so much, John. I’m really pleased to be here. Big fan of the show and, yeah, big fan of the work that you do at your team.

John Wall – 00:44

Thank you. It’s been so long, I actually had to dig in and it has been far too long. We normally try and check in and talk about hosting, and of course SEO is always a topic, but I wanted to get you in so we could talk to you about what’s going on in the state of folks who have to manage a bunch of websites and, people who are getting things set up. But before we dig into that stuff, tell us about your background first. Like, what happened in life that ended up bringing you to Wix?

Crystal Carter – 01:10

So I am the head of SEO communications at Wix. And in my marketing life, as many other marketers I’m sure have had this experience, I’ve done a lot of different things. It’s one of the things I love about marketing is that a lot of times, the principles are the same. You know, the cash cow and the star and the dog and like all of the, all of those sort of classic marketing things, they’re the same. But your day-to-day tends to be really flexible and really different.

And so I’ve worked in a freelance capacity. I’ve worked in an agency capacity. I’ve, been very close to management in the agency capacity. I’ve managed clients in both those spaces. And I’ve also been in-house, and I’ve worked for public facing entities. I work for private businesses, small businesses, large businesses, all of that sort of stuff. And when the role for communications SEO person came up, I thought that it would be a really good fit because the team that I was with before was an agency where we’re building websites, but we’re also providing SEO services. So we’re able to see the website from the inside out and able to advise on the digital strategies for that. And that I really enjoyed.

Even in that space, one of my favorite things was to be able to fix the CMS. To be able to sort of say, “This is something that we can fix, and this will fix all of the CMS.” And the way I was handling my clients, I was thinking about it that way as well. So I would group my clients by their CMS. And I always say, people say, “Oh, what’s your favorite marketing tool?” I’m like, “Your CMS?” And I’ll say, “What’s your favorite marketing tool?” “Samuel Wooks website.” That’s, that’s it.

Because honestly, it’s like a guitar. If you’ve got an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, you need to know the difference. You need to know how to use them. And what the sound you get out of it will depend on how good you are at using that particular guitar. A Fender Stratocaster is different from a resonator. These things are different. And it’s important for you to know the differences so that you can get, you know, make beautiful music.

So one of the things I love about working at Wix is that, I’m not a hands-on engineer fixing SEO things on that side, but we work really closely with that team. So if I see something and I’m like, “This would be really useful for marketers who are using our platform,” I can put that forward and we can get that implemented. I can think of one thing in particular that I was really pushing for. And seeing that implemented makes me so happy because it helps all of our users, and we’ve got over 250 million users worldwide, and that’s helping all of them.

So to be able to bring the firsthand experience of trying to do marketing on a website, trying to do SEO, trying to grow your website presence, and of having managed clients who are going to come to you and say, “Why can’t I do this? Or why can’t we do that? Or how come this is this way?” And being able to bring that into the sort of SaaS environment is really a dream come true. And plus, I get to talk to lovely people like you and I get to go to fantastic conferences and things like that. And so, yeah, it’s been a great journey and it’s one of those things where I get to bring all of the knowledge that I’ve gained throughout my career to the four every day.

John Wall – 04:19

Yeah, it’s funny. So it seems like you were the ideal customer for Wix Studio. And we love to see that because there’s so many times where the product marketing team doesn’t actually come from the world that had lived in that pain, and it makes it so much easier. I love that idea of bundling your clients by CMS. I hadn’t thought about that. But that does make so much sense because that’s the customer experience that you’re in.

Crystal Carter – 04:43

Yeah. And I think also the way I would do that, so we have custom, we’d have, we’d have some of the off-the-shelves. So things like that when I was working agency side. And the thing is that normally if you find a solution, and this is true with Wix as well, but if you find a solution one CMS, chances are you’ll be able to roll that out across every single client that’s on that CMS. So it gives you incredible efficiencies to bundle them together because also sometimes you can see, you can spot problems ahead of time for a different client. So maybe one person who’s on one CMS is having trouble with something and you dig into and you’re like, “Oh, it’s that.” And then you look on the other ones, you’re like, “Oh, that has that as well. And I hadn’t ev