In this interview series, we feature Mordy Oberstein, Founder of Unify Brand Marketing and Head of SEO branding at Wix. Wix is a website builder platform that provides SEO and marketing tools to boost traffic. Mordy joined Wix at a time when it did not have the best reputation for SEO. It was Mordy who bridged the gap and showcased how advanced Wix’s SEO capabilities were.
Mordy Oberstein had recently geared his own branding agency “Unify Brand Marketing”. The branding agency aims to provide a flex of services in branding ranging from strategy, and opportunity analysis to measuring the brand’s performance.
He also serves for Semrush as the communications advisor. Mordy Oberstein is also a prominent speaker and author. He is the author of Wix SEO Guide and one of the organisers of #SEOchat. He has also worked as the chief marketing officer for the SEO platform Rank Ranger. He shares his SEO journey and valuable insights on SEO and brand marketing strategies with us.
Table of Contents
Watch the Interview here
➢Could you share your journey in the SEO industry and how you became Head of SEO Branding at Wix?
I started my path towards SEO while working for an educational software company as their lead content person. They asked me to write copy for the website, and then they asked me to rank the copy of the website. I thought, sure, I can write whatever you want.
But then they said they wanted organic traffic. And I was like, what’s organic traffic? What are you talking about?
That’s when I got started with SEO. From there, I eventually joined Rank Ranger, which was later acquired by SimilarWeb. I became their content manager and eventually took on the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
A friend of mine, who was working on the product side at Wix, reached out and said, “Hey, why don’t you come over and join us? We’re working to improve the SEO product, really advancing and moving it along, and we need some help on the marketing side.” That’s how I ended up at Wix.
Actually, this is my second stint at Wix. After my first time here, I went to Semrush and became their Head of Communications. I still consult for them for the last three years, I think. I came back to Wix, and I’ve been focused on running their messaging, positioning, and overall strategy around all things SEO.
➢How has your transition from SEO to brand marketing influenced your approach to building a brand?
I think it’s helped me realize the limitations of performance or the performance mindset on a brand, and where you really have to go beyond the immediate ROI and the immediate KPIs. You need to look at things a little more broadly and really understand how the performance side of things such as SEO, for example is impacted by wider momentum, wider inertia, wider energy around the brand, and wider engagement around the brand, and how that does correlate to the performance side a lot of the time.
It works on both sides. The performance side doesn’t always realize the impact of the wider brand on performance, and the brand folks don’t always realize how they tie into actual performance. There’s this disconnect, and it’s really helped me bridge that disconnect, I think, effectively.
➢What key factors do you believe are essential for establishing a strong brand identity?
There are many. I’d say the most commonly ignored and probably the most important is to offer depth and meaning. Well, it’s the same thing: meaning and depth. I’ll use them interchangeably.
When you’re trying to come up with a brand identity — who you are, what you do, and how you position your offering to really speak to your audience — a lot of the time it gets a little bit superficial, especially with digital copy. Digital copy is still very conversion-oriented, and we don’t often approach it from a more holistic or messaging point of view. The reality is, you can do both. And it’s a shame that we don’t.
But offering something that’s a little bit more meaningful,I like to say that it goes beyond the emotional, almost touches on something existential.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say I was running an amusement park. I could say, “We’re a great place to have fun,” and that could be my positioning and messaging. That’s who we are: all about fun. But fun is a very surface-level kind of thing. I like to have fun, but it’s okay if I don’t. It’s not necessarily a powerful message. Sometimes, it can be, but in this particular case, the way I’m formulating it, it’s not.
Now, imagine if instead, the messaging was: “Come to our amusement park, and you’ll forget about life for a day.” That’s almost beyond emotional. It touches on something deeper — like, “Life is overwhelming. Here’s a way to escape that overwhelming sense of life.” that’s like deep stuff. It can be used in a way to connect with people.
➢ How do you integrate SEO strategies into brand marketing to create a cohesive online presence?
So, that’s kind of what I was saying before, and it’s something you hear a lot now on the SEO side. And it’s great to hear, but at the same time, it’s a little bit frustrating for me.
You hear things like, “Focus on brand, focus on brand,” and the power of brand for SEO. A lot of that started with the Google API leaks thing, where people were saying that the amount of time users spend on a website or the number of mentions you get might be part of the algorithm.
I’m glad people are talking more about the brand and the impact on SEO. But what’s frustrating is that you don’t really hear much about what it actually means to do brand marketing so that you can get the SEO side of it. There’s not enough content out there on this topic. I don’t think SEOs know enough about that yet, and they don’t have the right mindset to really approach the brand.
Brand marketing is a very different mindset compared to SEO, but the two tie together incredibly well. The way I describe it is that Google is like a moth, and it’s drawn to whoever has the largest digital light.
All that good brand building you do gets you cadence, momentum, and engagement. It gets people talking about you, looking for you, and sharing your content and URLs on social media. It gets people mentioning you. For example, let’s say there’s a podcast about accounting, and they mention your podcast as one of the best in the field. That’s a valuable mention — maybe even a link. You also get people searching for your brand. ,I don’t think Google’s confirmed this,but there’s a patent about this. But I think Google is unaware of the fact that people are searching for Nike and then the word shoes. Branded searches can, I think, be a significant tell to Google, like what’s relevant, what’s not relevant to your website. And all that comes from doing actual brand building.
You can’t actually get that, I mean, unless you’re just paying for it, which is not going to be high quality and is against Google’s policies. In the cases of links, you have to do that good brand building in order to get that digital momentum going. And that directly ties into SEO.
It’s funny to me that we’re still at a point where people ask if brand marketing really ties into SEO. It absolutely does.
I was recently doing a webinar where we audited e-commerce websites, and I kept focusing on messaging and brand. People asked why I was so focused on that, and my answer was simple: Because If you want to get that momentum that ties into SEO, this is the only way to do it. So we talk a lot about brand and SEO, but when we actually get into it, I feel like we’re almost like not ready to really hear it yet. Little Bit of a hot take,I guess.
➢ How do you measure the success of a brand marketing strategy in the digital space?
So, there’s this myth about brand marketing that you can’t measure it. But that’s not true. You can measure brand; it’s just that you can’t measure it the same way you measure SEO. Even SEO is more complicated than this. But you can’t measure, you know, exact hard metrics like clicks, impressions in the same way, but what you can do is paint a picture of your brand’s impact by looking at a lot of different things. For example, it’s not just about the number of social media engagements it’s about who is engaging with you. Who’s liking your posts? What are they commenting? Are they simply liking it, or are they actually engaged with your content?
You can also look at branded searches. But it’s not just about the number of branded searches or the percentage of branded versus discovery searches; it’s about what people are searching for in relation to your brand. Because they might be searching for your brand, you know, plus socks, which is not what you want, obviously.
You can look at things like who’s partnering with you. That’s a way to measure brand, right? If you’re a brand and you have a certain toxic reputation in the niche space you’re in, people will not want to partner with you. You might have a reputation, but it might not be around what you want.
So we’re trying to be X, we’re trying to position ourselves as X. But the people who are trying to partner with us are more about why Y. Then there’s something off there. So you can’t measure brand, you can measure reach, there’s a lot of things you can do. You could survey awareness, there’s a lot of things you can do to measure brand. But it’s a little bit different. It’s a little bit more. You do have to have your finger on the pulse. You do have to be a little more holistic about it, and you do have to sort of put it all together. It’s a more compound versus particular metric kind of thing.
➢ Wix recently started a new initiative called Wix SEO Learning Hub. Could you discuss the importance of educating marketers and SEOs through initiatives like the Wix SEO Learning Hub?
We’ve had the Wix SEO Learning Hub for about two and a half years now. One of the key reasons behind this initiative is that SEO is one of the most in-demand topics among Wix users. I’m not just talking about the SEO industry specifically — of course, SEOs and digital marketers use Wix, and they’re part of our user base. But outside of that, SEO is a popular topic for anyone using a website builder.
There’s a natural connection between a website and Google that people understand. For example, if I don’t share a URL on social media, it won’t get picked up. But if I just have the URL indexed, Google can still rank it. So there’s a much more intrinsic connection between a website and Google compared to a website and social media. Because of this, people are really eager for SEO education, and that’s one of the reasons we launched the SEO Learning Hub.
Another reason is that while there’s a lot of great content around SEO — sites like SEO Roundtable, Barry’s website, Semrush, and Ahrefs — there still isn’t enough dynamic content. The larger media sites or platforms, for example, don’t do podcasts. We recognized that there was a gap for a certain type of SEO content, and we felt we had the expertise to fill that gap.
The SEO Learning Hub is a great resource. It offers articles, newsletters, webinars, and podcasts. We even have a daily news series with Barry Schwartz called It’s New, which we host on the SEO Learning Hub and the Rusty Brick YouTube channel.
What’s interesting about the Hub is that it serves a wide variety of people with different needs, at different levels, all at the same time. This multi-layered approach is something unique that we’ve been able to put out there, and we’re excited about the impact it’s having.
➢ What are your thoughts on how brand marketing will evolve in the next five years, especially in relation to SEO?
That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought about how brand marketing will evolve in the next five years, but I have some thoughts on it. I’m not sure if this is true, but here’s my take on where I think the ecosystem is heading, and I believe that’s going to help shape where brand marketing is heading. I think we’re about to hit a wall.
There’s this growing sense of frustration, this undercurrent of dissatisfaction, whether it’s on social media or search engines. You hear people saying the same thing: “I can’t find what I’m looking for.” Or “What’s out there is just the same thing done 30 times over.” People are looking for something different, but it just isn’t there yet.
We’re not fully conscious of this fact just yet, though. You still see posts on social media that get a lot of engagement, like 100 likes, and that’s great. But I think there’s an unconscious sentiment behind that engagement — people may like the post, but they’re also thinking, “I’ve seen this a thousand times from 500 different people.”
Brands haven’t yet fully embraced the need to differentiate themselves, especially on the digital side. They’re not quite ready to lean into something different, to speak in a more unique way, and to reach a more specific audience with a more niche message. I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet.
But I do think that, not because brands — especially the larger ones — aren’t ready to do this, but because they haven’t done it yet, they’re going to hit a point where they’ll feel the effects of that user sentiment. People will start saying, “This doesn’t resonate with me anymore. I’m looking for something different.” When that happens, brands will feel it.
At that point, I think brands will have to pivot. They’ll need to offer something that truly speaks to a more specific audience, even if it’s a smaller one. They’ll have to become more conversational, less jargon-heavy, and less cliche
Brand marketing will evolve to be less about jargon, less about cliches, and less about the typical, overused messaging we see today. I think we’re still seeing too much of that, and at some point, it’s going to hit a wall.
The same thing is happening with SEO. You hear people say, “I go to Google and get the same results every time.” I experienced this just recently. I was searching for health-related information, and no matter how specific I got with my search or how I phrased it, I kept getting the same results — WebMD, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, over and over again. I couldn’t find what I wanted.
It’s the same story for both brand marketing and SEO. The entire web ecosystem is heading in the same direction. I think we’ll start seeing significant changes soon.
Hopefully, that answers your question! If you have any others, feel free to ask. I’m happy to help. Again, thank you so much — I really appreciate it.
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