This excerpt is from “SEO in the Gemini Era” by Marie Haynes ©2024 and is reprinted with permission from Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.
Much of the SEO advice you see online today comes from the sharing of community wisdom that learned about search in the days before Google made aggressive use of AI.
Much of what many of us SEOs do and treat as standard practice is based on search engines’ lists of heuristics: hand-written rules programmed by humans. A lot has changed.
For example, let's say you've been tasked with creating a new article for a website you're currently working on.
Since we know that in order to appear as relevant content in search engines, you need to cover your topic thoroughly and create content that uses keywords that are semantically related to your topic, you’ll likely start with keyword research.
Much of the content on the web today comes from a process that goes something like this:
- Do keyword research to see what your competitors are writing.
- Create similar content, but perhaps a little better or more comprehensive.
- Do some keyword research to see what others are covering that you aren’t.
- Create content that covers these topics as well.
- “Do People Also Ask” research finds relevant questions to cover, allowing you to create content that looks more relevant and comprehensive to search engines.
- Google already has content that answers your questions, but create more content that answers those questions.
This process prevents you from creating truly original and insightful content. Much more useful than the online version.
But that's what Google wants to reward!
SEO agencies often spend a lot of time each month improving a site's technical SEO, improving its internal linking structure, or acquiring external links and mentions – all of which can help make a web page look better to search engines.
These aren't bad things and could potentially help improve your site, but again, they're unlikely to be reflected in the content of your pages. Greater help for searchersThis is something Google wants to reward, too.
I want to make something clear here. I’m not saying technical SEO is dead..
Larger sites, especially, benefit from having a technically sound, fast site that search engines can easily navigate and understand.
Schema still goes a long way in helping Google understand your business and its EEAT, especially new businesses. Some industries may benefit enough from technical improvements to improve their rankings to some extent.
Here's one way to make your content more useful.
Are you ready to discover this deep and insightful secret?
here it is…
The secret to creating content that Google is more likely to find useful than other content is to create content that users find useful..
SEOs need to change their mindset
For over a decade, my primary source of income has been advising businesses on how to improve their search presence.
I combed through every public word Google has published about what they want to reward, and created pages of checklists, training documents, and advice.
I had one goal. Help people understand what Google rewards and get results.
Do you see the contradiction in this statement? The more I think about it, the funnier it gets!
I was unaware the whole time I was preaching about creation. People-first contentA lot of what I was doing was, as Google now calls it, Satisfy Google rather than search users.
Other SEOs are now waking up to this idea: what users do on your website matters a lot. User behavior dramatically impacts your rankings in Google.
X/Twitter screenshot, July 2024Up until now, I've treated Google's guidance for creating useful content as a checklist of things to consider for improvement.
Is there an author biography? Check. Is there a descriptive headline? Check. Does it demonstrate experience? Is it informative? Check again.
In my first book on creating useful content, I provide several checklists like this one. can By working through these checklists you will see improvement.
In fact, I know this because people often contact me to tell me they have implemented changes based on the checklist and seen improvements.
However, it turns out that what Google provided wasn’t a list of criteria to analyze as a checklist.
I now realize that what Google was telling us was: Our system is built to reward things that people tend to find useful and trustworthy. If you want to know what that is, here are some ideas.
This is not a checklist, The types of things searchers tend to likeAlgorithms are built to value what searchers prefer.
Author biography is not a ranking factor, but in many fields, users like it when an author demonstrates their experience.
Core Web Vitals, which is a metric used to measure load times and other similar things, used to be a score that we all aspire to, but the reason we actually work to improve our Core Web Vitals score is because users tend to prefer pages that load quickly and don't jump around.
Google doesn’t have a checklist or scorecard for the quality of every page. know What exactly is the content and if it is of high quality.
As I said earlier, search is a complex, AI-driven system. Predict what searchers will find.
Below is a complete list of “ideas” that Google provides to help understand what searchers find useful.
In the past, I've taught people to look at these ideals one by one for inspiration on how to improve their site, and I still think there's a lot of value in doing this.
But now I realize I missed the point. I was thinking about useful content. Like SEO.
If you’re creating truly people-first content, you’re likely already following Google’s helpful content recommendations..
I understood it the wrong way.
By understanding your audience's needs and the questions they have, and creating content that answers those questions, you'll be creating the type of “human-centric content” that Google wants to reward.
People-first content is:
- Typically created by people with real-world experience on a topicStores that sell products to real customers are more likely to create helpful content advising people about those products. People who provide expert advice on a topic are more likely to have fresh content that understands the current needs of their audience.
- There are exceptions to this: Authority can sometimes beat experience, as you can see with the high rankings on websites like Forbes. [BBQ reviews]In this case, it seems that Forbes is considered a trusted place by users as a general authority on journalism. It has enough EEAT to be considered a trustworthy answer to this query. And as long as searchers are happy, it will continue to rank higher. (However, I think this will change as we learn how to create truly useful content, and we should see more truly useful content recommended by topic experts.)
- Content that provides real value to searchers.
- Written clearly, concisely and in an easy-to-understand way.
- Original and insightful.
But how does Google determine this?
In the next section, we’ll discuss something that was largely unknown to SEOs until recently: the extent to which Google uses user engagement signals.
It turns out that Google knows what's useful to people because signals from every interaction that happens during a search are fed back into its machine learning systems with one goal in mind: for the systems to learn how to work together most effectively and serve up the information they think will be most useful to the searcher.
Note
[1] Creating Helpful Content. Marie Haynes. 2023. https://mariehaynes.com/product/creating-helpful-content-workbook/
To read the book in its entirety, SEJ readers can purchase Marie's book, workbook, and course bundle at a 20% discount. The discount will be applied automatically when you click the following link:
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