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This excerpt is from SEO in the Age of Gemini by Marie Haynes ©2024 and reproduced with permission from Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.

Much of the SEO advice you’ll see online today is due to the shared wisdom of the community learned about Search in the days before Google actively used AI.

So much of what many of us do as SEOs and treat as standard practice is based on a search engine that is a list of heuristics – handwritten rules programmed by humans. So much has changed.

For example, let’s say you’re tasked with creating a new article for the website you’re working on.

You’ll probably start with keyword research because we know that in order to appear relevant to the search engine, you need to write content that covers the entire topic and uses keywords that are semantically related to your topic.

So much of the content we have on the web today is born out of a process that looks like this:

• Do keyword research to see what your competitors have written.
• Create content that is similar, but maybe a little better or more comprehensive than theirs.
• Do some keyword research to see what other people have covered but you haven’t included.
• Create content that covers these things as well.
• Do people also want to research to find related topics to cover so we can write content that looks even more relevant and comprehensive to search engines.
• Create more content to answer these questions, even though Google already has content to answer them.

Nothing in this process keeps us from creating content that is truly original, insightful, and significantly more useful than what exists online.

Yet that’s what Google wants to reward!

An SEO agency often spends many hours each month improving a site’s technical SEO, improving its internal link structure, or perhaps getting external links and mentions. These are all things that can potentially help a web page look better to a search engine.

They’re not bad things to do, and some of them have the potential to help the site improve. But again, these things are unlikely to make the content of a single page significantly more useful to searcherswhich again is what Google wants to reward.

I want to be clear here. I’m not saying technical SEO is dead.

There are benefits to be had from having a technically sound, fast site that search engines can easily navigate and understand, especially if you have a large site.

Schema can still work wonders when it comes to helping Google understand your business and its EEAT, especially a new one. There are some verticals where technical improvements will give you enough of an advantage to improve the rankings to some extent.

There is one thing that makes the content more useful.

Are you ready for this deep, insightful secret?

Here it is…

The secret to having content that Google is likely to find more useful than others is to have content that users find useful.

A change in the mindset of SEO professionals is needed

For over a decade now, my main source of income has come from advising businesses on how to improve their search presence.

I looked at every word published by Google that talked about what they wanted to reward and created pages and pages of checklists, training documents and tips.

I had one goal: Help people understand what Google rewards and help them achieve that result.

Do you see the paradox hidden in this statement? The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it gets!

I didn’t realize this all the time I preached about creation People-first contentas Google now calls it, a lot of what I was doing was much more geared towards satisfying Google rather than searchers.

Other SEO specialists are also adopting this way of thinking now. What users do on our websites is extremely important. User actions dramatically shape Google rankings.

I’ve historically treated Google’s guidelines for creating useful content as a list of things we could improve.

Have an author bio? Check it out. A good descriptive title? Check it out. Demonstrating experience? Information gain? One more check.

My first book on creating useful content walks you through multiple checklists like this one. You i can see improvement by working with these checklists.

I actually know this because usually people will contact me to tell me that they have made changes based on the checklists and are seeing improvements.

But it turns out that what Google gave us was not a list of criteria to be analyzed like a checklist!

Now I understand that what Google was telling us was: Our systems are designed to reward the kinds of things that people tend to find useful and trustworthy. And if you want to know what that is, here are some ideas.

This is not a checklist, but rather a list of types of things that searchers generally like. The algorithm is designed to reward what searchers like.

Author bios aren’t a ranking factor, but in many verticals, showcasing your authors’ expertise is something users like.

Key network metrics, metrics used to measure load times and things like that used to be an outcome we were trying to get…but actually the reason we’re working on improving the key metrics for network vitality is, that users tend to like pages that load quickly and don’t bounce.

It’s not like Google has a checklist or scorecard when it comes to the quality of each page. Google doesn’t i know exactly what your content is or if it is of high quality.

As we discussed earlier, search is a complex AI-driven system trying to predict what searchers will find useful.

Here’s the full list of “ideas” that Google gives us to help us understand what searchers might find useful:

I’ve taught in the past to look at these ideals one by one for inspiration on how you can improve your site. I still think there is a lot of use in it.

But now I realize that I missed the main point. I was thinking of useful content such as SEO.

If you’re truly creating human-centric content, you’ll already be in line with Google’s recommendations for useful content.

I had it the wrong way.

If you know what your audience’s needs are, and you know the questions they have, and you create content that answers those questions, you’re on your way to creating the type of people-first content that Google wants to reward.

People First Content is:

• It is usually created by people with real-world experience in a given topic. A store that sells a product to real customers is more likely to create useful content advising people about that product. A person who advises professionally on a given topic is more likely to have fresh content that understands the current needs of that audience.
• There is an exception to this: Sometimes authority can trump experience. We see this when a website like Forbes ranks for [BBQ reviews]. In this case, Forbes is probably seen as a place that consumers trust because of its overall authority in journalism. There is enough EEAT to be considered a reliable answer to this query. And as long as searchers indicate they are satisfied, it will continue to rank. (I think that will change, though, as we learn to create truly useful content. We should start seeing more truly useful content from featured subject matter experts.)
• Content that provides real value to searchers.
• Written clearly and concisely in a way that is easy to understand.
• Original and insightful.

But how does Google determine this?

In the next section, we’ll talk about something that until recently was unknown to SEO specialists – how much Google uses user engagement signals.

It turns out that Google knows what’s useful to people, because the signals from every single interaction that happens in search are fed back into the machine learning systems with one goal in mind – for the systems to learn how to best work together to create a representation of the information a searcher is most likely to find useful.

Notes

[1] Creating useful content. Marie Haynes. 2023 https://mariehaynes.com/product/creating-helpful-content-workbook/

To read the whole book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 20% discount on Marie’s book, workbook and course pack. The discount will be applied automatically by following these links:

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