This excerpt is from SEO in the Gemini Era by Marie Haynes ©2024 and reprinted with permission from Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.
Much of the SEO advice you’ll see online today comes from community-shared wisdom that was learned about search back when Google wasn’t actively using AI.
Much of what many of us do as SEOs and consider standard practice is based on a search engine that was 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 a search engine, you need to write content that covers a topic in depth and uses keywords that are semantically related to your topic.
Much of the content we have on the web today is the result of a process that goes something like this:
- Do some 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 a keyword search to see what other people have covered that you haven’t included.
- Create content that covers these topics as well.
- People also ask for research to find related questions to cover so we can write content that appears even more relevant and comprehensive to search engines.
- Create more content to answer these questions, even if Google already has content to answer them.
There is nothing in this process that incentivizes us to create content that is truly original, insightful, and considerably more useful than what exists online.
And yet, this is what Google wants to reward!
An SEO agency will often spend several hours a month improving a site’s technical SEO, improving internal link structure, or perhaps gaining external links and mentions. These are all things that can potentially help a web page look better in the eyes of a search engine.
These aren’t bad things to do, and some of them have the potential to help a site improve. But again, these things aren’t likely to be part of the content of a page. considerably more useful to researcherswhich is, once again, what Google wants to reward.
I want to be clear here. I’m not saying technical SEO is dead..
Having a technically sound and fast site that search engines can easily crawl and understand has its benefits, especially if you have a large site.
Schemas can still do wonders when it comes to helping Google understand your business and its EEAT, especially if it’s a new business. There are certain verticals where technical improvements will give you enough of an edge to improve your rankings to some extent.
There is one thing that makes content more useful.
Are you ready for this deep and insightful secret?
It’s here…
The secret to having content that Google rates as more useful than others is to have content that users find useful..
A change in mindset is necessary for SEOs
For over a decade, my primary source of income has come from advising businesses on how to improve their search engine presence.
I have carefully studied every word Google has published that talks about what they want to reward and have produced pages and pages of checklists, training documents and advice.
I had a goal: Help people understand what Google rewards and help them become that outcome.
Do you see the paradox in this statement? The more I think about it, the more laughable it is!
I didn’t realize all this time that while I was preaching on creation Human-centered contentas Google calls it now, a lot of what I was doing was much more geared towards satisfy Google as searchers.
Other SEOs have adopted this mentality as well. What users do on our websites matters immensely. User actions significantly shape Google rankings.
Screenshot from X/Twitter, July 2024I’ve always viewed Google’s advice on creating useful content as a checklist of things we could improve.
Got an author bio? That’s good. A descriptive title? That’s good. Proven experience? Information gain? Another check.
My first book on creating useful content walks you through several checklists like this one. You can see improvement by following these checklists.
In fact, I know this because people often contact me to tell me that they have implemented changes based on the checklists and seen improvements.
But it turns out that what Google gave us was not a list of criteria to analyze like a checklist!
I now realize 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 those are, here are some ideas.
This is not a checklist, but rather a list of types of things researchers tend to likeThe algorithm is designed to reward what searchers like.
An author bio isn’t a ranking factor, but in many verticals, demonstrating your authors’ experience is something users value.
Core Web Vitals, metrics used to measure load time and similar things, used to be a score we were aiming for… but really, the reason we’re working to improve Core Web Vitals scores is because users tend to like pages that load quickly and don’t jump around.
It’s not like Google has a checklist or scorecard when it comes to the quality of each page. Google doesn’t. know exactly what your content is or if it is high quality.
As we discussed earlier, search is a complex AI-driven system that is trying to predict what researchers will find useful.
Here’s the full list of “ideas” Google gives us to help us understand what searchers might find useful:
In the past, I’ve taught how to look at these ideals one by one to find inspiration on how to improve your site. I still think there’s a lot of value in doing so.
But now I realize I missed the point. I thought about some useful content like an SEO.
If you’re truly creating people-focused content, you’ll already be in line with Google’s helpful content recommendations..
I misunderstood him.
If you know your audience’s needs and the questions they have, and you create content that answers those questions, you’re well on your way to creating the kind of people-focused content Google wants to reward.
People First content is:
- Usually created by people with real-world experience on a topic. A store that sells a product to real customers is more likely to produce useful content to advise people on that product. A person who professionally advises on a topic is more likely to come up with fresh content that understands the current needs of that audience.
- There is one exception to this rule: Sometimes authority can trump experience. We see this when a website like Forbes ranks for (barbecue reviews). In this case, Forbes is likely seen as a site that users trust for its overall authority on journalism. It has a high enough EEAT to be considered a reliable answer to that query. And as long as people indicate satisfaction, it will continue to rank. (I think this will change as we learn how to create truly useful content. We should start to see more truly useful content recommended by subject matter experts.)
- Content that provides real added value to researchers.
- Written in a clear and concise manner, so as to be easy to understand.
- Original and insightful.
But how does Google determine this?
In the next section, we’ll talk about something that was until recently largely unknown to SEOs: 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 in search are fed back to machine learning systems with one goal in mind: for the systems to learn how to work better together to present the searcher with the information they’re most likely to find useful.
Remarks
(1) Creating useful content. Marie Haynes. 2023. https://mariehaynes.com/product/creating-helpful-content-workbook/
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