So What? What’s Working for SEO in 2022

Well, hey friends, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John, who I can now hold up because they're above me this week. Um this week we're talking about what's working in SEO for 2022. Um we'll be focusing specifically on uh Search Console.

Uh because uh Tada, we just launched a new Search Console course, which you can find at TrustInsights.ai slash search Search Console, um, where we walk through all the different features uh that are available in Search Console, but also how to start interpreting the data that lives within Search Console for even better data-driven SEO in 2022. So Chris, where do you want to start today? Um is how Search works today and what's changing this year, because I think there's some important things to discuss there. Some of the advanced features of Search Console that actually are not in the course because they're like really advanced and require you to be able to code, uh, which we did not want to throw into uh the the course. And then talk about some of the action steps that need you you need to take with the data, and I figured we'll use some of our data.

So I want to start with one of the challenges that uh is pervasive in SEO is that people don't update their knowledge, and as a result, they're stuck with you know ideas and concepts and things that are pretty outdated and are not part of necessarily what causes search results these days. So one of the most important actionable, easy things to do for everybody is to actually read Google's blog, right? And Google is fairly transparent, not totally, but fairly transparent at a very high level, you know, sort of a non-technical person's level about what goes into search. So when they talk about how search works and tuning it and how they make it happen, uh they talk about four big things. They uh launching new uh search experiments.

They they do you know a few thousand of these a year. Uh they do live experiments, 17,000 live experiences just showing you know A-B testing. Does a user's behavior change for the better with some of these A-B tests that they run with live traffic, and the big one 383,000 search quality tests. What these are is there's this whole group of human beings who are paid by Google to rate and review web pages. They go to a page and with a gigantic document called the search quality evaluation guidelines, which Google publishes, it's it's publicly available.

Um, they ask people to rate pages. Now, one of the challenges with this document is that people don't uh people who are not necessarily like super technical don't understand the purpose of it. This is not human beings are not spot checking Google uh Google's algorithms, right? They're they're they're not there's no part of what you see in Google search that has been curated by a human. What the search quality guidelines are is they are ways for Google to develop training data for their AI.

It said this is for this type of page, this is the outcome that we think it has. And then they these these paid humans go through and rate these all the the pages that they are told to rate, and then Google takes that information, and as they say here publicly, we then feed it to our AI and say recalibrate how you rank things based on this feedback. So where do these something people can sign up to do? Do they randomly are these employees? How do they find these people?

They're contractors. My understanding is they're basically contractors. They're you know, that are around the world, and yeah, it's just you get uh a web interface and you get you to rate things, you know. It's it actually seems to be one of those like tireless, you know, you know, uh thankless jobs. So it's interesting that you say, you know, people don't update their knowledge.

I mean, you could say that about a lot of different facets of marketing, but focusing specifically on search, you know, Chris, in the time that I've worked with you, which is you know eight or nine years now, um two things I've never heard you mention when we talk about search and SEO are things like SERP, SERP, and domain authority. I never hear you talk about those things, but when I go outside of Trust Insights and outside of my conversations with you and our clients, I see those terms everywhere. And that to me is an indication that there's a mismatch in the knowledge somewhere. There is. So search engine ranking position is a generic term for essentially where you rate where any given page ranks for a given query in Google.

So for example, if you type in trust insights, uh our our homepage should be in the number one position for that search term. If it's not, we've totally hosed our SE offer it. Um Domain authority is a term originally pioneered by Moz. Uh and is their internal effort to try to determine how important uh a given website domain, like trustinsights.ai is in the grand scheme of things on a zero to one hundred basis. Google has publicly said many, many times that third-party SEO metrics do not necessarily have any relation to actual search results.

Uh and they're very, very they express we want people to take uh with a grain of salt. You know, they just because a site has a high domain rating or domain score or domain authority, because every vendor has a different term, um, does not necessarily mean that getting links from those sites will be impactful. And one of the things I think is so interesting is when you look at and you read through the search quality uh evaluation guidelines, and then we think about the things that SEO folks um talk about. They're like dining at different restaurants. They're not even at the same table, they're different restaurants.

So uh for example, identifying the main content of a page. You know, uh main content is any part of a page that helps uh a page achieve its purpose. It can be text, images, videos, page features, or it can be user generated content, videos, reviews, articles, and stuff like that. And they give obviously you know examples of main content, supplementary content, stuff like that. And this is Google's attempt to essentially understand the structure of a web page.

So the takeaway for us as content creators is make sure it's clear what the main content is, and it's uh you know, it's easy to read for a human being. What's not on here that we hear people talking about all the time, you know, headings and bold text and you know, all these these formatting things, which are incidental. They used to be important. They used to be, you know, your H1 tag and your H2 tags on a page used to be important because that was how Google, you know, did very very early on, did stuff like keyword matching. That hasn't been the case in more than a decade.

What those features do, like heading tags and stuff, is provide sort of a structural layout to the page, and then provide the guidance that a human being who's rating that page would say, Oh, I understand what this page is about, right? You go to one of our blog posts, the blog post titles at the top of the page, and a human being would say, Okay, it's clear where the main content is. And so uh, if you were rating this page as a as a quality ratings guideline, uh quality reader, you'd say, okay, I you know, this page is easy to read. Um if the on the other hand, the page is filled with ads and pop-ups and you know, punch the monkey and stuff, um, it becomes pretty clear. You're like, uh I don't even know what the content is on this page.

And so a human being who's building the training data for Google would rate that no, it's this this page is terrible. Okay. So now that you have completely scrambled my brain with what Google defines as search, what do we as regular marketers need to do to get high search rankings and good quality content out there? Where do we start with our planning? So that's a really interesting question.

Where you start with your planning actually would be two things. First, I know it's not the most compelling reading, so get your beverage of choice out, you know, caffeine or whatever, um, and read all 100 some odd pages of the search quality rating guidelines. Yes, you think every company who's trying to do content marketing needs to read this? Ever I would say every individual professional who has SEO responsibility should read this document through at least once because Google is very, very clear, and including things like what you're gonna get dinged for, right? Um the document itself, you can divide up into into two sort of dimensions the quality of the page and the needs met.

Like this, if you were to do everything on a two by two matrix, um, does a page have the appropriate indicators that show that it is high quality, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, satisfying amount of content, things like that. That's one dimension on this on our two by two consultants matrix, right? The second is does the page meet users' needs, right? Um, so given a search term's intent, does that page fulfill that need? So, like you can have, and this is a real issue with SEO.

One of the things you know, the things with a lot of people sort of looking at studies very superficially to say, oh, well, pages have 3,000 words of content minimum for pillar pillar content, right? You'll hear that in in various SEO blogs. And this is how you get to things like, hey, I want the damn recipe. I don't care if it was your grandmother's dog that I hiked across the mountains, you know, five generations ago. Just tell me how much you know tartar sauce goes in this recipe.

That's an example where the bulk of the content, even though it's high quality, is in opposition to the meeting the needs of the user. The user wants show me how to make this recipe. And so, yes, everyone who is in SEO who performs an SEO or content marketing role should read this and understand that these two factors, page quality needs met, sometimes can be antagonistic. Sometimes they're butting heads. All right, John, I need the uh cliffs notes version on my desk ASAP tomorrow.

That's it. Eat that's all you need to know. You've got to have the EAT. Expertise, authoritative, and trustworthy. If you can do that, you're at least on the right path.

So that's part one of the answer to your question, Katie. Part two is a little trickier. Um you have to do an assessment of where you are right now, where your content is right now from Google's perspective. And this is why Search Console is so important, because you have all these other SEO tools, and they're great. Don't get me wrong.

Tools like Hrefs and Moz and Spyfu and SEMrush, all these tools are terrific tools, but they're not Google. They don't have access to Google's data. And only Google will tell you what Google sees in substantial detail. So a couple things Google has done recently that have made me as a data nerd very happy is they give you the ability now to programmatically submit pages to Search Console to say, hey, Google, look at this page. Make sure that you you've got this page in your index.

And what's called the URL inspection API, which is you give Google a list of pages and it tells you in a programmatic list, hey, here's the status of these pages as I see them. Now you could see this in regular Search Console. And if you take the course, you can see it, you know, we walk through that section in the course. But if you want to do it programmatically and start merging data together, you've got to do through the API. So let me show you an example.

You know, when I think about the third-party SEO tools, I think about it in terms of you're really trying to understand the landscape and the competitors around you. And that's, you know, that is valuable data that you need. But then Search Console is really you yourself and that self-reflection. So you need both. You need both sets of tools.

You absolutely need both. And if in fact, if you watch this week's episode of In Ear Insights, we talk about sort of the gap between uh third-party tools and Google. So it's worth checking out. So the first uh place that I will go, uh let's see, am I on the right section here? Nope, that's the topic modeling software.

Um Google Analytics 4. So if you're not using Google Analytics 4, uh now would be the time to start. And in particular in Google Analytics 4, I am looking these days. Uh I'm pulling data from the Google Analytics 4 data API, which is their brand new uh uh data API, and looking at two things. I'm looking at the total number of sessions that any given page has, and then the to the number of search sessions, you know, Google organic search sessions that a page has, and just doing some basic math on it to say, you know, out of the total number of sessions, what percentage of them are search sessions?

Let me pull up uh an Excel version, it's a little bit not much, but a little bit easier to see. Um here's all the pages on the Trust Insights website. We're gonna just pay attention to the right hand side of the page here with that lovely rainbow. And you can see sorted by uh page traffic, you know, some pages, like for example, um this this one here, the home page, 14% of the traffic type page is from search. This one here, the TikTok page.

This is interesting, 351 sessions in the last uh 30 days, but only one of which is from search. So it has a point three percent. So that to me tells me that page, there might be an issue there. Right. Now I I actually know what's causing that.

Uh what's causing that is that we promoted that very heavily in email, and of course, email is not search. Uh but if we hadn't been, that would be a page to go, huh? What's going on there? So you want to start with Google Analytics 4 to figure out all the pages that are on your website and the amount of traffic that they get and the amount of search traffic that they get. There used to be a field in Google Analytics 3 called s organic page searches that is gone in GA4.

Instead, if you have connected Search Console to your GA4 instance, those metrics will now appear in the data API. It takes a while though for it to get set up. So make sure you do that sooner rather than later. Go watch the Search Console course to see how to do that. I think it's like lesson 10.

And if you if you missed uh last week's episode, last week's live stream episode on setting up Google Analytics 4, you can watch that on our YouTube channel, trustinsights.ai slash YouTube, where Chris and John walked through setting up John's website for Google Analytics 4. And a lot of what Chris is talking about now was covered in that episode. So you can definitely go back and rewatch that at your at on your own time. Yep. So once we've got our our traffic, we can get a sense of okay how much of you know any given page on the site overall uh traffic is coming from search.

And in this case, you know, not a substantial amount. Most of the trust insights pages actually don't have a ton of search traffic to them. They get the traffic from other sources, which we've talked about in the past with attribution analysis. So that's page one part one. But what's important here is that we get the URLs that Google Analytics 4 sees and we export them into Search Console's inspection API.

So what does the inspection API do? The Google Analytics uh the Google Search Console inspection API says, given any pages URL, tell me how Google thinks about that page. So for example, the our newsletter page, Google says it passes status checks, right? It is it is it is submitted to the you to Google and it has been indexed. Um it is allowed to be seen by Google, it is allowed to be indexed by Google.

Uh it tells you when Google last stopped by, it tells you Google was able to successfully uh crawl that page. It tells you what Google thinks the URL is, the canonical URL, which by the way, if you're doing things like guest blog posts, you want to make sure that you're doing that properly. It tells you what we've set it as, and that tells you how Google has crawling that page. So Google is, if you for example, on the Trust Insights website, Google sees our entire site through its mobile first crawler. So it's looking at our entire website as as if it was on a mobile device.

So you'll see either desktop or mobile here. If Google is crawling your site as mobile and you are not optimizing for mobile devices and you're not checking it, you're gonna have a bad time. Right. So that's an important uh simple takeaway. But now here's where we start getting into some interesting stuff.

There are pages in here that's called index but not submitted in the site map, right? Uh, one of which here, this is that new TikTok paper. That tells me as a website owner, I better go check my site map software that generates sitemaps on if this page is not showing up in the site maps. Google still found it. Search Console has found it uh and is reporting on it, but it's saying, hey, I didn't see it in your site map.

And so I'm like, wonder why. Um so I so my immediate takeaway now is to go back into the Trust Insights website and say, what's going on there? Other status things you'll see, you'll see index not in site map uh and so on and forth. You'll see alternative with a page with a proper canonical tag. So this one is instead of pass is called a neutral.

We have a guest blog post from the marketing AI Institute, and it is correctly canonically tagged. So Google is saying, Hey, when I read this blog post on your site, any links to it, any credit um that you know, from a ranking perspective should go to the marketing AI Institute. So don't give it to Trust Insights. Um I'm glad I set those up correctly. I was nervous about those.

Thank goodness. Good job. Uh yay. But also give this some thought now. We're saying we're take we have content on our website that we're saying belongs to marketing AI Institute, which it does.

Um, and then any search benefit that you know comes that that's going to that page on our site is being transferred to the marketing AI institute. This is one of the reasons why you have to be very judicious with guest blogging, right? Particularly when you're putting other people's content on your site. If it's if it's on there and it's set up properly, you're in effect giving away some of your credit to that partner website. So be sure that you're not um accepting blog posts that could potentially be undermining your own keyword rankings, right?

If you've got a guest post that happens to have the same focus keywords and topics as a piece of content on your site that's yours, and it ranks better, you're basically boosting somebody else's website. I think fortunately, you know, and so I think that that makes a lot of sense in this particular example. You know, we are not directly competing with our friends and partners over at the marketing AI Institute. A lot of what we write and what they write is complementary and fills in gaps that we each respectively don't have. And so it was a strategic decision that we came to that we could give them that credit for search because it was not topics that we would necessarily be covering ourselves and vice versa.

And so that's how we came to that decision. But for other guest posts, you're absolutely right. That's that's where I would be a bit more hesitant to give away that search traffic. Exactly. Now here's a status on line two eleven.

Crawled, not currently indexed. Google has found the page, but it's not in Google's index. And that's an older episode, an older issue of our newsletter. This one is a problem. This one, uh something's gone wrong in Google being able to even process a page.

So if you recall from previous episodes, there's three steps to Google processing a page for search rankings. Crawl, index, rank. Crawl means Google bot comes by and and vacuums up all the content, slices the dice, it puts in a standard machine format. It then goes into the indexing engine where Google takes that content, puts it into its index, like putting it in the like the index of a book or a card catalog in a library, so that it can be found. It can start showing up in search.

And then rank is when Google says, okay, now when somebody types in relevant terms in search for what this page is about, I will show it um higher or lower in the search results. Those three steps are different. So this is saying step one is done. Google's crawled it, but it's not available to be seen in search. It's not indexed.

So my next step here would be to inspect any of the pages that have programmatically in this list that have this status and go, what's going on? Why did Google not index this page? And I would probably the easiest thing to do would be to use the URL inspector built into Search Console, which by the way is I think lesson like 10 or 11 in the in the course on how to interpret those results. Like it did I accidentally knock this page out and say like don't index it, right? In this case, no, because you can see it's indexing allowed.

So that field says it's allowed. So something's gone wrong in our website that I need to go figure out why is this page misbehaving. And obviously there are there are other ones in here. And there are actually a decent number of pages that are showing up, you know, indexed, not submitted in sitemap, whatever. So again, those are things that are I need to check our CMS software for.

But so this is part two to your question, Katie. Pis we figure out what does Google want. So search quality rating guidelines. Part two is what do we have and the diagnostics on it to say how do we fix the things that we already have? And then the next step is to say, okay, based on what we know about the search quality rating guidelines and what we know is performing for our content, what things can we do to bulk that up?

So what I one of the things I do is I take both of these tables and bond them together so I can see okay, what is the status? Uh here let's go the mega file. What is the status of a page? And then is there a relationship between the page's status and the amount of search traffic it gets? For our site, the answer is there isn't really one.

It's you know, pages do well regardless of whether they're in the site map or not. So we can rule out sitemaps as being like critical to SEO. That said, from a best practices perspective, we still should be uh making sure that our blog posts and stuff are correctly in our sitemap. But now our what's incumbent upon us next is to go through and start making those repairs, figuring out what's going on that there are pages that are showing up that are not being indexed, because that's that's an that's low-hanging fruit, like fixing that first. So this might be uh I don't feel like it's a random question, but um when you guys did the episode last week when you moved John's website from Google Analytics 3 to Google Analytics 4.

I know that one of the things that is a best practice is to connect all of the different Google marketing platform systems together. So do you have to resubmit a site map when you move or when you set up Google Analytics 4 if you already have Google Analytics 3 set up? It does that have any does one have anything to do with the other? No, they're totally different systems. Site maps are part of Search Console exclusively.

Um what is useful though is looking at this data to say, okay, we know what's in our site map. Does Google see it all? Like one of the the next steps to to look at in here would be are there pages that show up in Google Analytics that aren't seen at all in Search Console? You know, there could be there could very well be. In fact, I know there are some pages that are not in the sitemap list at all.

Anytime we do a network graph for an event, for example, I don't bother putting those URLs into a site map because they're fun, they're cute, but they don't have they don't satisfy strong user intent, right? If you stumbled across one of them in search results, you'd be like, what the heck am I looking at? Why you know? So to me, that's not an important thing to have in our sitemap. So there will be known gaps.

Other things could be though, indications that Google is not being able to can't simply can't crawl your website uh or parts of it because you've accidentally blocked parts of it out. It's misformed. We've had cases uh not too long ago actually, where we had a client who accidentally set an entire section of their website to uh no index to say Google, don't put this in the index, and then but much chaos ensued. How about all the landing page stuff and things like that, right? I mean, you normally have a bunch of pages that you don't want indexed because you don't want traffic just from the general public showing up at those you only want your campaigns driving to that.

So is that still normally just handled with this, you know, they're excluded at the site map level, and that's enough to keep them out of everything. Uh the best practice there would be to exclude them in the robots file, the robots.txt file. Say, don't include these landing pages. I I have a philosophical disagreement with that approach. Um if a landing page gets traffic that isn't from your your paid campaign, I don't see the problem.

Like hey, oh no, uh, people found their way to our landing page just to buy something from us quick, stop. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you know, you can argue that like if we paid 10 grand to get into this one thing, and now suddenly there's actually more traffic than attended the thing, but yeah, you know, who cares if they're all waving money that let them all in. And that's where good tagging makes all the difference. Because when you look at things like your landing pages and stuff in Google Analytics, you have your source in your medium and you'll have your ad campaign, uh, you'll have your first user source medium, you'll have your session source medium, and you'll have your conversion source medium.

That that these are all new in Google Analogs for. As a result, if you want to look at the effectiveness of a uh page in in GA4, you can say, I simply want to see it from those paid source mediums, right? And I can ignore the other stuff, but don't just say, you know, no, we don't want extra traffic to those to these valuable pages. Um, one thing that's very interesting and and somewhat challenging there is uh you have to set up Search Console to also be able to interpret your landing pages if you want to see them in Search Console. So uh again, this is something that's not necessarily covered in the course because there's a whole bunch of issues with the cross-domain stuff.

But if essentially, if you use a landing page surface, you need if you want to see that data in Search Console, it has to be on a domain that you own. So we could not, for example, right now, the Trust Insights Academy where the course lives, is is actually on thinkific.com. We don't own thinkific.com, so we can't put it in Search Console to have it indexed. We would need to, and I'm in the middle of doing this, um, moving our our subdomain, so it's academy.trust insights.ai into our think instance, then because we own the trust insights.ai domain, that can then go into Search Console, and then our course page can be seen as part of our site, and then these we can see is it being indexed, is it being crawled, and so on and so forth. And again, best practice, if you're using tag manager with GA4, you would then have you know put that tag manager container in your landing page tool or your courseware tool and stuff, and then be able to see that traffic there as well.

But then you have to remember to also put in the cross-domain stuff inside GA4 as well, which is in done the data streams. But you, as the user, don't have to worry about any of that. You can just go to this handy little URL here, and everything that Chris just mentioned, we handle on the back end. So you, the user, don't worry about any of that for being able to access this course. That's all our problem on our side.

Now, in terms of next steps, so you've done, you've read the search quality rating guidelines. You have looked at your site and you figured out what's working, what's not. Your next step has to be getting out that two by two matrix, right? Um of page quality and needs met and figuring out how do we create content that satisfies both. So when we think about needs met, um, you're talking about intent queries, right?

So Google tends to look at queries in sort of uh two types. There's informational queries, and then there's uh action queries. So informational query would be like the history of ranch dressing, which I was looking up this morning. It was actually invented by a plumber in Alaska of all things. Um then he he went and bought a ranch and then in California and we named it Hidden Valley Ranch.

Of course. Exactly. Um so that's an in that's a knowledge query, right? You want to learn all about ranch dressing. When you type in ranch dressing near me, you're now making a transition into a do query.

Like you're you're you're trying to figure out where can I get this stuff, where can I go buy this stuff? And in the needs met section of the search quality rating guidelines, you have that is that is a you know one of the the two axes. So you have page authority, page quality and then needs met. When you start building out your content plan, you have to figure out is a page lead is the intent of a page to fulfill a knowledge search or an action search. And a page may it can do both, but it's better, obviously, if you've you've structured it from uh a topic perspective to have a uh a fit towards leaning towards one or the other.

So John, to your point earlier about landing pages, right? Landing pages are 100% due, right? If you own a coffee shop, you know, you're you're gonna optimize a page for coffee shop near me, coffee shop in Framingham, coffee shop in Boston, stuff that clearly indicates that you got some intent in on that landing page. But on your blog, you might have like the history of coffee or the fact that you know Lloyd's of London was originally a coffee house in 1605, and you know, the one of the world's largest financial institutions sprang out of the fact that this guy ran a coffee shop near the harbor, and people would literally place bets as to whether a ship would make it home or not. Those two things are different, and you can see how the the knowledge query, history of coffee, probably should not be on the same page as how to find our coffee shop, because you're going there to find out the history of coffee, you may not want coffee right now.

On the other hand, if you're typing coffee shop near you know London or coffee shop near Whitehall, like yeah, you you pretty much want coffee. So you've got to design these pages with sort of a meta intent. What is this page supposed to do? So now that I 100% need and want a cup of coffee, um, before we get too far down the road, we were just talking about indexing. And Chris, we have a question uh from Jesse.

So uh he says, I I heard recently the number of pages on your site will dilute your domain authority, and then he's talking about how his company website is pretty old. Should those be removed from the index? So domain authority, as as we talked about earlier, doesn't exist in Google's land. It it is is a constructed third party metric. Um the question you have to ask with those pages is exactly what we were showing in the spreadsheet from both Search Console and from Google Analytics 4.

If those pages don't get traffic and they're old and they don't serve either a knowledge query or a an action query, then yeah, it's probably safe to say, okay, let's let's retire those pages, make sure you redirect them, you know, to them to someplace that that is more fits that intent. But it comes down to the user experience. One of the challenges that again, SEO folks who have not kept up to date don't understand, is that as Google pivots to more and more complex machine learning models behind the scenes, it starts to look and think more like a human being, right? So a lot of things like traditional metrics like domain authority and and page rank and stuff that you still see in you know in legacy SEO tools, they don't matter. And they don't not only do they not matter, they're not predictive of performance.

Because we're looking again at at more complex things. Google is rolling out this year, in fact, we just talked about this on an episode of Marketing Over Coffee, um, the ability to return images as you know, generated images as part of search results on mobile. How does it know how to do that? They're rolling out their multitask unified model, which is their their expanded language model that we started with BERT three years ago. But now, because Google understands what's in a photo or what's in a video or what's in an audio podcast, if it knows that you've got a relevant query, it's gonna bring back any content of in any format that it thinks is the best match.

So to Jesse's question, if those old pages aren't relevant and don't satisfy a user intent, then yeah, either revamp them so that they're you you're clear about what intent they serve or retire them. Um and the other question, and this might be the direction this conversation is going. So I know we're starting to get into the conversation about Search Console. Uh so Brian wanted to know have you seen sites with poor core web vitals performance take a hit on organic traffic? Now I know the answer to this question.

The answer is yes. Um and the reason for that, so you have things like largest contentful paint, which is basically the size of your images and how long it takes for the page to render. Uh, Google will say, Hey, your page is taking too long for to show everything. So I'm not gonna bother showing it very high because it's gonna be a poor user experience for the people who are clicking on it. So you go fix that stuff first, and then we can come back to showing your stuff again.

The what we've seen so far, particularly for some of our clients, is that um core web vitals, if you think about it, really are on the needs met side of that two by two matrix, right? So um Google pretty has said and it it's on page 70 in the in in the rating guidelines that mobile friendliness and the core Web Vitals are part of needs met, right? So you you've satisfied the need of the user. Which means that if you have content that's largely informational, where page quality matters more, it'll it's gonna take slightly less of a hit. But yeah, Core Web Vitals, um, given two pages of equal quality, the page with the better needs met score is gonna do better in terms of performance.

So uh really good example of this. One of our customers had this uh location finder thing uh on their website, and theirs was like code from 15 years ago, super clunky, you know, very messy, hard to parse, didn't work on mobile. And a competitor had a modern HTML5, you know, uh interactive web application, and the competitor just beats the crap out of them every single month because the the information quality is the same, but the needs met on the other side is so the gap is so huge that we've we've actually advised this client throw that thing out and start over because it's uh you you you're just you're just providing people a terrible experience. And again, as when you think about it, Google has a tremendous amount of insight into what happens on mobile devices thanks to the Android operating system, right? And the and the mobile Chrome browser.

Um Chrome is the largest mobile browser on uh on most devices. Uh and as a result, Google gets all that telemetry back because you know that good Chrome talks back to Google. Uh hello privacy. Um of course it can say, okay, these sites, these kind of sites could just create a bad experience. John, is your website a mobile first, or is it a responsive website, or is it just for desktop?

Yeah, no, we have a responsive WordPress template. So that's one of the cool things with WordPress is you can just pick a template that's got responsive built-in. And now you definitely have to test the heck out of it. You know, you some responsive templates are far better than others. Um but yeah, that's definitely some grunt work that you've got to do.

And um, yeah, it's funny, we had seen some stats that desktop traffic is actually up, but still it's you know the major in fact the majority of traffic now is mobile. You know, it it used to be the other way that you didn't have to make it the number one priority. But yeah, it's pretty much mobile first. And the great thing with that is if you get mobile straight, then you know it will definitely at least work on desktop. It may not look as good as it can look, but doing it the other way around is not true.

You know, if it looks great on desktop, it can really be messed up on mobile. Been there, done that. I don't miss those design meetings. Everybody has a tale of horror from website design and rollout that's just when mobile first was a new thing. Some marketing badge of honor.

So, Chris, where do we go from here? So we know um how at a at a high level, we know how Google search works. We know what on our website is happening in terms of pages. Now what do we do? So now you take out your content plan, right?

You have your topics and your lists of keywords. Now you start generating content um that fits those two axes, page quality and needs met. And you look at that, you review those those search quality rating guidelines and say, okay, what are the things that I'm doing uh on my website? And are those things uh going to get would they be rated high quality or low quality? Um does what is the user experience like on my site?

When we talk about um content structure, content structure is really important, not from a uh a search indexing perspective, but from a user experience perspective. A knowledge query, the advice we always give to people is satisfy the the query's intent plus the next two intents. So if I'm searching for history of ranch dressing, what am I also likely to be searching for? Probably the ingredients of ranch dressing, right? Um, probably uh you know applications for ranch dressing.

And as a result, if I put together a page about this, I would want to have that those two or three intents in my knowledge page. On the other hand, if I have a do query, ranch dressing near me, I want to have a a brief bit of of sort of what the thing is, maybe some links to my knowledge query content, and then immediately fulfill the intent. Here's how to buy you know the trust insights branded uh uh ranch dressing, which by the way, we we have a recipe for we'll put it up on our blog maybe one of these days. Um the secret celery, the celery, like it's it's uh if you want that like good ranch flavor, a little bit of celery in there. Um anyway, so you have you have your content mapping of knowledge and and action queries, break out all of your top keywords and concepts and for topics into uh the pairs so that you have a knowledge pay uh knowledge page and you have an intent page uh and and keep them clear that you want uh this page to be, you know, what it's what's was designed intent is one of the things we've had an issue with again with with several clients, is they have pages that are a hot mess mishmash of both, and it's and as a result you can't tell what the user is supposed to do, right?

It's not clear what is what is the next intent here. Like if you have a blog, most blog content should be knowledge content, right? If you have a landing page, most landing pages should be um uh action intent. Um there are some really good tools that will help you uh with this. Uh Katie, one of your favorites is answer the public, uh, taking a search and having all the questions that people have about that, you know, sort of dividing up and putting it out uh into these things, but you want that so that you're fulfilling both intents and that people are being directed to those things.

And when you're looking at your focus keywords and stuff, if you're using tools like rank math or Yoast or whatever in your in your CMS, make sure that you've documented with good governance, hey, this is what this page is, this is a knowledge page. And then that way when you know the regional sales manager says, hey, this blog post isn't a sales page. Well, no kidding, it's not a sales page, it's a knowledge page. Dummy, go back to your auto shop. We've kind of been all over the map today, but I feel like to sort of bring it all back, you know, to where we were originally starting with some of the planning, you know, this is where you then bring in the data from Search Console and the data from your third-party SEO tools.

So as you're building that key list, you kind of have two sets of keywords. You have what people, what are people are searching for that brings them to your site. So those are the things that people care about that they said, you know what, this person can answer my question. And then you have what your competitors are doing so that you can then you know stay competitive within that landscape. And this was something that we covered in the newsletter.

And I gave the example of I think it was you know, chocolate desserts versus fruit-based desserts. If you're being found for fruit-based desserts, but you keep trying to compete for chocolate desserts, then you're missing the intent of the people coming to your website. I was also very hungry when I wrote that post. Um and now that you've been talking about coffee. Now I want dessert and coffee.

So this has been a productive live stream for sure. Absolutely. And the last thing I will suggest is that we know the multitask unified model is being rolled out. Um we don't know exact timelines. Google has said it's it's this year.

Um we know it is a big deal because it changes how Google responds to queries. We know that it can draw upon many, many different kinds of media. So in if you are publishing content and you're not creating audio and video and images and text and maybe even interactives, you need to find the bandwidth and the budget to start doing that. You know, one of the things we do at Trust Insights is we do stuff like live streams. We record our podcast, our podcast is recorded as a as a record-only live stream because we want the video, we want to rip out the audio and turn it to an audio podcast.

We take the transcript and turn it into text so that we have as many chances at bat as possible under the new multitask unified model. When when somebody searches for Hidden Valley Ranch SEO, hopefully this episode will show up. Um and we we stand to uh a chance. But if you don't have those extra types of media available, and a competitor does, all things being equal, your competitors probably going to get the nod before you do. So make sure that you are creating as much content as you can.

And of course, uh, if you have not gotten a chance to take it out, go go take the the Search Console course. Uh again, we covered the advanced stuff in today's episode, the coding stuff. So this should reassure you there's no coding at all of any kind in the in the Search Console course, but it will get you up to speed on all the basics and all the different tools. And there's a lot of tools in there. Um what I found interesting in going through building the course with you, Chris, was I was learning about all the different as you were just covering the different kinds of content.

I didn't realize that you could filter by those different kinds of audio images, all those different things. And that's all the information we cover in the course in terms of really utilizing your data to make your content planning that much richer and deeper. Exactly. So uh any uh any final thoughts? Be sure to talk to your grocer about getting trust insights dressings in your neighborhood and take the course.

And take the course. All right, thanks everyone. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it for more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today's episode, join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at trustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.