So What? Search Quality Ratings Guidelines

Well, hey everyone, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I'm Katie joined as always with by Chris and John. I'm struggling to speak today. So it should be interesting.

Um on today's episode, we are covering search quality ratings guidelines, which does not roll right off the tongue. Um we'll be talking about what Google considers to be quality content. Um, how to compare the Google search quality ratings guidelines to your own SEO uh strategy and uh what you should avoid doing in your content marketing. Um so now that I've gotten through all the tongue twisters, um where should we start? John, do you pay attention to things like uh search quality ratings guidelines when you're putting together uh content for marketing over coffee, or do you just kind of wing it?

Well, it's kind of like it's like religious instructions, like you're supposed to interpret them and follow them, you know, so you kind of keep them in mind as you do it. But it's always fascinating to me because it's really kind of like you know, people always talk about Google as this black box, and it is, but the box is actually cut in half, and there's the upstream box that nobody ever sees, and then there's the second box, which is these quality ratings guidelines, and they do actually show you kind of what goes on in there. And it's amazing to me that there's over 10,000 people that review these results, like humans that actually review and rate stuff and you know, make things happen. And so there's some stuff we can learn out of that. But yeah, I wish I could say that, like I have a checklist that I follow, but no, that's definitely not.

So Chris, I know you've read the entirety of the search quality ratings guidelines. Where should we start? Let's talk about how they're used. I think that's the best place to start because they are not ranking factors in and of themselves. Uh, one of the things that we were talking about this week in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group is what things constitute uh actual Google ranking factors and what things do not.

Uh the search quality rating guidelines themselves are not ranking factors. Uh they're they are in a way for Google to build data, but they do not play a final role in how Google decides how your your site rates. Um, if you are not a member of Analytics for Marketers, I recommend you pop on over because what we did this week was we actually put together uh based on search engine journals excellent uh 550 page book on uh ranking factors, a cheat sheet of the things that do and don't matter. Uh and the the search quality rating guidelines, the evaluated guidelines do not uh they are not ranking factors in themselves. So, what are these?

These are essentially QA tests. And so, what raters do, like John said, 16,000 people around the world uh load up web pages and then based on Google's uh guidebook, which is this is this is essentially the uh training manual for these 16,000 people, they go through and they rate different websites. They rate them on two dimensions um page quality and needs met. So, is the is the page a high quality page? And does it meet the needs of the searcher?

And what these folks are asked to do is first do a quick assessment of page quality, and then they're given a task, like, for example, find the contact information on the Trust Insights website. That'd be a task they'd be given. And then they have to rate that site based on the ease of which they can accomplish that task. So go ahead, Katie. Uh let me see if you answer my question before I ask it.

What Google does with this data is it takes this these ratings, and it is part of the training data that retrains the Google algorithm. So the Google algorithm is an unknown entity, a giant black box with several hundred inputs, of which some of these are these training scores. Um, and then the output is of course search rankings. Other inputs include things like you know, header tags on pages, alt text, page speed, core web vitals, number of inbound links, all those things are data that goes into Google's massive model, and what comes out is is hopefully useful content. And so following their search quality rating guidelines, uh in and of themselves would not necessarily change your rankings.

But because they contain the best practices that Google is looking for and teaching their AI models to uh learn from, there is a high likelihood that adhering to the guidelines will result in pleasing experiences that will mirror the data that Google uses in its algorithms and therefore help your site rank better. So, and I'm guessing that within this 500 plus page document, they go into detail, but do they some can we summarize like what defines quality? Like what is a good quality page versus a not good quality page? Because without that definition, I feel like it's very open to interpretation of what I consider good quality versus what you know John might consider good quality. And indeed, section three is all about page quality.

What constitutes uh quality? The there's a sliding scale, and you can see this on the screen here. For those who are listening, if you're just listening to the audio, there's a it's this nice little sliding scale, and this is actually part of the interface that uh Google uses for uh page ratings. And you you would select through pages um that based on these things, the purpose of the page, what is its intent, uh, the potential for the page to cause harm, uh, the topic of the page, and to it the topic is in the special category called your money or your life, which are high risk pages. So, for example, medical information is a a your money or your life page, and the the bar for quality is higher on those pages.

Um, does the page convey accurate information? So, for example, a page could look very authoritative about the uh supposed inherent harms of a COVID vaccine, but we know through literally billions of tests now that COVID vaccines are safe and safe and effective. And therefore, Google would say, okay, because the intent of the page, if it wasn't say a page opposing vaccines, the intent of the page is to cause harm by convincing people not to take vaccines, this page will be rated the lowest level of quality. And those decisions are made by the raiders, which is why there's so many of them, because you need to have many, many, many different people evaluating these pages based on Google's somewhat subjective guidelines. The four categories that they look at are effort, which is how much effort did it take to create this content, how original is it?

Um much skill does it take to create the content, and how accurate is the content? So when Google talks about quality of content, those are the four major buckets. How so let's say I'm a rater, how do I know what the level of effort is that someone took? Like, you know, so this is saying consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content. You know, uh the speed in which you know someone like me creates content versus someone like you, Chris, is very different, but the outcome could be the same thing, you know.

And so how do they determine? And I guess that's what you're saying is like it's subjective, uh, the level of effort for creating content. Like I know John puts a lot of work into each marketing over coffee episode, but someone else who, you know, just as an example, could have a similar type uh podcast and really not put that much effort into it at all. You know, how does some how does a rater know that they spent a lot of time creating satisfying content, which that in and of itself seems subjective? Uh part of it is Google has dozens and dozens and dozens of examples for every single one of these uh ratings.

So, for example, this page here, um, and we'll show this uh blow this up here. This one was rated as low con low quality content. Um, and the reason Google says this was rated low quality content, it does not achieve the main person. Well, it lacks accuracy and does not demonstrate expertise, experience, authority, or trustworthiness. Um information about energy sources and nuclear power could significantly impact global industries and society.

This is a your money or your life topic. The writing of this article is unprofessional, including many grammar and punctuation errors. The main content also appears to be paraphrased from a science article found on a different source, but with factual inaccuracies introduced throughout. The combination of low quality main content and the lack of EAT justify the lowest plus to low rating. So that's uh essentially that you know an explanation.

And part of your job as a quality rating guide, quality rater is to go through this exhaustive training to decide to learn what is and is not quality content. Well, and it sounds like they also have to be capable of doing research. You can't just look at it and go, oh, yeah, that sounds like what I understand it to be. So it's good quality. Like you actually have to demonstrate the correctness of the content.

Exactly. There's the well, not just the correctness of the content, but also um the even things like layouts. So this was rated low quality content. 40th birthday party food ideas. Um yeah, the design itself is pretty horrendous.

Um, but this one is dinged because of the sheer number of ads uh going through it. Uh so you can see here, uh, this page has uh and website have many characteristics of low quality. Close observation of those main content that contains mostly common information uh and poor writing quality writing just demonstrating a lack of effort. The content is broken up by large ads that significantly disrupt the user experience. So part of learning how to use the guidelines is in fact going through the examples and going, okay, well, why did this, you know, why was this rated?

This is another one that was rated uh low quality. Um at first glance, like you know, the design's a little on the old side, but it looks okay-ish. But then when we go to the rating, we see there's a large amount of filler or meaningless content and a complete lack of effort in editing. Uh, in addition, the main content contains only common known information, no expertise or firsthand experience created by the content author. So those that's how Google helps people decide what constitutes quality.

And you've seen mentioned in here a few things. Um, one thing that has comes up over and over again is this thing called uh expertise, authority, trust authoritative and trustworthiness. And these categories are the distinguishing factors. You've heard people refer to them as eat in the past, EAT. Um, in this most recent version, Google has kind of rearranged things.

So they say experiences, considering how much the content creator's personal experience or firsthand experience informs the content, how much credentialed experience do they bring to the topic? Um, and how authoritative is it in terms of is it a reliable source uh for the information? Um, for example, uh, if you were a um you're writing a page on COVID vaccines, uh, if you worked for the National Institute of Health, that would be uh, you know, an authoritative source. Uh, if you worked for Chris's blog that he runs out of his basement, not as authoritative. What do you think about it?

Am I right in the understanding of so the idea with this then is it is still all subjective, but they put together a ton of examples. And the hope is that after somebody has scored five or six hundred pages, they're kind of going to be in line with the rest of the group of reviewers, and people will be scoring stuff within a couple points because they all have done enough work and have this picture in their mind of what the stuff should be. There's that, and then there's also remember this is only a portion of the training data. The other portion of the training data comes from the users themselves. When you and I are on the search engine, we click on a result, we go to that page and we just come back two seconds later, like nope, that wasn't it.

Um that behavioral data uh tells Google, okay, this was this was not a good mismatch. If there are, you know, one of the things that Google has uh as a substantial advantage over many other search engines is they have millions and millions of websites that voluntarily put Google Analytics on their sites. And so once that user arrives on the site, Google can watch that user and say, okay, are they you know are they clicking? Are they scrolling? Are they going, you know, how far into the site do they go?

How you know we all love that scroll depth uh measure in Google Analytics that tells us how much of their content got read. Well, we're not the only ones who use that information. Google uses that as well to determine, like when you click to a search result and you read that first paragraph and you're like, I'm out. Right? Your scroll depth is 10 or 20 percent, and Google understands the content did not fulfill your needs.

Interesting. Um, does it say in here for those who are interested, how to become a reader? No, but it's uh uh an open position. I believe you can find on Google's employment site. Okay.

Just I wanted to throw that out there for anyone who, you know, maybe they're in between things or looking to pick up, you know, a second job or something. It sounds like it's time intensive, but there are people who enjoy this kind of work. Like I would enjoy this kind of work if I was looking. And so I just want to make sure that people also know how to get involved if they're interested. I will put a big asterisk on that.

Um all of these types of positions um inherently expose you to extremely harmful content. So if you are if you are someone who is has certain uh past experiences or things, um, you may find that these jobs are extremely taxing. Totally understood. And obviously, like you have to use your own judgment for before you sign up for anything, but you know, there are people who would be interested in making sure that websites are following these guidelines, for example, so you can sort of see where it's a greater good kind of a thing. Exactly.

So one of the things that um is like I said, is is very useful in here is uh understanding how Google makes a lot of these differentiations. So for example, in these your money or your life topics, um, there's a difference between experience and expertise, right? Someone who is sharing their first hand experience of something, that's valuable. But if the information uh in Google's judgment requires more expertise than experience, a page that is high in experience but low in expertise will get rated lower than a page that has the expert expertise and not necessarily experience. So they the example they cite here, which is a really good one, filling out tax forms.

You know, a humorous video from a non-expert content creator about the frustration of doing taxes would be valuable sharing of life experience, right? As opposed to uh something information best left to experts, instructions on how to fill out the tax forms, because uh as many of us know, filling out tax forms does require uh all sorts of arcane knowledge about tax code to do it uh an optimal outcome. The other thing that stands out, and this is part of the the guidelines is understanding the website. Google is very particular about making sure that there is adequate contact information available on a website. And again, the bar is higher.

If you are your site is classified as a your money or your life site, you have to have more contact information than say uh my personal blog. So, and I'm guessing that in here, let's see, they define the your money or your life. Um so, for example, trust insights, probably not uh your money or your life kind of website. Right. So your money or your life topics, so the topic itself is harmful or dangerous, um, or the topic is har could cause harm if the content is not accurate or trustworthy.

So health or safety, financial security, society, and other. Now, here's the thing: Google doesn't present a clear list, right? They do say here's you know, here are the the various different uh examples, but there isn't a clear list, and it is not site-wide, it is topic related. So if on the Trust Insights website, we put up a topic about, which we have actually, um, we have a whole uh page that we put up annually about hate crimes against LGBTQ folks that we put up uh before Pride Month every year. That topic is a your money or your life topic.

It is held to a higher standard. Um and so we would rate lower than say uh human rights campaign or the Trevor Project. Appropriately so, because it's not our specialty. Um we don't necessarily have all the you know the the expert credibility that uh an organization like the Trevor Project would have. Um, and someone reading it, now we're you know, both ethical and moral, and we don't put up information that's going to actively cause harm, but it is a sensitive topic, and therefore it is held to a higher standard.

That's always uh I always wonder with this is it because they like if you're just talking about restaurant reviews, then you can have diversity of opinion, and that's okay, but these are topics where uh variation in the opinion is not allowed because they again it can be loss of money or life. Is that the idea? Essentially, I mean think about it from a business perspective. What Google wants to avoid is lawsuits, right? Saying, hey, you directed my you know me to this website, and this website uh told me that drinking bleach is okay, and I drank bleach and you know now I can't I can no longer eat any food.

That in that example, there is a pretty clear indication that uh Google sent you somewhere that should not have been listed, right? That would they that would be the lowest quality content, content that is actively harmful. Where things get questionable and where we don't have any guidance from these search quality rating guidelines are about things for which there are highly polarized opinions that do not necessarily have a scientific or factual uh judgment, one way or the other. Um example uh tax code. Should tax code be regressive or progressive?

Should it, you know, should tax code be a flat tax or should it be a progressive tax where income tax increases with your income? There isn't a right answer to that question, but they are highly polarized opinions. And someone who is rating a page, depending on your political inclination, you would choose you could use a page that was advocating for a progressive tax, and you were a conservative person, you would rate that page low quality because you would consider that misinformation. Someone who is liberal who looks at a flat tax would easily say do the same thing. And so again, you need that large group of people to achieve the you know the diversity of opinions, you need the behavior of the users themselves that would signal, yeah, there's debate about this topic, but it's you know it isn't necessarily harmful one way or the other, even though it is about a your money or your life topic.

And Google has been very closed-mouthed about how it handles things where there are political overtones, like you know, uh LGBTQ rights. Um, and depending on your point of view, the other point of view you may view as factually incorrect. If this question uh likely will send us down a rabbit hole, we can certainly we can park it for now. But who's making this set of guidelines? Like I understand like the raters have to follow these guidelines, but who's making this determination to say that this is what's considered low quality?

This is what's considered high quality, this is what's considered harmful. So who's who's building that? Obviously, I know the answer is Google, but like is it a large committee? Is it one person? Like, how does that work?

As far as we know, it's Google's web quality team. I don't know how large that team is, but it is a team of folks. Um, I know in the past, folks like Danny Sullivan have said that there is a team behind the creation of this. And I believe, and we're gonna have to we're gonna have to Google this. Um there is also a third-party trust and oversight committee that is not Google employees that looks over most of the big tech companies have some sort of third-party um body that will uh frequently audit um what these things are doing.

Uh it's kind of funny. Uh Twitter is notable for uh when their management changed, they dissolved their their trust and safety council immediately. Um they just got rid of it, the whole thing. Um but as far as I know, Google uh has has a similar committee of folks who agree on a lot of these guidelines. Gotcha.

So all of this being said, all of these search quality ratings guidelines, what do we marketers need to do with this information? How does it impact us? Obviously, we're talking about organic search and so naturally SEO. Like, what do we do with this information? This is a lot of information.

It is a lot of information. And remember, it boils down to two dimensions page quality and needs met. So the first thing you have to do is go through and read about what Google, what the essentially Google considers uh lower high quality. So, for example, this is high quality main content. What is the difference between you know high quality and low quality?

High quality is a news article with accuracy, depth, and clarity, a QA page or form post with meaningful discussions, a well-organized crafting tutorial page, high originality, unique or original, original photos and things like that. Low quality would be photos from other sources, low quality would be lack of curation, poor editing. So immediately there's some things jump out, like okay, just spell check your stuff. Make sure that that is it is obviously not garbage. Um when you're going through looking at the various uh authority examples, you could again read through a you know this pay, this page is clearly labeled as an opinion piece, right?

So yeah, if you have content that could be misconstrued, being clear about its uh intent uh is super helpful. When you look at uh things like the news and updates page, you know, main qualities, high content effort, original content unique to the site as a marketer. If you are just copy pasting from somebody else's website, um that you're yeah that's low quality. One of the most damning uh statements that is you'll find in here is on the medium quality content. And Google says medium quality content it falls under the category of nothing wrong, but nothing special, right?

And that is that is most marketing content. There's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing special. There's nothing that would when you go there, like, okay, this was valuable, this was useful, this was original, this was unique, this was um you know, provided uh good information. Interesting.

So basically, what you're saying is that we're all just mediocre. I mean, yes, most marketing content really is just mediocre. So that's the first part. The second part is the needs met guidelines. So the needs met guidelines is talking about does a search, does a page meet the needs of the user?

And so users are given tasks and asked, does the page or the search result meet the needs of that task? So let's go through a few examples here. But they'll say things like shop Nordstrom Online is the query. User intent, go to the Nord Stream website for online shopping. This search result fully meets that need, right?

The query has a clear intent to go to the Nord Stream website. Google showed the Nord Stream website that the need has been met. If we scroll down, let's go into what country is Mount Fuji in. User intent find the country. Mount Fuji from Wikipedia.

This is a specific, no simple query. The landing page for the result provides the answer to the query with a lot of information about the mountain. While the answers can be found in the description of the website is not displayed prominently. So in this case, um the need was highly met met, but not fully met because the answer did not leap out immediately and obviously. Oh, that that's that's clearly what it is.

Um Broadway tickets. The intent here is you know to to research prices and go find um tickets on Broadway. And there's Ticketmaster is the the example. And it says, this helpful is this site is helpful, but you have to do a lot of navigating to get to where you want to go. So as a result, it's it highly meets the needs, but not fully.

If we go down a bit further into the uh slightly meets the needs, you know, Brittany Spears in the you have this TMZ article. It says the landing page has a 2006 article about Britney Spears filing for divorce. This is very old stale news, making the result helpful for few users. And so as Google's ratings basically the the in the meeting of needs is how many users does this help? Does it help everybody?

Does it help only a couple people? You know, slightly meets or does not meet the needs of of most users. What's interesting, and I'm looking at the uh example right below that, the Honda Odyssey. I I was gonna ask about how do we know user intent, but this is saying we will assume that users are interested in the current Honda Odyssey model unless otherwise specified. And I think that I can see where you know these guidelines can be very vague and murky because it's making a lot of assumptions.

Um, you know, the way in which we as you know humans search for information is so different. The way that the three of us would look for information, you know, is going to be very different. We could all be given the same task, but our approach is going to be different. The way in which we think about it is going to be different. Um it is fascinating to me that they are, you know, drawing that line in the sand and saying, like, you know, we know that humans can be unpredictable, but this is how we're going to predict them.

Exactly. And so one of the things that's different about the needs met scale is that it is it is context dependent, right? So if we pull up this blog post from last week, from last week's show, this page would meet the needs of somebody who wanted information about understanding shadow bands. It would not meet the needs of somebody looking for eyeshadow, right? So yeah, the there's no one score for a needs met thing.

It is it is all query dependent. And so you have query independent stuff like page quality. Is this a is this a high quality page? You know, does it uh clear is is do we know who made it? Um is it cluttered with ads, etc., or is or is the uh the the quality high?

That's one dimension. The second dimension is does it answer the question that the user has fulfilled the user's intent? So if someone was coming to this page looking for information about shadow bands, um, this page hopefully would fulfill that need. One of the things that SEO folks in in recent years have done a good job of of understanding and communicating is that a page, particularly like a landing page, should meet a very specific need. So this is where having a user story would be really handy so that you can say, yes, this meets the need of this page.

Um, and as a quick refresher, a user story is a simple statement with three parts. As a persona, I want to sew that the persona being you know who the individual is, the want to is the intent, and the so that is the outcome. Yep. As a person recently laid off at Microsoft, I want to improve my LinkedIn profile so that I stand a better chance of getting a job faster, right? That would be an intent, uh, a user story for this page, and therefore, if somebody would found this page by a search query for how do I improve my LinkedIn profile, this page would meet those needs, right?

There's a course that you can take that would help. Uh, actually, this page probably uh mostly meet needs because the page doesn't have the information itself on it, it has a a sign-up form for a course. But in terms of fulfilling user intent, um, that's what this page does. This page would poorly meet the needs of somebody asking, how do I improve my LinkedIn uh marketing to market to more people on LinkedIn? Because that's not what this course is about.

And so that makes me wonder, you know, there's the intent of the user and the question they're asking, but there's also our intent. Our intent is not to help people understand LinkedIn marketing. But if somebody's intent was to understand LinkedIn marketing, we are then penalized or scored lower because we didn't meet that need. For this page, so remember a page's needs met is query dependent. So if that was the task, and so it one of the things that we would want to do is have those user stories written out, and then say to you know, each critical page on your website, what is the user story for that page, right?

For the important ones. Obviously, you know, just some random blog post like four years ago, you don't need user story for that. But if there are pages that are highly converting, uh perhaps, what is the the user story of that page? And if you don't have that clearly written down, then that page may not be as focused as you want, which means it may not meet the intent of the user, uh the many users who find their way through that page. When you have a campaign landing page that you're putting up for say pay-per-click ads, again, that's a have that user story written out because if you don't, there's a good chance stuff's gonna find its way onto that page, especially when you're designing by committee, that uh is not gonna help.

Uh you know, people are not gonna find it as useful. Right. No, and I understand that, but that wasn't my question. My question is our the purpose of this page from our perspective is to help people who are looking that for their LinkedIn, you know, profiles. Yes.

If the task by the writer is LinkedIn marketing, then they're gonna rate our page low. And so we're penalized for not answering the question that we didn't know was being asked. That's correct. For that query, we would this page would be rated as you know, slightly meets the needs. Seems pretty rude.

And that's why stuff like keyword research still matters, so that you can see what people are searching for and try to determine what is the intent of it. It's also why, from uh a content creation um perspective, having a a you know, longer tail keywords, so instead of having LinkedIn be the keyword for a page where you're not sure what the intent is, um, having you know how to fix my LinkedIn profile as your target focus for that page makes it much more clear that that's you know it's it has lower search volume, but the intent is super clear. And so when you look at your keyword lists or your topic lists, you have to look at them and say, okay, are these topics that we are targeting clear enough that when somebody finds their way to our the landing page for it, we fulfill the intent. So it sounds like you know, I wouldn't say regardless, um, but despite all of the hoops that you feel like Google is making you jump through in order to have your page ranked higher, um the the basics of SEO still matter, making sure you're doing your keyword research, making sure you are writing thoughtful, uh helpful content, making sure that you know who your audience is and what questions they're gonna be asking that you can answer. So that all of that, like if you focus on those things, then I feel like you don't have to worry as much about this massive document because you're still doing the thing you set out to do with your SEO and your content marketing.

And one of the things that I think is useful as an exercise is is doing this in reverse. So you look at pages on your website, they're like, This page should be doing better. Why isn't it? So the first thing you do is say, let's do the user story for the page, and then you look at in Google Search Console the search terms that are driving traffic to that page and say, Does the user story that we came up with match the search console data for that page that would indicate, oh, this is why people are on this page. And if the answer is no, um, you know, then then the remediation is pretty clear.

If you want to fix that up, you can say, Oh, well, I I clearly need to you know improve this page so that I I I'm I'm doing a better job of fulfilling those needs. And the challenge that you're gonna run into uh is that Google's uh Search Console uh interface does not actually help with that all that much. Uh it it's actually kind of a pain in the butt. Um so you have to, if you want to do that well, you have to extract it out from the API itself in order to do that assessment. So here, let's look at the trust Insights website.

Let's make this a little bit bigger. That was much larger than I wanted it to be. So here's an example. AMP app review is the query. And this page is so what platform review Amazon AMP.

Does that page meet that need, right? Does it does it satisfy the intent of the user? So we're looking for a review of that app. Yeah, I think you and John did that episode. Would you say that you did a fairly good review of that?

I think it was pretty thorough. What do you say, John? Best AMP review ever. But that was the exact question that we were answering was what is the AMP app? Uh, what does it do?

And should you bother to spend your time with it? Mm-hmm. Here's one that's uh further down a podcast manager's salary. Does this episode, which is in your podcast, which is just about what my salary would be, does that answer the intent of that page? No, because that's look the intent of that query is someone who is a podcast manager trying to figure out what their pay is, and and that page does not meet those needs.

No, it was a more general here's how you as an individual should start to go ahead and do the research to find out. So, you know, and it's interesting because it's not an immediate answer, but it gives you how to answer that question. And so this is where I can see it being problematic for the human raiders, is so it didn't tell you exactly the podcast manager's salary, but it does tell you how to get to that answer. Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Um scroll down a bit further here, you can see things like STEM marketing. Um, I don't even know what the heck that is. Uh AI generated copyright, content copyright. Does that, you know, does this post answer that? Yes, that that post uh answers that very clearly.

Um, so part of the things that uh any content marketing manager should be doing is looking in their data. Um, and again, you unfortunately to get this lined up by query and page you have to extract it from the API. Um, but to do this, you can then say, okay, are the pages that are getting traffic or the pages that were were showing up in the search results for do they match the intent of the searcher? And if they don't, your choices are either you fix that page or you spin up a separate page that sp answers that query. If there's a lot of search volume on a given term, you know, let's pretend that podcast uh uh manager was uh as a hot thing.

If we saw in the SEO tool of our choice that that was a uh you know 2,000 searches a month, yeah, that'd be worth putting up a dedicated page just to answer that question. So what's interesting, so that very bottom line that you said uh you don't know what that is. So uh to us, STEM is a framework in terms of strategy tactics, execution measurement, but we don't know if that's what these the intent was or if they meant science, technology, engineering, math. And so we don't know if it answers the question. So we would have to dig deeper into the actual analytics on that page to see how long people were staying.

Does it fit into, you know, does it contribute to people converting? Like there's a deeper analysis that has to be done because just looking at this on a spreadsheet, I could say, yeah, it answers the question because they were looking for STEM marketing. We gave them STEM marketing, but we don't know what STEM stands for. Or do they mean like STEM cell research or the stem of a tree or a plant? Like we don't know.

Exactly. And that's where, again, using multiple tools in your search marketing can be helpful to parse that apart because you are ultimately trying to get to those needs met ratings things. The other thing I'd say is, yeah, for marketers, um, in particular, go through the examples of the highest quality pages and read the justifications and the explanations that Google specifically says here's why um this page uh is is rated highest quality. So and they're not necessarily great pages, right? So this is a highest quality page.

Is this I mean, yeah, this is not exactly award-winning artwork here, but the reason Google says this is the highest quality page is that says uh we learned that kernel.org is the main repository of source code for the Linux kernel, makes all the versions of source code available to all users. This website is the most authoritative source of for information about Linux and has a very positive reputation in the topic of the page. So this page, the reputation of the website around the topic makes it highest quality, even if it's not a particularly attractive page, it fully meets all the needs that um that Google's looking for. So people should be looking through these, you know, all these different examples and seeing like, well, does my page meet those needs? So here's one.

This is um you know, secret Fears of the super rich. Um as a magazine article. The article is on a magazine website that has won multiple national magazine awards, a very positive reputation for this type of article. The article has in-depth main content that is unique and original, it shows effort, skill, and original content. If you're a content marketer and you're you're working on your the reputation of your website and stuff, all those uh awards uh ceremonies and things and and stuff may actually be heuristics that help a human raider go, yeah, this is an award-winning website.

Like, yeah, this the award was given out by my dog. But well, but in all seriousness, this is why when we talk about the things that matter most uh in SEO, inbound links from good quality, reputable websites. And so, you know, if Trust Insights is getting a lot of you know, links from The Atlantic, which was that last website, you know, those are good quality. And Google's gonna go, okay, the Atlantic is linking to Trust Insights. So Trust Insights must also, by association, have something important to offer, versus us just getting uh, you know, links from you know, my personal website, which has like five pages on it and not a whole lot of content.

Yeah, I'm part of Trust Insights, but my personal website does not hold authority at all. You know, and so I can see where that is still an important distinction. Exactly. You know, here's a chocolate chip uh cookie recipe. The author of this blog has documented her extensive experimentation with a chocolate chip cookie recipe, and her expertise is demonstrated in the large quantity of original higher highest quality main content.

The author of this blog has documented her extensive experimentation, shows experience, and her expertise and skill is demonstrating the large quality. So let's take a look at this this chocolate chip cookie recipe, because now I'm curious. Oh, it's one of these that has you know 500,000 uh things in the you know, this is your grandma's recipe, you know, that was handed down through the age, all that stuff. But it's less surprising now when you look at the things that show up in search results, why those things show up because the part of the training data is those human beings making these subjective calls that, yeah, hearing about someone's grandma's cookies recipe from the 1800s that you know was carried on a uh wagon across the country. And the rest of us like, just show the freaking recipe already.

But from a search quality rating perspective of can I convince a human raider to rate this as authoritative, that ridiculous story actually matters. Well, and everybody loves the here's the cookies, the butter was frozen, here's the cookies, the buddy, but it was room temp, it was melted, you know. I sprayed the butter from a compressor 20 feet away into the battery, you know, and you get all your different cookies. People love that stuff. Yep.

And the other part that's interesting in the intent is that Google breaks out intents in series of different categories. There's knowledge queries, like I just want to know something. How do I do something? I'm looking for something, a branded search intent or a visit intent, right? Those are sort of the big categories.

So as you're creating content for your website, you have to figure out, you know, which cat what kind of intent am I serving? And does this, you know, does this really our contents fulfill one or more of these intents? And if so, which one does it fulfill the best? Interesting. Yep.

So that is the quality rating guidelines. The the key takeaways, you have two dimensions. You have uh page quality, which is query independent, and there's a and following the guidelines for what constitutes high quality content. And then there's the the needs met uh dimension, which is query dependent on whether your site meets the needs of what the person is searching for. As a marketer, you've got to nail page quality out of the gate, right?

Whether regardless of anything else, you've you've your site's got to be high quality, and then you've got to have a good content plan to meet the needs of people based on the topics that you're choosing to create content about. So none of this replaces actually talking to your audience to ask them what they need from you instead of you saying, here's what I think you need. In fact, clearly, just on the fact that the search quality rating guidelines exist and that they're humans make you know, rating things should be a telling sign that Google, one of the largest you know, AI companies on the planet, still requires humans as a key part of its training data. So if Google requires it, you probably do too. Makes sense.

John, final thoughts? You gotta leave us to go be a reader. Dude, definitely steal this stuff for your own UX. You know, it's like here's a plan for you. It's like find a prospect, say, Hey, can you find this on my page?

And run them through the same thing. You can easily use this approach for your own stuff. Exactly. All right, folks, that's it for this week. We will see you all next time.

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