Hope Anderson says “So, my additional insight is don't forget about the bigger picture. And what I mean by this is I see a lot of SEO strategies and SEOs getting bogged down by focusing as a site as individual pages. So, panicking about individual ranking fluctuations and how we can use “quick wins” strategies to optimize individual pages, but actually forgetting that our site is a whole entity. And there's lots of elements that make up that site. It's not just about how individual pages what they actually look like on the page. It's about how they work together. And it's not to say that these elements about individual page quality don't play a part in your strategy, but in terms of ranking, and particularly creating bigger picture long term SEO strategies, I think that stretches far beyond individual pages, and you have to treat your site as that entity and that whole piece of the cake really, rather than individual quadrants.”

Quadrant, that’s a good word. So, what does that mean in terms of metrics? For instance, you'll obviously look at traffic coming into your site. But if content traffic for an individual page goes down, that's not an issue, as long as if traffic for the overall site doesn't go down?

“I think, obviously if it's a key page, it could be an issue. But I think the idea here is there are other wider metrics that could be affecting your site, for example, is that site got enough backlinks? Has it got enough authority? And has that individual page being linked to enough? Is your internal linking structure fostering the success of that page? For example, you could have valuable content on your site that was once ranking well, and it started to go down. Now the key is, that's not necessarily because there's individual things wrong about that page, possibly the navigation of your site's changes. So, it's moved down in the hierarchy of your site. So maybe take a look at your internal linking structure and think how can we now prioritize this page, if we want that to be a focus? Has your dev team or have wider teams made changes to that page so that it's not as usable anymore, it's not as fast anymore, it's not interacting with your users in that way? So I think there's other metrics such as technical SEO, social shares, PR activity, backlinks, all of that, that can feed into the success of individual pages. And I don't think it's necessarily about what's on the page all the time. And I think the key here is that I think there's a tendency sometimes in SEO, for example, if your page has fallen in a few ranking positions, it's thinking, “oh, what can we do about this page? Can we add more keywords into the page? Can we add a new paragraph of text? Can we add a new section to the page?” and it's thinking about these quick short term SEO strategies that might work on the short term, I mean, there might be a competitor that has a much longer form blog out there, and yours just isn't sort of cutting the mustard anymore. And you need to increase the copy on the page. But a lot of the time, it's the widest site factors that are actually affecting the ranking of your page. It's not necessarily directly what's on the page. And you might want to think about looking at it from a longer term SEO strategy and thinking, how can we actually improve the site as a whole, rather than just focusing on a small collection of pages and jumping on them to increase rankings.”

So, what are a few things that are favorites of yours at the moment in terms of improving the site as a whole?

“So, I would say the first place to start is to conduct what we call a content audit. There might be different terms of it across different agencies and things like that. But understanding what is on your site currently is one of the most useful things, I think. As SEO teams and as SEOs, if you know the content, I think, particularly if you've got an older site, 10-20 years old, there could be stuff on there, that's really outdated. That isn't really linked to but it could actually be that, devaluing the whole quality of your site. So, if you go in, start a crawl, for example, understand all the pages, bringing metrics for those pages, so I'd recommend clicks, impressions, backlinks. But again, not just SEO metrics, if you bring in stuff like paid traffic, referral traffic, social traffic, as many juicy metrics as you can get things like internal links as well. You can really upgrade your content audit and understand what's on your site. I would say that would be number one. Understand what's on that and I think that just gives you so much more value in terms of what to do with your next steps. Then you could have a lot of content on there, that is actually devaluing your site quality, as I mentioned a second ago. So Google can come to your pages, and you might be producing lots of new fresh, good content. But if Google's come to your site a lot in the past, and it sees that you've got a lot of spammy low quality content on there, it's possibly less likely to index and rank your content in the future. So you have to be I think, a little bit ruthless with SEO. And I've seen a lot of success with strategies that I've taken where you go in and you strip out a lot of that older, low quality content. And really, then you can see what's left and how you prioritize that. For example, you might have some pages in there that have some really good content. But maybe you're not quite getting the intent right, and maybe you're not quite targeting the keywords. So, in that way, that's how you would increase the quality of individual pages to increase the quality of your site overall, maybe going in and updating content, making sure again, that the intents right.

Another thing that we've been factoring in a lot is looking at your content strategy, looking at content clusters, and things like that, and how you can build out the quality of your site using content clusters. So see what's out there on your site already, do you have a lot of things on similar topics that don't actually link together? So can you capitalize that and think of a way to structure all these articles, so they naturally linked together, all of that sort of stuff is great for increasing the quality of your overall site. Again, obviously, tech related things, making sure your site is fast, it's usable. And all of these things, they require a lot more work, right? They require a lot more work than a quick keyword research project, that's going to look into a couple of pages, and you can just optimize from there, but having that investment and time into doing those longer term strategies, getting the dev team involved, working with other channels, making sure that your user experience of your site is there, all of that sort of stuff is what's going to foster that long term growth and where we've seen a lot of success.”

So you used the phrase “spammy, low quality content”. How do you define if something is spammy, low quality?

“So if it's thin content, I know I audited a lot of sites in the past and you go to the page, it's not providing it's not very long for one thing.”

So less than 100 to 200 words?

“Yeah, I would say that feeds into it. But again, that's sort of a very general phrase, we don't want to get too bogged down with word count, because obviously, that's one of those things. But I think, if you read the content, and it doesn't fit with your niche, it's not really going into particular depth, it's very sort of top level, you're not targeting anything in particular with it. I think it's hard to give a generalized definition of that, but I think you can tell sometimes when you read content, if you as a user wouldn't engage with that. And if you're reading it, particularly as an industry expert where or you know your client very well, you can usually go to the page and think, “oh, this seems low quality, this seems old”, you know, if it's outdated information that possibly isn't relevant anymore, or can't be updated. That's the kind of thing that you could bet off as well.”

And you also touched on a couple of other channels paid and social as well. So, do paid and social actually provide metrics that are useful for making SEO decisions?

“I think so, in our experience, we've seen particularly on working with large news publishers and things like that, if a particular article is getting a lot of social traction, it's being shared about it's being talked about a lot. That does affect its SEO performance, it affects its likelihood to ranking Google News, it affects its likelihood to rank in Discover, and it's organic search rankings as well, in terms of evergreen and short term content too. So, I'd say Google definitely looks at these metrics outside the board as well, in terms of paid obviously, it's a much different strategy. But I think the key there, it's if a particular page or a particular white paper, a particular blog has seen success with paid in the past, but it's not being used anymore, can you repurpose it for SEO? And think about how you could use that in terms of future SEO success. I think that's the key about a content audit as well. It's not just finding what's bad, or what's really good. It's finding those ones in the middle as well. I think the key that you can update, you can refresh, you can look at those metrics of your ranking on page two or three. What can you do with that content to make it start to rank better? And the key there, again, isn't just looking at that individual piece of content, it’s looking at your site as a whole entity and how you can optimize further there.”

So how do you alert yourself as to whether or not there might be an issue with your site? I mean, for instance, do you have some kind of traffic light system some kind of visibility score that guide you as to whether or not there might be an issue?

“In terms of visibility scores and things, obviously use tracking tools, use Analytics, use Search Console, keeping up with if you are seeing, again, fluctuations in rankings, you're seeing up and downs and traffic, I think, it's about trends, and that's the way we look at it, if there's an individual page that seeing some fluctuations, and it's not making too much of an impact on the whole site, that's something to keep an eye on and be aware of. And you should have a key set, in my opinion, you should have a key set of keywords that you track day to day that are key to your client, your key to your business, whatever. But I think the wider look at it is a downward trend. And I think that's an indication that something might be actually wrong with your site as a whole, rather than what's wrong with an individual page. That's where the alert signals can be going off. I don't think it's healthy, and I don't think it's particularly productive to watch week on week traffic, day on day traffic, things going up and down, because this could be so many other factors in that. But if you've been monitoring traffic for the last couple months, and you're seeing a downward trend, look at how Google is indexing your pages, use tools like Search Console to see whether there are actually a lot of your new, if you've been doing a new content strategy, for example, see if it's actually being indexed and see if it's actually being served to users in the correct way, because there might be a deeper issue there and you need to run some tests on understanding it. Is your content being indexed, is your content being seen by Google? Again, have you made big wide site changes, but you haven't changed the content of your pages? It could still be affecting the user journey, it could also be affecting things like click through rate, if you've made a change to your page structure, and users are now coming to your pages and not liking that and not interacting with it, and clicking away. That's obviously going to affect search performance as well. So, it's again, working with wider teams and thinking about the bigger picture and not getting too siloed in SEO and keywords and making individual optimizations. But thinking about the site as a whole and thinking about how different people within your team and how your customers are interacting with the site and try and formulating your strategies around them.”

Does that mean that you don't particularly like following Google algorithm changes?

“No, I wouldn't say that's the case. I think we definitely need to be prepared for Google algorithm changes, and it's really important to be on top of those, for example, obviously, with the recent, helpful content update, I think there was a lot of talk beforehand that this was going to be huge, and it almost seemed like there was almost a panic. I think even with in our own teams, it wasn't panic, but it was definite thought of “okay, have we analyzed the site content? Do we know what's happening with all of our clients? Are we on top of that?”, but that wasn't the same impact that we expected off of the helpful content update. But that's not to say that we all sighed, that, you know, it didn't affect us. I think you have to be up to date with these things, because that shows a fundamental change in the way that Google is looking at how they process sites in general. So, the helpful content update is obviously moving more towards EAT. It's moving more towards the general structure of your site, how it works together, it's moving more towards backlinks, authority, all of that, which I personally think are fostered more by long term SEO strategies. So, I think it's almost the opposite, it’s almost all of Google's updates recently seem to be going after the general site quality, right? It's not about any more keyword density and stuffing keywords in pages and making sure content is super long form for the sake of it, it's actually looking at quality and what users want. So, I say it's super important to stay on top of algorithm updates, but also in the same brushstroke, if you have a quality site, if you're writing for your users, if you're looking at your site overall, if you know the content that's on there, if you're confident everything on your site is great, and it has a purpose, and it has a use and you're not just creating new content for the sake of it. I think it seems like the most recent Google updates, we can be pretty certain that we're not going to be too affected by that. So I'd say there's lots of different arguments for it. I think it's moving away from the panic. But definitely being aware of algorithm updates is really important.”

So you have shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. Now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing, so what's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive, something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“So, I think the key here and this is a bit of a buzzword at the moment and I'm sure a lot of people reference it but machine learning content and ChatGPT, I think it's a big buzzword at the moment and it could save a lot of time and I think there is a place for it in SEO strategies. It can be valuable in terms of trying to come up with new niches to go after, trying to come up with new ideas, but you always need that human touch. And I think this is where it fosters into a quick win SEO strategy versus a long term SEO strategy. If you're using ChatGPT to produce loads of content targeting every single keyword that you might think be relevant to your brand, and posting it really quickly on your site, I think Google's going to end up getting wise to that. So in terms of jumping on machine learning, and using it just to churn out content to your site, I think that is counterproductive in the way that it's almost against the long term SEO strategy. You're not thinking about creating a content strategy or creating a transactional page strategy to actually foster your user base, thinking about all the elements of your funnel, and how users actually use and interact with your site and interact with your content. To me, it seems like some people just want to use it to churn out content for the sake of it. So it's thinking about long term SEO strategies and moving away from just thinking about quick wins and getting content out in the site or on your sites. And I think that is hard to do in some ways.

Obviously, I think as SEOs, we've all we've all experienced client pressure, senior management pressure going “show us the value of SEO, you've been working with us for six months, and we haven't seen any up turns”. And it's very seductive to go for those quick wins and low hanging fruit and try and do something by churning out loads of content and suggesting loads and loads of recommendations. But I think in a way that can be of course, that's part of the strategy, and that can feed in well, but what you're going to see with long term sustainable growth, is that bigger picture SEO strategy that looks at your site, as a whole look, how it looks, how users are interacting with your site, and how other teams are interacting with your site and developing that on the long term. So yeah, ChatGPT is very interesting, and it does hold a place, but I think we do have to be careful with it, and content at the moment should definitely have a human touch. You should really be thinking about what you're publishing on your site rather than just publishing for the sake of it.”

Hope Anderson is an SEO Manager at Semetrical and you can find her over at semetrical.com.