Jonas Sickler says “Google will continue to release more Helpful Content updates going forward, and it's really going to be up to us as SEOs to create a more satisfying experience and figure out how to solve for search intent, while also providing some unique value on top of that.”

Okay, so how does Google go about really understanding search intent?

“It's been evolving its algorithm significantly over the years to be able to understand some of the nuance of human language. Some of those things are around just topics and subtopics, so that it understands what the relationships are between different themes, and then how they fit together. It's getting quite good at picking apart human language and understanding things like from, and to, and these little words that previously were sort of ignored by Google and now it understands that when somebody uses a word that seems insignificant, it actually carries a lot of meaning, and helps Google understand more about what somebody's trying to get at and has evolved quite a bit to be able to even understand the differences between something like, "what are the benefits of doing something" versus "what is the importance of doing something" and understands that there's some sort of different meaning and expectation between those two words.”

Is it possible for an SEO to really measure the volume of search intent and the kind of impact that actually has on the bottom line?

“It's really a story about the customer journey. When SEOs look at conversions and traffic, a lot of times what happens is they look at the bottom of the funnel as the big end game where they want to capture the conversions. But really, search intent is about getting in front of users throughout the entire customer journey, and making sure that you're present. When they're just starting to figure out what their problem is, as they're starting to weigh different solutions, you need to be present and able to guide the narrative and the story, and be in front of them at those key moments as they move from that awareness stage down to the purchase side. We need to be measuring things like traffic and awareness style metrics, branded metrics, and not just conversions, because we want to get in front of them throughout the entire journey.”

Part of getting in front of the customer is to build topic clusters to try and ensure that you cover a topic completely. So how do you go about researching the right topic clusters to be in front of and ensure that you cover every single micro topic within there?   “That is a really interesting puzzle to solve. One of my favorite topics, and a lot of it comes down to understanding how Google perceives topics and how Google understands that they're connected. Google is trying to serve things to its to user base that it believes they're going to want, so here isn't a single sort of puzzle that you can say, well, everything's going to fit into this box, you really have to turn to search every single time that you have a question, you have to take your keyword set into Google and say, well, this Google grouping these terms together and returning the ame set of search results for these sets of keywords? Or is Google looking at this a little differently and saying this deserves its own separate piece of content? It's a little bit more targeted? Examples might be like content strategy versus e-commerce content strategy versus b2b content strategy? Is Google just returning generic content strategy articles for that? Or is it getting a little bit deeper and saying no, these actually are their own separate things and we need to have separate pieces of content for that. So I would look at when you're grouping the keywords, which is the ardest thing about developing content and topic clusters, and just really make sure that if you're producing something, does Google see it as something separate, or as part of the same bigger topic of something else? That way, you're not producing hundreds of very similar articles, and getting no traffic to any of them. But instead, you're producing enough where you're able to show up across the spectrum, but not so many that you're getting redundant.”

Okay, so step one is to come up with some seed keyword phrases, perhaps by using a keyword tool to do that. Then to actually search Google yourself to see what kind of content already exists for those keyword phrases to see what Google is looking for, and then clustering these keyword phrases together to actually determine what keywords are related in order to apply to the same topic cluster. Is there specialist software that you use to do to do that? Or is that fairly manual task?

“You can, there's a lot of software out there. I think that's really kind of where a lot of the development is these days is in trying to develop clustering tools and clustering software. The big challenge is there's kind of two different branches. One branch says we're going to cluster keywords based on related similar terms that are included. The other branch says give us a whole bunch of keywords, our software is going to go to Google search it and then look for matching URLs and clustering them if we find a whole bunch of URLs returning the same sets for each keyword. That's the better approach. But I still prefer the manual approach to automation because I think that you're just basically looking for some strategic direction. Every software is based on rules and if you're using it, you're using somebody else's grouping rules, and that may not align with your own SEO strategy and your own content strategy because there is no one answer. It's always a choice, and the choice is, do I want to try to rank one article for more keywords? Or do I want to rank several articles for a larger set of keywords? If Google says you can do either one of these and win, because usually that's the case, you'll see like one website ranks, 1 or 2 for everything with an ultimate guide, and then everybody else is sort of targeting separate is slightly different intense with the keywords and ranking well with those. So you kind of want to be able to see what's possible. If I write four articles where the target is slightly similar, but have related terms, am I able to rank? And then the second thing is, I like to write more pieces of content that are a little bit more unique and targeted when Google is saying yes, this is it's, it's possible to do that, rather than a single mega guide, because you're able to just kind of tweak and target your audience a little bit better, be more specific.”

So a lot of these bits of software out there that are actually used to structure content are based on rules, and these rules are perhaps historic rules, or rules that only cover certain aspects of what you're trying to do, and if you don't check things manually, then you could be missing out on quite a few opportunities.

“It's also about how thorough your content is. So a tool might say, here's how you can write 20 different articles about this topic, because we're finding that it's possible to rank on those things. But if you decide you want to be a little bit more comprehensive, and you're better at optimizing the on page elements, you're probably going to rank for a larger circle of terms, and then that pushes the other ones out. So it really depends if you want to sort of skim the surface and go thin, which I don't recommend, or do you want to go for a 'mega guide' and try to hit it all, which I also don't really recommend. I think the sweet spot lies in the middle, where you're able to differentiate where the intents are separate, but you're able to be a bit more comprehensive and say, if things are similar and related, then we're going to try to cover all those related points to so that we're not leaving users searching for more answers when we don't have to.”   You're also a fan of coming up with unique perspectives, when still answering the query. So that sounds like the toughest part, because obviously, there's so much content out there, there are so many answers, answering the same question or keyword phrase. So how do you come up with those unique perspectives?“Part of it comes from the initial audience research that you do around your personas in the journey. But another piece of that is trying to look at the angles that Google's returning in the SERP. If you search something, and a whole bunch of ultimate guides are returned, are they all beginner guides? Are they all advanced guides? Are they comprehensive? Or are they sort of introductory? And making sure that you're not diverging from the expectation, because Google is saying, when we believe that when people search this thing, they're looking for something that's more surface level. So you can't go and be hyper advanced on a topic, but maybe you can find a unique audience spin on it and create something that's an intermediate, so it's like a bridge guide, or you can say it's for marketers, or you make sure that you're calling out your audience in that so that you're still satisfying the intent but you're being maybe a little bit more specific than others are in the SERP.”

A lot of people focus on just the keyword, or answering a question, without actually really thinking about what the audience wants to find out, and doing a great job of providing the answer that they're looking for.   “Yeah, that's really important. Because I mean, there's a reason that Google is returning these results. It's easy as SEOs to just fall back and say that the reason that the top 10 results are very similar is because everyone's copying each other. But we have to remember that Google is filtering these results for a reason. It's not just you know, because they're being copied. Google's algorithms are designed to see what users are likely to be searching for, and when you have a keyword space that's enormous and there's a ton of different types of searches involved in it, Google has to kind of parse through that and understand, hey, people seem to be enjoying the more beginner side when they search this particular phrase, and do they specify when they want something different? I think it's easy for everyone to get hung up on format, is this a list of things or a number of steps or how to or a definition, but that angle is really important. I've seen things where we've targeted SEO, and as Google has gotten more sophisticated and realized, people want beginner stuff, our more advanced guides have kind of fallen, fallen down in search. But we don't want to change that, because it's, we're still targeting for our audience. So sometimes you just have to say, well this keyword is no longer relevant for us to target in that way, because Google wants to see something different, and it doesn't align with our audience to write it that way.”

One reason why you want to create content is you want to hopefully generate links to your site. So is there a particular aspect about a piece of content that makes it likely that people will want to link to it?

“Yeah, there's, I think there's a number of different approaches, generally speaking, there's, you know, the ones everybody knows about, if you include statistics, you're going to probably get some links. If you have thought leadership or quotes, you're going to get more links. If you take a very complex topic and distill it down in a simplified way visually, that's, that's good for forgetting links, especially if you're, I think we've kind of all moved away at this point, hopefully, from the, you know, the gigantic infographic that gets pasted onto a site to get links. And instead we're, we're more smartly and strategically breaking it down into like little, little square graphics that tell parts of the story and then placing those in the content where it makes sense. So it might still be the same overall graphic, but it's now broken down in a way that's more shareable and more bite sized. And there's a lot of extra text around it to explain the story better than just a whole, you know, whole bunch of numbers and data points. So I think those are the big ones are statistics and quotes and graphics to sort of boil down complex topics.”

And another reason why people will want to link to you is because they perceive that you are an authority on a particular topic. So are there any particular ways that you would recommend reinforcing the thing to demonstrate that you are actually the authority on this, and you are the one that should be quoted on a particular topic?

“I think there's a few things that can be done. First of all, I'm thinking back to the topic cluster idea, don't ever cover a topic too thinly. You want to make sure that you're providing value, and the value extends beyond "I wrote about this idea, and it's a it's an interesting idea", but rather, every single subsection, every single paragraph, every single sentence is there for a purpose, the content is providing true value, and you can read that paragraph, or section, or that piece of content and come away with actionable advice, actionable tips, so that you're not just kind of fluffing around keywords. People can see through that, and when you provide that real value, they say this person, this author, this website, is a really trusted source of information. And then if you do that around all of the different subtopics and create those topic clusters, then they're seeing you as an expert, not just around one thing, but around an entire topic. And I think that's one area. But then you need to kind of think off page as well. You need to start thinking, how can I take these insights to social media? How can I build my brand? Through email? How can I build my brand out through doing webinars and speaking at events and conferences, and putting yourself out there as someone who has a brand or as an individual. It's not just people, but companies can say they're thinking big and broad about this topic and we want to be able to educate our audience and be a leader in the industry. So it goes well beyond just publishing a few pieces of content on your website.”

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

“We've all just seen Google come back around with another link update recently, and this one feels a little bit different because they're starting to use their SpamBrain to look for link manipulations. So I'm not saying don't build links, but what I'm saying is, prioritize properly. Start with your user experiences, start with great content, think about satisfying search intent and create the best experiences you can on your website, create topic, clusters, internal link all of your content properly, do all those things first. Create the experiences first, and then turn to links, because you're going to naturally start to earn those links if you've created great content. I know it's a bit cliché, but it's true. If you start to really focus on building yourself or your website up as an authority and create amazing content, you're going to earn some links, and then you can then go out and ask for some because your content deserves it, not because you're doing it the other way around. I would say to invest resources in creating the best, most efficient, effective content that you can, and do all those other things first, and then then look for links because Google is getting really crafty, and is able to spot the link manipulation algorithmically and ignore them. So why waste time doing that stuff before you've done the more important work.”

Jonas Sickler is SEO manager at Terakeet, and you can find them over at terakeet.com.