Ana says: “My additional insight is that SEO is always evolving, it's always changing. Signals are always changing. My SEO tip that will last forever is ‘content’.

I feel that the end goal for Google is to always give the best possible result to the user, and that's never going to change. Whatever that result is, that’s what we need to provide it with. I feel that having the best quality content out there is what's going to make Google like really see our potential.”

You talked about high-quality content. How do you optimise Google for high-quality content and ensure that it continues to deliver what you're providing?

“It's not something that you do once, it's a constant optimisation over months and years. The things that you do, those might change – those techniques and strategies – but, in the end, it's always about giving the best content.

That will vary from industry to industry, your product will be different from others, how big you are, etc., but what I've seen throughout the years is that, at the end of the day, it’s the content that is winning. That's what I mean by the fact that my SEO tip will last forever, because content will always be the most important thing.”

How does Google measure quality?

“That's a great question, and nobody knows exactly how it does, right?”

[Laughs] I was hoping that you would know.

“No, of course, nobody does. Even after the famous leak, with all those documents telling us a few signals. Google is getting better and better at evaluating that.

As SEOs, we have known some of the techniques for years. We know meta titles, we know keywords, we know search intent, domain authority, and backlinks. We play a guessing game, and then we do things that sometimes work and sometimes don't work, and then we optimise and re-optimise.

The algorithm is there in order to fight SEOs trying to trick the algorithm. It’s like a chasing game with how much we get to trick the algorithm, and how much it gets better so we don't trick it anymore.

Long story short, I don't think anybody does know exactly what the techniques, the strategies, or the signals are, but I don't feel it's that important to always trick the algorithm, if that makes any sense.”

Sure. You say you're constantly testing, though, so what are some examples of types of content that you've tested that have worked extremely well?

“We've seen that time-sensitive content has worked really well, compared to seasonal content that has been there for years that's harder to rank. We've been trying to focus on something that's really tied to the time – that's current, that's good, that's new, and that nobody else is writing about. We've been trying to focus on that.

That's for exactly the same reason. We always do the same things, and all SEOs do the same thing. It's a battle against us, not Google. So we've been trying to focus more on new topics.”

How do you determine that a piece of content is likely to be great from a time-sensitive perspective?

“We actually get in touch with our customers a lot. We are in constant talks and chats. It's easier for us to identify their needs, the trends, and the things that they are talking about – even before we have search volumes in tools or see other people writing about it.

That's what I think is great for us. It's like we know what our customers and users need, and we just give that to them.”

How important is search volume?

“It's a tricky one. We don't focus on search volume so much as traffic potential but, at the end of the day, it's almost the same. I think it's important that, when you create content, you have a focus on who is going to read it. So yes, search volume is important, but at the same time, it's just a metric that is not real. It feels made up. It's never accurate, if that makes any sense.

You really are missing a lot of opportunities when you only focus on search volume and see, ‘It's 10. Nobody's going to read it.’, but then you get 500 clicks a month – which may be okay for you or maybe not. That, you need to evaluate for yourself.”

What metrics are real and accurate and good to focus on?

“Traffic potential is for sure one of the ones that we follow. I'm not going to lie, we do focus on traffic potential but, other than that, we also trust our intuition and what topics are trending and popping up right now. We try to cover those as well.”

How regularly do you sit down with a client to review performance? What kind of questions do they ask to determine how successful it's been?

“We talk to them all the time, really. We focus on the reviews that they provide us with. We have some internal data that we gather just because the users are using our own tools. We know some of the behaviours that they have and what they like. We are really keen on learning this data and how we can utilise it. It's an ongoing process all the time.”

What's your process for sitting down and determining what type of content you should be producing – whether it should be long form, short form, video, where you should be publishing it, etc.?

“That comes back to search intent. There are some queries where a video will fit best versus other types of content where, if you see it's a short question, a short article could do the job.

That really comes back to search intent and what the user is really asking for.”

Do you trust your instincts and manually determine search intent, or do you use software to establish that?

“I'm a huge fan of Ahrefs, that helps a lot with the established keywords, just to figure out what type of content is out there. We can then replicate it, and just try to make it better. That's a big one for us.”

When you've established search intent, what's an example of a type of content that would tie to a particular search intent?

“For example, if we are looking at a How To guide, and we see that on the SERP already, we may provide the user with a How To guide or even include in a video about how to do a certain process.

However, if we find a listicle on the SERP, then we may say, ‘Okay, this is actually better. There's no video needed. It's more of a list of the tools that they can use’, for example. Some things like that.

One of the things that we use a lot is images. We see a lot of images ranking on the SERP and a lot of our traffic is now actually coming from images.”

Google Image search specifically?

“Exactly. We have a big chunk of traffic that comes from images now.”

What about other image specialist social platforms, like Pinterest? Do you have a lot of traffic from there when you talk about image search?

“We don't really have Pinterest, so I have never been able to test that, but I think that's a huge asset that you can use for your own website. I would actually like to give it a try.”

It depends on the type of business. If it's an e-commerce business that's heavily reliant on good imagery, then perhaps that's a good opportunity to test.

You mentioned video as well, and we talked beforehand about you having certain opinions about best practice in YouTube SEO. Can you give a brief summary on your thoughts on that please?

“Yeah of course. I think the biggest difference is how the algorithm is designed, because it's both a search engine and also a social media platform. It has the best of both worlds.

Unlike blog optimisation, you don't really have much time to optimise it. In the first 24 hours of a video being published, you can already see the performance of that video going forward. It’s not that you can come back in 3 or 6 months and do a few tricks to boost the traffic. There's nothing like that for YouTube.

Everything that you do has to be done as soon as you publish the video – and, of course, before that. Really work on the structure, on the title, on the video itself, on the description, and on the thumbnail. All those things have to be perfect before you post a video.”

Absolutely. Of course, a lot of YouTube success nowadays is based upon recommended videos and having that traction to begin with, but you need to drive that traction.

I did a lot of YouTube SEO maybe 10 years ago. Back then, I found that you had to drive that initial traffic to the video, and you could do that by any means you wanted. I had videos ranking number 1 for phrases like ‘digital marketing’ and ‘internet marketing’ for a few years.

The way that I achieved those rankings was by actually driving StumbleUpon paid traffic to the videos for the first 24 hours or so, getting many people viewing and interacting with those videos, and then YouTube would start recommending them. The metrics would then take care of themselves because people watch the videos and YouTube would recommend it more.

It's funny that, with the latest Google API leak, traffic certainly appears to make a difference to SEO success as well. Perhaps that opportunity with YouTube is still there: driving traffic from whatever source you decide – it could be an email list, paid traffic, or something else – to get that initial traction so that people discover your video to begin with. Then YouTube's organic algorithm would take over.

Is that something that you'd still recommend or is there a better practice now?

“No, definitely keep doing that. When I was publishing videos, within the first 24 hours, I would distribute them through email, I was posting on social media, and I would also run paid advertisements as well. I was doing everything that I could within those 24 hours.

Then, the video that was working was already at 5,000 views after a day compared to the one that was never going to work, which only had a few hundred. I would definitely still do that.

Even adding it to articles will help as well. We were combining blog strategy with YouTube strategy. We were also gathering a few views from the blog articles that were linked to the topic.”

How often do you go back and track how your content is doing, benchmark it against other content out there, and tweak it to get better rankings?

“Monthly, for sure – but it also depends on whether it’s YouTube or a blog. On YouTube, as I said, you can really see the performance really quickly. Within those 24 hours, even, I would make changes if they were needed.

For a blog, everything takes time. After 3-6 months of having published something, then I would go back to it just to see if it was not where we wanted it to be ranked-wise, and what we could do to re-optimise it.

Then we track everything monthly. If something has dropped in rankings, we will see what tricks we can do to improve it again.”

Do you sit down at the beginning of a year, maybe with an SEO team, and try to incorporate a content strategy for the whole year as part of what you're delivering for the client? How often will you sit down internally with different teams to determine what you should be doing?

“I always do it once I join a company. I will fully and deeply evaluate that, and then every 6 months I will re-evaluate whether there is something that needs to change.

If not, we will just keep with the same strategy and content calendar that we had so far. But, yeah, more like every 6 months to 1 year I would say. There will be content that needs to be updated, and then we will have a list ready for the next few months.”

When you talk to clients about getting loads of YouTube views, how do you measure success with that? Is it just about views? Do you try and incorporate a link in the description and generate direct traffic from that? Or is it just simply about brand uplift?

“For me, with YouTube, it’s more about brand awareness and brand uplift, because there is so little that you can accomplish when it comes to actual traffic to the website or even conversions.

I feel it wouldn’t be fair to measure success solely on the number of customers that come from YouTube because, at the end of the day, it's a social media platform. People are mostly there to be entertained or educated, but it's hard to measure the fact that you got a customer who came from YouTube.

For me, it's the views, the subscribers, etc. If those metrics keep going up, then it's a good sign that you're doing a good job.”

You shared what SEOs and content pros should be doing in 2024. 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 SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I feel they shouldn't be focusing so much on trying to trick the algorithm. That comes back to what I said in the beginning. At the end of the day, if you have high-quality content, then I feel you will be more successful in the long run, and you will have to make fewer changes.

Don’t only focus on the latest update, because core algorithms changes happen every 6 months and then you have to switch your strategy. Whereas, if you focus on content itself, then you are building for the long term.”

Ana Llorente is Head of Content at Doofinder and you can find her over at Doofinder.com.