Arnout says: “My additional insight is user query satisfaction, which means looking at what a user is trying to achieve and get them to that point as quickly as possible.”

You talk about the culmination of content, UX, Core Web Vitals and EEAT coming together. Is it possible to serve all those multiple ranking signals at the same time?

“Sometimes you don't need to. I've seen websites rank really well because they give the user what they want in the quickest possible way.

Let me give you this example. If you have a governmental website, and you need an answer from it, but the article was written by the webmaster and Core Web Vitals isn't that good, but it's the only single point of truth because it's the government website that talks about this legislation, or these rules.

Well even though all the other websites have EEAT, and they've got everything we recommend, they are not the single point of truth. So the government website will win and will outrank the other ones even though it's not the best user experience, but it's the ultimate truth.

I think EEAT and Core Web Vitals are proxies for user experience, but it doesn't mean you need to tick all the boxes. However, if you're competing with other websites, it's definitely something you should work on.”

If you're not going to become the single point of truth for your industry, how do you become the most authoritative point of truth?

“I think we're almost going to go full circle with this, but they need to trust you. I see a lot of websites just chucking things into ChatGPT and then posting it as blog posts. But some of it is not true, right? How can you become an expert with something that isn't true? The most important part is that you publish true things.

After that then you can give an opinion and you need to help people. If you help people, then they’ll reward you by following you or subscribing to your newsletter and help you build an audience. For me, that's a really important distinction.

The problem will be that if you don't understand what your user or target audience needs, then ultimately you won't rank or you will rank less.”

You're talking about solving the query satisfaction and ensuring that you're delivering the right piece of content at the right time for the right user. So how do you know which queries to optimize for?

“I don’t think enough SEOs are leveraging the SERPs. They’ll look at rank trackers and keyword tools, but often they don’t just ‘Google’ it? If the first five results are videos and your blog post ranks number one but has no video? Then you're missing out.

You can also look at the ‘People Also Ask’ questions and it will literally give you what you need to talk about on your page. There are also tools like alsoasked.com that’ll let you do this at scale.

SEOs need to start thinking about are the objectives the user has, and what do you need to do to solve this for the user. You can do this by talking to your customer service team to find out what questions are being asked about your product or your service, or even talking to your potential clients. I always ask my clients how they found me and why they chose me.

If you can get an idea on the ‘why’, then that's what you need to solve, because before they come to you they’ve asked this question to a Search Engine.”

Is there an argument to say that, actually, you should be looking to optimize for questions that Google aren't aware of at the moment and aren't surfacing as suggested questions to answer, and that you should be looking to augment the SERP as opposed to answering questions that already has content existing for those answers?

“That's what I mean when I say to talk to your customer service team or participate in forums in Reddit. Reddit has loads of questions, Quora has some questions. So if you just go in those topics, and you keep an eye on them, you will get a ton of insights on what other questions are there.

What I found is that a lot of the answers in what ‘People Also Ask’ are just not good enough. So yes, they're being answered, but if you actually read the answer that Google show you, it’s often not the best answer you can get. I think there's a lot of room for improvement there, and I personally think that not a lot of companies, publishers or authors are looking at it this way.”

Is there anything that you can do to the content on your website to try to ensure that your answer is surfaced instead of other answers?

“If you look at all the questions you can usually come up with three articles about a topic because of those specific questions. You can then use an index on the page where you can jump to those different parts, then you describe the question as a heading, a quick answer in bold as an excerpt, and then you can expand on the full answer in the rest of the article.

But actually, it first starts with ‘Why is Google servicing this?’ So just click through and you'll find out that if the user experience is really good, and they didn't find anything out there that was better.

Another thing is that, if you see the latest updates, everybody goes, Google favours forums nowadays, like Reddit. But what they're really saying is that the content out there is so optimized, people want to see different sides of a story. Right? So they have a question, and they want to read the pros and cons of everything, and then go, ‘Okay, I get it’, and that is what a forum does.”

Does that mean that an SEO should be attempting to optimize answers on Reddit instead of their own website?

“Yes, if you're talking about credibility. If you're a regular contributor to Reddit and people like your answers, you get a lot of upvotes, that is a very big thing. You're building an audience there. But I think content people should be doing it, not SEOs, because that’s where the audience and their questions are.”

**You’ve said that it's a good idea to answer three questions on a page. Is that the optimum number that you've discovered? **

“No, what I'm saying is if you get all of these questions, you'll recognize that a selection might fit together into this kind of question-thread, which can all be one article. Then the next section might fit into a different article. These articles can be one, two, three or more questions – they just need to fit together cohesively.”

You mentioned that you have a look in the SERP and you see if there are five videos on there, then that will lead you towards creating a video instead of written content. Is that how you should go about selecting the content format?

“Either that or do both by basically writing out the whole video but in chapters under it.

I don't see a lot of people go into the Images tab, because Google will serve us a lot of images, and you'll find a trend in those images, which are the images that a user is expecting.”

Do you feel that many regular users use the Images tab as well?

“Massively, and I find this really interesting. Recently it's become less and less, but previously, when in Core Updates, we would go back to just links in the SERPs, but within two or three weeks we would see image carousels appear, or videos appear.

Why was this? Because people were switching tabs in the SERPs.

If a big enough group switches to the Video tab, then that’s a big signal for the Search Engine and their Machine Learning that this question probably needs videos in the results.”

Coming back to satisfying UX, Core Web Vitals and EEAT. Are there any elements that you try to incorporate in your answers to do that, or do you simply just answer the question as well as you can, and that will ultimately ensure that the UX and other customer experiences are dealt with?

“I think the way to approach this is you should always strive for a leaner page. Nobody likes a slow-loading or cluttered page. So that's like a tick box, it’s now just mandatory to avoid that. Personally I also usually go by the rule that no page should exceed one megabyte.

Secondly, with EEAT, I think it's more important in the way it's written. I see a lot of informational content being written in an almost sales-like way. Search engines can understand when things are written in a transactional way versus an informational way.

An interesting experiment you can do is to search for something, print out all the pages, get 10 people in and get them to order the results by most relevant. What you'll find is that most of the numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 were put in the right order based on the actual content. You need to start measuring how well people are responding to your content. You can get this data yourself by asking ‘Was this helpful?’ at the bottom of the article and giving users the option of a thumbs up or thumbs down.”

Is there anything that needs to be done differently to optimize for Search Generative Experience?

“It's interesting because SGE (Search Generative Experience) has been trained on a supervised data set, which Google has published.

One way of optimizing for it is to become part of that initial training set, because that's how it was initially trained.

The other way is to not take shortcuts. If you follow the rule of answering a person's question and building your brand and your authority, then taking shortcuts will ultimately harm your progress.”

What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“Blatantly putting ‘Also Asked Questions’ into ChatGPT and then copy-pasting the output into a blog post.”

Is there any role for ChatGPT in the assistance of the content writing process?

“ChatGPT is actually extremely friendly, even if it's wrong, but it's posing it as the truth. It's very easy to just publish something because ChatGPT says it's true, but ChatGPT is not intelligent, it's a mathematical formula. So use it as a tool alongside actual sources and proper research. It can help you get ideas, structure an article, spell-checking work, and loads of things, but just don't use it like here's a few inputs, give me 10 blog posts and just post them out there, because it will come back to bite you.”

Arnout Hellemans is a Tech SEO and Analytics Consultant, you can find them over at onlinemarkethink.com.