Michał says: “I can see so many people sleeping on money – having a huge authoritative domain, but not publishing enough content. That's a huge mistake.”

Sleeping on money. Is it not comfortable? Is it too hard?

“It's about the policies and following brand instructions, trying not to hurt anybody – while leaving a lot on the table. There are a lot of chips on the table, especially after recent updates where big pages are growing bigger.

They basically receive the proper SEO snowball effect in organic traffic, and I see them hesitating about publishing not 20 posts a year but 20 posts a week. That's definitely doable with their crawl budget and their indexation pace. They could do it, but they are not, and I don't know why.

There are probably many different things that cause this, but we should definitely try to break it down and maybe demystify them.”

Sounds good. How do you know if you have a strong authoritative domain? What metrics do you use?

“Well, obviously, it's about backlinks, it's about the traffic you have already and the coverage of the topics that are within your niche. You can clearly say that Majestic has authority in SEO. You can clearly say that HubSpot has authority in marketing and, most likely, pages that are in their own niches can say that they already have authority.

Take a five-year-old domain that’s still in business, and still getting organic traffic from their niche keywords and branded keywords. If that's the case, you are definitely eligible to rank for so much more than you're ranking for right now. The only keyword you cannot rank is the keyword you do not answer on your website, basically.

With the algorithms these days, having a big domain is a huge benefit that is so often overlooked. Traffic, backlinks, even Citation Flow, Trust Flow, DR, whatever you call it – any metric that tells you about strength is fine.”

Is there one key, most important metric that you look at or is it a combination of all things?

“I personally look at traffic because it's like the outcome of having backlinks, the outcome of having authority, and the outcome of having topical coverage. I look at a traffic share, basically.

The more traffic you have, the more you can have. If you look at your top 10 competitors and find yourself in the top 5 or top 3 in terms of the traffic share, then you can call yourself an authority and grow bigger and bigger.”

If you have determined that your domain isn't as authoritative as you want it to be, how do you make your domain name more authoritative?

“There are two paths to doing this and both can be done simultaneously. The first one – the fundamental one – is obviously building backlinks. You can start with trying to acquire backlinks that are common across your competitors, which means that they will be the easiest to tackle. If they could get them, you could probably get them pointing to your domain too.

Plus, covering all the topics in your niche to build topical authority. I can see that only when there's a synergy of these two going in parallel – getting traction in backlinks and getting traction in content – it's basically a fast track to building authority in your niche. That's how you can bridge the gap.”

Okay, well, let's say that your domain name is relatively authoritative. You advocate publishing as much as you can. What do you mean by that? How much are you talking about?

“Oh, really as much as you can. It's mostly about lowering your quality levels to push something to production. When you try to only publish content that is 100% up to your quality standards, you will end up publishing once a week, which is definitely not enough. There is a hack that can help you deliver only high-quality content that is visible to real users while still testing a lot and publishing a lot.

There is a small window between when a page is being indexed when a page is getting traffic. You have a couple of weeks, maybe 2 months, between your blog post being indexed and when you start getting real traction – let's say hundreds of people reading it from Google. You have that window to actually figure out whether you just posted an article that is getting traction and it's not quality enough, so you can quickly rewrite it to be quality enough.

This way, you are able to publish hundreds of pages, index them, see which ones are getting traction, and spend quality research and quality analysis only on those which are getting traction.

Otherwise, you will hit and miss and prepare, let's say, 10 super-quality articles but only 5 will get traction. That means you wasted time on the 5 that are not getting traction because of incorrect research or not having a strong enough domain or some other issues that would be found out during the audit.

That's the trick. You publish hundreds and then you see which ones are getting traction and then spend your expensive editorial time only on those that are getting traction.”

Interesting strategy. But is it not possible to do some great keyword research, do some great competitor research, analyse the SERP to see what's ranking, and then – before you even write anything – be confident in what is likely to get traction?

“Traction for you means two different things because there can be traction in a specific SERP, so you can see that there is a demand. People are writing about it. People are reading, and are crazy hyped about a certain topic, but you may end up in a position where you will never get traffic from that article because, for example, you are too weak to take over this keyword or you don't have the topical authority in this area, or whatever.

It's a good idea to test it first before you put massive effort into making this piece 100% aligned with your quality guidelines. I have even seen people throwing some keywords at a blank page in display: none just to see whether Google picks it up at any position or not. If yes, then it means you have enough authority. If not, then obviously you skip that topic and try it with another one.

I wouldn't be an advocate for that sort of shady technique. I would probably lower the standards to make them halfway, in terms of quality, and see if they start getting to position 30, 40, 50, or sometimes they will climb up to 20. When they start getting organic clicks, it's like an alert on Slack for your editorial team. You have a new task. It's time to rewrite this page to actually meet these quality standards.

This is how brands that are really cautious about publishing a lot of content can get rid of that risk of people seeing content of theirs that is not extremely great, right? If no one is visiting your page, it's fine to have this page sitting there but, when it starts getting traction, it becomes a liability that the editor should jump on and raise the bar.”

Is there a certain number of new articles per week that Google is happy indexing?

“It all depends on the website that you are publishing on. I would basically be speaking out of the blue, because there is no such universal number. In general, I would publish as much as I can until I see a slowdown in indexation because that means I hit the ceiling.

Before that, you will never know. It’s like querying Google’s Search Console API, you never know when it will be too much because they don't specify that number. You need to find out your number for your website.”

Got you. Okay. So, you keep a close eye on how many pages are being indexed and you make sure that you don't publish any more than that number, which is fairly unique for you.

“Yeah. If you see a slowdown, there is no point in publishing faster because they are not going to be indexed anyway.

However, the more you publish and get indexed, the more crawl budget you will receive because if the page is indexed and starts getting some traction in Google, they will evaluate your website as a little bit better. If you are a little bit better, you deserve a little bit more crawl budget, so it can speed up with time.”

So, let's talk a little bit more about the type of content that you write quickly; the imperfect content that you just want to get published. Is this generated using AI? Do you use primarily humans to create this content? And is there any particular length that you tend to aim for? What are the core aspects of this? It sounds almost like a minimum viable piece of content that you're producing.

“I always start with reverse engineering of the SERP. Always. Because it gives you all these numbers. It gives you the length. It gives you the structure. It gives you the topics. It gives you entities. It gives you questions to answer.

When you use the proper research prior to writing, you can even execute it in a large language model and push through the humaniser tools that will get rid of these GPTisms like ‘delve into’, ‘embark on a journey’, and ‘fasten your seatbelts’, right? These are the trigger words you don't want.

That will be my process. Go to the SERP, and check what's ranking – what are the common elements of what's ranking and what actually makes these pages rank compared to the others? When you gather these few points of information, then you turn them into prompts and then humanise. The value for money is really high in such a process.

Obviously, if you are a big brand, you cannot push it like that. It will probably require a little bit more time. But, when I hear that someone can only publish 50 posts a year, it means that it's a ridiculously slow process. So, there is a lot of time to save and still maintain quite good quality.

Even writing one post a day with a single writer means that they have 8 hours, which is plenty of time to do the research, do the writing, and basically prepare quality enough posts to be published right away.”

In terms of how you determine whether or not that article needs to be augmented, what you will do is you'll look at, first of all, whether the article has been indexed. Secondly, perhaps, if it's ranking on the third or fourth page in Google, then you'll have a look to see if it's starting to get traffic and those are indicators that it's probably worthwhile improving that article.

If so, how do you go about enhancing it?

“I would put in an expert, basically. That's the moment to involve an expert in the article. These starter articles can be written by either AI or a generic writer who is relatively cheap but okay with grammar, okay with structure, and okay with doing research. These generic writers can be a starter point.

But when you start seeing that this article is ranking 30-40 it means that it's going to get there sooner than later. So, you can already start thinking about who may be the one to turn it into a masterpiece.

You have the time window between this moment of position 30-40 and the first clicks to actually get this article enhanced by a real expert with some EEAT factors and so on to put on the page. Then, you can sign it with your name, and you will be like, ‘I'm fine with it.’ When you, as a business owner, say that you are okay with this content to be signed by you, then it means that it's enhanced.”

So, you've shared what SEO should be doing in 2024. Now let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. So, 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 wish I could say that they shouldn't be spending time exploring large language models, but that's not true. They have to be doing it. Even though it seems counterproductive, at the beginning, they have to do it. What they should definitely stop doing (if there is anyone that's still doing it), is acquiring crappy backlinks.

These days, when we have so many websites devalued in algorithmic updates, with penalties and so on – even if you acquire a backlink and it kicks in for a little while, you cannot expect that it will be kicking you up for a long time because it'll get devalued sooner than later.

I would say that it’s really not a good idea to spend your time acquiring these types of backlinks. I would consider spending time on making a network and, based on those relationships, start acquiring backlinks from real businesses and real websites that are clear about what they are.

For example, our website is a SaaS product, it has a blog, and it has traffic and an established position. That's something we should do instead.”

Michał Suski is Head of Innovation at Surfer, and you can find him over at SurferSEO.com.