Rad says: “My additional insight is to prioritize value over sheer SEO. This means focusing on offering unique added value that meets user intent. Only after that, should you worry about Google.

Work on improving your site, grow it and provide that additional value that the users want or may want, or you don't even know they want, but they will benefit from instead of obsessing with SEO.

I've just seen too many SEOs grinding this final, last technical SEO bit that they're trying to iron out on the website. And sometimes those small tidbits are so peculiar, that they don't really bring much even after they're fixed. So think of the bigger picture and think of the user.”

Has that always been your point of view? Or have you changed your mind over the last few years?

“I've been in SEO for so long that I've been looking at it from a pragmatic point of view, which is sometimes not necessarily focused on the user.

Obviously, in cases where websites have some bigger fish to fry in terms of benefiting from something you can actually fix on the website from an SEO standpoint. The site is a short way to prioritise your work.

But then Google is showing us time and time again how much the user is important to the algorithm and to Google itself that I've put that on a pedestal out there. And even before that, if we've been working towards benefits for the user, it's usually been a win.”

Why is working on improving the site better than obsessing about SEO?

“Google is extremely smart and it's becoming smarter and smarter over the years. So even if you leave some things out, especially some peculiar SEO tidbits or technical tidbits that you would fix because they're somewhere at the back of your head or popping up in the audits that you do for it with some crawlers, they're sometimes not things that would be beneficial for the user, or they would actually yield any good results that you can get in terms of traffic or the actual benefits of SEO.

With my approach, when you put the user first and the functionality of what the site offers to the user, as the first and foremost KPI in your strategy, you're also bringing up a lot of business value as collateral to this approach.

SEO, as much as you can agree, is all about traffic and all about visitors visiting your site. It's not necessarily what the business gets from SEO, and earns from SEO for the business, and I don't think it should be.

Businesses benefit from SEO in different ways, mostly from a monetization perspective. So having more traffic is great. But if this traffic isn't converting, then it's just a waste of your server resources, essentially.

If you're thinking about the user and bringing the additional functionalities or added value to the website that users will benefit from, and thinking how to give them something that they will buy or they will use and retain on the website, then you're increasing your chances that they will convert so users are good to have but what you want are clients.”

You say the SEO elements on a website can be imperfect. Why is that?

“Well, they can be. If you make mistakes in your canonicals, Google will probably figure it out. If you leave some index bloats on the website, Google will probably ignore it. Google is just smart like that.

I need to emphasize that it is not to say, to just completely forget about them, it's good to know and remember about these things, but just choose what you're actually implementing. As SEOs, it's our job to make the website as good as possible for Google to crawl and index.

Google is very efficient and very fluent in crawling and indexing. If there is a tiny bit of mess on the website it probably won't harm you that much, and fixing it, as I have said, might not always be productive.”

So you're essentially saying that, as long as you choose a decent modern CMS, then that should be automated enough to deliver a sufficient standard of SEO that Google was comfortable with what your page in your site is about, and you shouldn't necessarily worry too much, technically, if that's the case and focus more on users?

“Essentially, yes, although I would add one more bit to it, just to do basic optimization. Because if you get a client for SEO, you provide basic optimization, clean up whatever is the worst, and funnel your resources into more important things, but remembering all the other stuff that is left on the website, then you're probably good to go.”

What's an example of what you see is the worst?

“Well, so for instance, when you have a very big website, and you're fighting with a lot of index bloat, I would probably prioritize some things that will take care of most of it, and probably leave out the rest. While this ‘rest’, in an example here, would just take a lot of time to either identify or fix or sometimes when you don't have access to a website, which is quite often the case with agencies, sometimes clients don't even implement those things, because they would be too expensive for their dev teams. I think this is totally fine.

I know SEOs who would not make peace with this, with this approach, where something is outstanding still on the website to fix, they would just nag the developers and the client to get it fixed. But I just find it fine.

Essentially, if you get any website on the internet, you'll probably find some tiny mistakes in terms of SEO. And this is fine. Google has been saying that similar to my approach, so far with prioritizing the resources instead of focusing on the small things, trying to advise on what we can build on the website or create on the website that is better than the competitor is good for the user. That just works so much better, in my opinion.”

You also say that if your site is not useful, or does not deliver a truly unique value, then it might be throttled and suffer in the long term. So how do you provide that truly unique value?

“It depends on the industry and the type of website that you're working with, or you're providing SEO for.

Let's take an example, of an e-commerce website that sells shoes. That is pretty much one of those standard campaigns where you optimize, create content and build links. Usually, it works. But just from this mindset of what I'm mentioning, what would be the super additional functionality that the website could offer that users will probably really enjoy and would be useful for the users that may be competitors don't have?

Just off the top of my head, it could be a tool where a user photographs their foot next to a piece of paper, like A4 piece of paper, and it just calculates what size of shoe or what types of shoes would be the best for that user. That would be a super useful functionality, way above average in terms of competitors, and something that I'm sure would get traction and perhaps even get your free links, and all that.

I think with that you just have to be creative and think outside of the box while also putting the user first, striving for this extra functionality and just delivering it.”

Do SEOs need to keep on top of what AI is doing and use AI as much as possible?

“I think everyone, SEOs, marketers, site owners, and developers should find the balance between automation and personalization. If you rely solely on AI, that is against Google's guidelines, because they want you to provide experience and additional stuff.

I would say that generally you should stop obsessing over AI developments. It's moving so fast and it's difficult to really keep track of this and stay on top of that I think it would just burn out your energy.

It's much better to master a few useful tools than just try all of them that come out because that's counterproductive and just wastes a lot of your energy.”

Are SEOs and digital marketers a little bit guilty of loving to stay on top of absolutely everything, and researching everything, even though it's not something they're necessarily going to use within their day-to-day activities over the next six months?

“I think it's a fair enough criticism. Most of the SEOs that I know tend to have this ‘shiny object syndrome’ where they see something new come out, and they run and test it. This is good but you also need to prioritize your time and estimate what might be useful for you, and what you can use.

It is good to be oriented in the news and anything that comes out that is interesting, or is getting some traction, and evaluate how this can help you. But just don't try to try everything.

I read somewhere that there are a lot of AI tools coming out every day that it's just physically impossible and not feasible to keep track of everything.”

What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive, or something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I think SEOs shouldn't be obsessing overly about sheer Technical SEO. If you have a choice between, fixing everything that Screaming Frog or Sitebub show you as a mistake or a warning, you will be wasting a lot of time trying to nail everything and have it all in green, because I think that would be very counterproductive. You'd be spending hours of your time analysing it, hours of developers' time or your own while doing the implementation.

Essentially, a lot of these things for Google would be just a confirmation of what Google already knew and had implemented algorithmically for your website. So don't waste time. Don't obsess about the smallest things in SEO because a lot of them are not important. Focus on what's important and focus on the user instead.”

What's your process for deciding which technical improvements are the ones to prioritize?

“I have three elements that I take into consideration: how impactful the issue is, how difficult it is to implement it, and how much potential it has to bring revenue or unblock the site to bring some revenue or traffic.

So how big, how costly to implement and how much money it can essentially bring. These three elements will give you a good framework to prioritize all your work.”

Rad Paluszak is Co-Founder and CTO at NoN Agency, and you can find them over at non.agency.