Sukhjinder says: “My Additional Insight is that to appear in SGE (Google’s Search Generative Experience), you need to know your audience, cater to their search intents, and consider EEAT within helpful content.

We should be doing SEO best practices because these systems, algorithms and new technology are supposed to enhance and help us do the right thing and to produce the content in a way that appeals to users.

What I’ve noticed so far with SGE is that you've got to be doing all the standard best practice SEO things like targeting the topics that you actually have authority and experience in, and producing it in the correct format, as well as having solid technical SEO, content marketing and link building, etc.

You might already be appearing on page one for certain queries, but with SGE you need to be a bit more ‘exact match’ and specific with that topic and the way that you're optimising it - similar to rich snippets, Q&A content, and answers.

With regards to knowing your audience, targeting their search intent, and looking at EEAT and helpful content, Google is a bit more open about what's involved in them and what we need to do, which is great.

I've personally maintained that most of the best practice stuff hasn't changed that much apart from a few helpful additions, which are mostly just Google disclosing something that they recommend that you need to do. The Quality Rater Guidelines are stuff that's given us a hint of the bigger guidelines that Google’s Quality Rater’s use to rate websites, but now they've had to be more specific.

I feel like I've been doing the right stuff all along, but now I'm just adding to it.”

What intrigued me the most about your answer was your emphasis on the exact match. What you're saying is the importance of delivering a piece of content that's highly relevant for the target keyword phrase, but obviously keeps the audience in mind as well.

Then, that long-form blog content of several thousand words, trying to cover a whole subject, isn't necessarily as effective as it was a few years ago, and perhaps shorter pieces targeting very specific pieces of intent are more effective in 2024 and beyond.

“I think there's a place for the shorter, more concise topical pieces that are showing up or being preferred in the first three recommended snippets on an SGE result versus the longer form stuff. It's similar to how Google Chrome users will jump to a place in a long-form post as an answer to a question or rich snippet question specifically, and I think you can also achieve that exact match optimisation within skyscraper long-form content.”

Does it matter whether it's incorporated in part of a long piece of content or a singular page?

“I've not found that it matters so far, it just tends to be the snippet of text within a piece, whether it's long-form or short, and that tends to work alright.”

How do you define who your audience is, what they want, who they are, and how do you match your content to meet their intent?

“If you're doing content marketing, the first place that I’d start looking is at your ‘owned’ data such as your Google Analytics, your Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc. Look at the kind of the queries that people are using pre-click, and then post-click. If you've got search functionality on your site, have a look at what people are searching for on your website, what they're landing on, and how they're engaging with the results.

You can then talk to your clients, and if you've got salespeople within the organisation you're working with, anyone that knows their clients inside and out. This works really well for starting a campaign and within that kickoff period where you're establishing relationships, getting people on board and getting buy-in from people that you can later on do some excellent content marketing with by picking their brains for ideas and making them advocates, etc. Asking them who they’re talking to who tends to convert? What are these clients like in Europe versus Asia versus the Americas, etc.? How do they engage? Is it more formal? What kind of queries are they using?

Then you can use third-party data, which I tend to do on the larger campaigns, such as survey data and social media listening tools, and tools like Similarweb too.

By talking to clients, and using third party data, you can then build that picture of the personas, the job titles, what they're likely to search for, are they technical or non-technical? You can then work out how they fit in that buyer's journey, pre-click, and then post-click through the website, and how to cater to specific people.

This can all seem a bit daunting, but when you go through that fact-finding process, which I tie up in a kickoff conversation, keyword research-intensive content audit, and content marketing strategy, it all comes out nicely, and I think it's really essential, generally speaking, in SEO as well as targeting for the new SGE and helpful content.”

When you talked about the importance of having conversations with people, like informed salespeople in organisations that understand who their customers are and what they want, I was going to ask you what kind of questions do you ask these salespeople? But then you suggested questions. Who are you talking to? How do they convert? How do they engage? You also ask the salespeople for their opinions on what content these customers are asking for and where the missing opportunities are.

“They have quite a lot of content at their disposal, PDFs, marketing material, etc, which I’ll try to repackage. We also try to ask them what are they doing throughout that journey. What questions are they asking? What kind of documents are they referencing? What do they need? What does that persona's job title need to then make a put something or decision together package together to then get that approved by their superiors? What is that content entailing?

We’ll then look at how we can package that for them on the website, if there is a common persona, like an Acquisition Manager or a technical person, and what kind of technical documentation they’ll use. Even if it's offline, try to package it and make it as easy as possible.”

Do you get other people within an organisation to record content for the organisation?

“I have done a couple of times through interviews and because that tended to be an easy way to get answers out of them and in a conversational way. But most of the time I've deferred to content writers and marketers to do that because they do it best. I’ve found that they can then write up a blog post as a result of all of that.

With a couple of content writers that I've worked with, they've asked survey questions, and it's a lot of standard content questions in there as well as specific ones for their role and the type of content we'd need producing from them. That's also proved to be a really useful technique for getting that information in an informal way.”

How do you define the optimum opportunities that you need to create content for? Because obviously, you can create content for users, but you might be missing opportunities. So, how do you try to ensure that you're plugging those gaps and creating content for the best, optimal opportunity?

“It's good to use tools like SEOmonitor or Semrush for keyword tracking and keyword research. With those tools I can see what positions and what type of positions a set of keywords are ranking for, for example, is it rich media, or is it just text? This is a good source of research to figure out. Knowing if image results are going to help with the best engagement for this particular type of informational search versus text results is a really good place to start.

I've got a little table that I use where I've got the buyers’ journey for a website versus the types of content that tend to do well in that stage, like awareness, consideration, convert. Obviously, awareness is quite a lot of content, and then you've got a consideration specifically and convert which are things like white papers and those specific documentations for those types of personas that need to package something up, where it's not an e-commerce client to get a decision, like that brochure type documentation. Then it’s retention and advocacy where we're using things like social media, emails, podcasts, etc.

It's a combination of that data versus the stuff that I already know and tried to categorise. But the danger of that is to not stick to that script all the time, and just to use it as a guide and change it up, depending on the client and the industry.”

Where does EEAT fit into all of this? Do you methodically go through each piece of content and try to incorporate as many elements as possible?

“In terms of appealing to these different factors in EEAT, I get exposure to it in the content audit to figure out if we're trying to make sure that there's enough information about authors and the entity and the actual organization/brand, etc.

We're working with a client who's already done a brilliant job of having author bios. They’re the experts in the particular industries that they cater to, they've got their degrees listed, their qualifications after university, the different forums that they contribute to, their socials etc. They then clearly list their expertise in the industry. They’ve also all got blog roles where they've got specific blog titles, even if not all of them at the moment relate to the topics that they are experts in.

It's my job to figure out if they've got a good bio, and the blog role is 100% match. Maybe if they're an expert in one industry, they shouldn't be talking about another unless it ties in somehow. So I go through a checklist for that, and then similarly, with the brand overall. What is that brand known for? Are they experts in the financial sector? Are they mainly talking about that? Or are they talking about other industries where they're not as authoritative, and they might not be performing as well? I've got that whole EEAT checklist in the content audit, and then kind of ticking off the other bits.”

Are SEOs or marketers guilty of adding too much as opposed to having too little?

“On a personal level, it is harder to be an advocate for SEO. What am I actually good at talking about, what I'm actually good at within SEO and what lane do I need to stay in? It's not hard and fast rule and people are going to talk about different topics, but how is that being perceived by Google? Try to stay in a lane whilst adding to that and trying not to veer off too much.

It reminds me about one of the earliest things that one of my managers told me about producing blogs. They asked me what are you actually good at talking about and if somebody did a Q&A with you now, at the end of the conference, would you be able to answer questions about this?’. They then followed it up by asking about the audience I'm trying to cater to. If I couldn't answer that, I'd just go back to the drawing board with this idea and spec it out fully.

So, knowing the audience again, and that also that authoritative topic. What are you actually good at talking about? And try to stick with that. Because then if you do, over time you’ll get known as the ‘financial guy’ or ‘the carriage door guy’ or whatever you’re an expert in your niche at, and I think that's what really Google wants.”

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

“I would have said AI produced long-form content that doesn’t have the human factor added to it, and not editing and making sure the facts are okay.

I also keep coming back to not keeping up-to-date with the satisfaction of your clients and their knowledge about the SEO industry. You should be trying to have regular check-ins with them. Typically, if you're an agency, you might miss a few things and a few cues, like a client wasn't happy with this thing or they don't know where you stand on AI at the moment.

Aim to catch up with them to figure out your client is happy with the current strategy, and are you able to update it based on the industry changes at the moment, and are you communicating effectively to the client all of these changes, what it means to them in a positive way, and how we're going to basically exploit these changes and improve on things.

It goes back to client relationship management and building, maintaining that, and reassuring them that we're on the right track.”

Sukhjinder Singh is a Freelance SEO Consultant at I Do SEO.