Return to basics

Greg says: “Don’t forget the basics.

People tend to pay more attention to algorithm updates, Google document leaks, or ways to use AI to make their job more efficient. Everybody’s thinking about all of these new things to the detriment of handling the basics.

Sure, there have been some algorithm updates but let’s stick to the basics of SEO. Let’s create awesome content that answers customers’ questions, and then optimize it the right way so that Google can quickly and easily tell what it’s about. That is still the vast majority of what you need to do if you want to get visibility.

A lot of people are looking for more complex hacks or silver bullets. If you grind the basics, you’re still going to get great results.”

Does creating content to answer people’s questions come first, before tweaking technical SEO?

“Technical SEO is definitely important, but I wouldn’t spend any time on technical SEO if you don’t have the right content there in the first place. That’s where a lot of people lose the forest for the trees. You’re so worried about all these other things and all the different experts that you’re following. You spend more time doing more advanced things, which would make a difference if you had the content in the first place, but most people are lacking quality content.

A lot of people lose that, even if they’ve been doing it for a long time, because they start going after these more advanced things. Being really good at technical SEO and getting into all the nerdy bits sounds cool, but none of that’s going to matter if you don’t have good content in the first place.”

Why are the basics still the most important part of what an SEO does?

“The basics are the most important part because you can’t do any of the other stuff if you don’t have the basics in place. You have to have a website. You have to have content on that website, and it has to be good content that answers customers’ questions. Then, it’s got to be optimized the right way.

After that, it gets a little more advanced with the site architecture, internal linking, and more technical SEO stuff that you’d get more advanced with. However, if you don’t have a well-constructed website with good content, you’re just wasting time with everything else.

If you’re trying to rank for 100 different phrases, and you’re worried about your Core Web Vitals, page speed, hreflang, etc., but you’ve only got 5 pages of crappy content, none of that other stuff’s going to matter.

People have gotten so into SEO and all the technical bits, coding bits, content planning, content marketing, and all the other things that you can do. They forget the simple concept that you need to have the answers to customers’ questions on your site.

Lately, I talk about giving a website ‘the noob test’. Business owners and marketers are intimately familiar with the website they’re working on and the business, and what it’s about. The things that are there make sense to them. However, what would an absolute noob think on that website?

If somebody has never bought that product or service before, and knows nothing about it, could they come to your website and find all the answers that they need? Would they feel comfortable enough to submit their information through a chat, a text, a lead form, or a phone call?

If they’re calling you because they need to ask more questions, then that means the site’s not good enough. If they land on your site and they don’t feel comfortable because they don’t get the answers they need, they’re going to go find those answers somewhere else. Now, they’re off your website and it’s going to be a lot harder to get them to come back and convert.

The core problem is that SEOs think the site’s great, but they don’t look at it through the lens of an absolute noob. The information might all be there, but it’s 5 levels deep on some sub-menu and there are 3 contextual links to get to the answer. Could a normal person find that answer easily? If not, then that means you need to go back to the basics.

Make it an easy website experience for potential customers, that answers their questions. Everything else comes after.”

Is anything about the basics changing?

“Recently we have the explosion of AI-generated content, which has made some people think they have to worry less about content. In general, people don’t realise that these large language models aren’t actually intelligent. They don’t know what they’re saying, they’re just predicting words.

Most of the people reading this will be in the SEO industry, and they all know that, but the general public thinks that AI is thinking and intelligent, and that it’s writing this content. A lot of people are taking the cost-cutting/time-saving AI shortcut for content and ending up with bad content – or they’re not thinking about how to organise their content. They’re just putting all of this AI word vomit on the website and then moving on to the technical stuff.

Using the noob test, if someone that knows nothing about that product or service comes to the website, they’re not going to find the answers they need – or they’re going be turned off by the weird AI phrasing, which still becomes a problem. It comes back to: if you don’t have quality content on your site, nothing else is going to matter.

The helpful content update has been interesting. They’ve had updates where things have tanked and then come back, and other things have come back and then tanked. The clients that we work with haven’t really been affected by that.

AI overviews could shake things up, but that’s shaking up how search results are presented, not what it takes to show up in search results. The AI overviews are going to come from the AI searching for content, but you still have to have the content for them to discover.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s been almost 20 years and, while lots of stuff has changed, even back then it was about basic marketing. Answer the questions that customers have and that will bring customers to you. Years ago, you put keywords on the page, and you showed up for those keywords. It’s a lot more complex now, but you still need to have the content.”

Is there a good way of using AI to create content?

“For sure. We’ve started using AI for certain types of content. We have a lot of healthcare clients, a lot of attorneys, and a lot of car dealers where you have to be careful because of compliance issues.

If you’re talking about a car and the AI lists the mileage as being 1 mile off, they can get into a lot of trouble with the manufacturer. You have to fact-check. In healthcare and in legal, you definitely don’t want to have anything incorrect.

We do local SEO, so we periodically create informational blog posts about the local area that aren’t purchase-intent content. It’s meant to get the website to show up when people aren’t looking for that product or service, and they’re just looking for information about the area. It functions like a billboard, and it gets eyeballs on the website before the purchase funnel. For that content, we’ve experimented with using AI.

The caveat is that we have an editing service. We use the AI to write the content and then we send it to the editing service so that human editors are fact-checking, grammar and spell-checking, and removing the goofy language that the AI systems use. You have to clean up the obvious AI jargon that’s always thrown in there.”

Is there software or another AI that you can use to clean up AI or do you need a human for that?

“I’m sure that people are building that stuff right now but, to have the quality that you want, you need that human layer. Some people will just vomit out a blog post and post it on the site without really editing it, but most companies with a quality agency or internal content/marketing team will follow the standard process of researching, writing, sending off to an editor, publishing, and then optimizing.

You still have that human editor in there when you’re writing it manually, so you still need it in there when you’re doing it with AI. Now, you’re just not spending all the time researching and writing because the AI spits it out for you.

When you give it to the human editors, it will be good quality content for its intended purpose. I don’t think the AI tools are there yet. We have been testing it for other types of content, but we’re not satisfied with the level yet. I think it’s going to get there pretty quickly, especially now that you can train your own models and get it to be in a specific voice and use specific information. For us, though, it’s not yet ready for anything beyond pretty simple general information.”

Should SEOs not keep track of algorithm updates and perhaps even update our tactics accordingly?

“There are reasons to pay attention to and keep track of them. However, there’s a big difference between people who track the algorithms and pay attention to what’s there in case they need to adjust their strategy and people who are algorithm chasers. Every time there’s an algorithm update, they scramble to fix all their sites, then there’s another major update, your sites tank, and you have to do it all again.

Those types of people are not doing ‘legitimate marketing’, they’re trying shortcuts. They’re doing every little hacky thing that can get quick results. On the white hat/black hat spectrum, they’re pushing the grey to get results quickly.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. There are definitely a lot of people out there who do it well and are successful with it. However, we take a more conservative view for the work that we do with our clients – even those that want to be really aggressive. We don’t want to do anything today where, if Google rolls out an update a month or two from now, it completely tanks all the effort that has been put in.

With the latest helpful content updates, sites will tank and it’s clear that something’s wrong because crappy sites show up on top and the sites that should be ranking show up really low. Then, if you fix the ‘problems’, it swings back 6 months later with the next update.

That’s the situation a lot of people are in. They’re not quite sure what they did or what’s going on. That’s why we try to play more conservatively and predict what might happen in the future based on what we’ve tracked with past algorithm updates. We don’t stray too far into that grey area that might get results right now, but isn’t sustainable over a year or two.”

Does focusing on the basics apply to all types of websites online?

“Definitely. It doesn’t have to be just local, it could be e-commerce, it could be purely informational, it could be a news site, etc. It still all comes down to the basics.

With local SEO, the basics also include your Google Business Profile, which is not related to your website and is something e-commerce sites don’t have to worry about. However, a lot of people ignore the basics on their Google Business Profile. They’ll pick one category when there might be 3, 4, 5, or 10 categories that apply. They’ll load photos in once and then never touch them again.

We’re finishing up a big 2.5-year project studying around 8,000 Google Business Profiles across multiple verticals, and looking at the average last photo upload date by owner. You can upload a photo along with a review or you can be at a business, upload a photo, and tag the business, and it goes to the Google Business Profile image gallery. In that gallery, you can see which photos came from the public and which photos came from the business owner.

The average last photo uploaded by business owners was posted around 718 days ago. Businesses aren’t updating their photos, or they’ll change their hours of operation and not update it. Make sure the right information is there to answer your customers’ questions, regardless of whether it’s on your website, your Google Business Profile, your Google Ads, your Facebook page, or your Yelp profile. It’s pretty shocking how often people get it wrong.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop everything you’re doing and watch my video series on our blog at SearchLabDigital.com. I’m kidding.

If you’re strapped for time, pause for an hour or two at the beginning of the week and look at what you’re doing. A lot of SEOs fall into a rhythm; you know you’re doing certain things at certain times. Pause and look at what you’ve spent time on, and maybe use a time tracker.

Then you can diagnose whether you shouldn’t spend so much time on technical because you still don’t have the basic content stuff right. Maybe you’ve got a content plan that’s going out over the next 3 months, but why are you waiting 3 months to get it there? If you’ve got time to do link building and technical optimizations, that won’t really matter if you don’t have the content in the first place.

A lot of the time, especially in-house, there is no campaign. It’s just a never-ending slog of continually optimizing this website. Spend an hour or two to pause when your mind is fresh. Really consider where your effort is going.

Maybe you’re spending a lot of time worrying about your Google Business Profile, but you should spend more time worrying about links. It’s hard to give a universal answer on what to stop doing because it’s going to be different for every site. If you’re in-house, you’ve only got one site, so it’s a little easier. If your agency or freelance, you have to look at the bulk of your clients. That thing that you need to stop doing may be different for one site than it is for another.

Take a step back and get out of that mental slog of just working and working. Think intentionally about what you’re doing and what impact it’ll have. That’s far more valuable than trucking along and doing the same thing without considering what would have a bigger impact in the long run.”

Greg Gifford is Chief Operating Officer at SearchLab Digital, and you can find him over at SearchLabDigital.com.