Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, recently shared the deck and notes he used to present a remarkable talk at BrightonSEO online on Twitter (I’m not calling it X).
If I were to boil down the main insights from his talk into a few sentences it’d be:
SEOs are taking the ranking advice Google shares in its Quality Rater Guidelines far too literally. Search marketers are trying (in some cases desperately) to tease out any actionable and reportable strategies from our guidance which is designed to be broad and open to interpretation. Our guidelines are supposed to be flexible and adaptable. We do not advocate for a do X to get Y results when it comes to search.
I’d like to point out again that this is my succinct summary of the talk which gets the overarching message across to you, the reader of this article. Danny did not say that word for word.
What do I think he’s trying to tell SEOs?
From my point of view it looks like Google are telling SEOs to take their foot of the gas and to stop agonising about authoring every page with accompanying schema, displaying experience in clearly signposted sections of landing pages and making sure expertise is reflected within the copy of every content page.
And I don’t want to shock you but I do agree with him.
At least in the sense that as SEOs we should first and foremost be concerned with giving our site visitors a great user experience and informative, accurate and insightful content. Once we’ve done all that we should find that most of the E.E.A.T requirements we need to fulfill are already done for us.
Creating user first content should be aligned with Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) anyway, we shouldn’t be treating them as a box ticking exercise. Whilst this is a noble sentiment and one you can share easily when you own Google I believe there’s a problem with this thinking.
You need actionable goals and metrics to define any type of strategy
Try telling your CEO that you’re not too concerned about your main competitor adding industry experts to all their product landing pages and content pages.
Heck, try telling a client that your plan for getting them to P1 in the SERP just requires they produce great, people-first content with no roadmap to improving the overall E.E.A.T signals of their site and individual pages.
These are quite extreme examples but I highlight the point I’m trying to make really well.
When you’re client facing or reporting to internal stakeholders you need to provide roadmaps for improvements and report on progress. Furthermore a lot of the advice that comes from Google is pretty opaque and needs to be moulded into action by SEOs trying to figure out what the guidelines are actually suggesting.
Danny does admit in his talk that this failure was Google’s fault for not being clear enough in their guidelines. He said:
“The gap between what Google says to creators and what creators hear about being successful in Google Search needs to get better. That’s largely on us.
It’s something we’ll be working on. People-first content remains the path to success, but we hopefully can find better ways to communicate this…”
For me I don’t think it makes much difference. At no point has Danny said an analytical, strategic approach to deciphering Google’s QRG is a negative. At most he was suggesting SEOs are focusing too much on the nitty gritty that won’t have a big effect on SERP rankings.
But for me, being able to present a concrete plan to improve a site’s experience and expertise signals though an authorship strategy doesn’t really detract from what Danny is saying. You can take his points on board yet still produce KPI driven SEO plans that your C-suite or client will like whilst working on producing user-centric, great content.
In this case, you can have your cake and eat it.