Google Explains How To Approach Content For SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the problem of how to approach content for achieving business goals, the wisdom of setting expectations, and observed that it may not matter whether a site is optimized if the content is already achieving its intended results.

Getting The Content Right

Anyone can write, but it’s hard to communicate in a way that meets the audience’s needs. One thing SEOs often get wrong is content, which remains the most important ranking factor in modern search engines.

A common mistake is publishing entire sentences that waste time. I think that happens when writers are trying to meet an arbitrary word count and providing context for the high volume keywords they want to rank for.

Martin Splitt started the discussion by asking how to go about writing content and shared his own experience writing content and getting it wrong because he was writing for himself and not for what the audience needs to read.

Splitt shared:

“…how would I know how to go about content? Because now I know who I want to address and probably also roughly what I want to do. But, I mean, that’s a whole different skillset, right? That’s like copywriting and probably some researching and maybe some lettering and editing, and wow. That’s a lot. I love to write. I love to write.

…But I love having a technical writer on the team. Lizzi is a tremendous help with anything that is writing. I honestly thought I’m a good, reasonably good writer. And then Lizzi came and asked three questions on a piece of documentation that I thought was almost perfect.

I basically started questioning the foundations of the universe because I was like, “Okay, no, this document doesn’t even make sense. I haven’t answered the fundamental questions that I need to answer before I can even start writing. I’ve written like three pages.

Holy moly, that is a skill that is an amazingly tricky skill to acquire, I think. How do I start writing? Just write what I think I should be writing, I guess.”

Writing is easy to do, but difficult to do well. I’ve seen many sites that have the SEO fundamentals in place, but are undermined by the content. Splitt’s experience highlights the value in getting a second opinion on content.

Site Visitors Are Your Inspiration

Mueller and Splitt next move on to the topic of what publishers and SEOs should write about it and their answer is to focus on what users want, encouraging to do something as simple as asking their readers or customers.

Mueller observed:

“I think, if you have absolutely no inspiration, one approach could be to ask your existing customers and just ask them like:

• How did you find me?
• What were you looking for?
• Where were you looking?
• Were you just looking on a map? What is it that brought you here?

This is something that you can ask anyone, especially if you have a physical business.

..It’s pretty easy to just ask this randomly without scaring people away. That’s kind of one aspect I would do and try to build up this collection of ‘these are different searches that people have done in different places, maybe on different systems, and I want to make sure I’m kind of visible there.’”

Set Reasonable Expectations

John Mueller and Martin Splitt next provide a reality check on the keyword phrases that publishers and SEOs choose to optimize for. It’s not always about the difficulty of the phrases; it’s also about how relevant they are to the website.

Mueller commented about what to do with the keyword phrases that are chosen for targeting:

“And then I would take those and just try them out and see what comes up, and think about how reasonable it would be for one of your pages, perhaps to show up there and how reasonable it can be, I think is something where you have to be brutally honest with yourself, because it’s sometimes tempting to say, “Well, I would like to appear first for the search bookstore on the internet.” Probably that’s not going to happen. I mean, who knows? But there’s a lot of competition for some of these terms.

But, if you’re talking about someone searching for bookstores or bookstores in Zurich or bookstores on Maps or something like that, then that’s a lot more well defined and a lot easier for you to look at and see, what are other people doing there? Maybe my pages are already there. And, based on that, you can try to build out, what is it that I need to at least mention on my pages.”

Mueller followed up by downplaying whether a site is search optimized or not, saying that what’s important is if the site is performing as well as intended. Whether or not it’s properly optimized doesn’t matter if it’s already doing well as it is. Some may argue that the site could be doing better, but that’s outside of the context of what Mueller was commenting on. Mueller’s context was a business owner who was satisfied with the performance of the site.

Mueller observed:

“I mean, it all depends on how serious you take your goal, right? If you’re like a small local business you’re saying, ‘Well, I have a website and I hear I should make it SEO, but I don’t really care.’ Then it’s like do whatever you want kind of thing. If you have enough business and you’re happy. There’s no one to judge you to say, “Your website is not SEO optimized.”

Listen to Episode 95 of the Search Off The Record at about the ten minute mark:

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Google’s Advice On Hiring An SEO And Red Flags To Watch For via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Search Off The Record podcast discussed when a business should hire an SEO consultant and what metrics of success should look like. They also talked about a red flag to watch for when considering a search marketer.

Hire An SEO When It Becomes Time Consuming

Martin Splitt started the conversation off by asking at what point a business should hire an SEO:

“…I know people are hiring agencies and SEO experts. When is the point where you think an expert or an agency should come in? What’s the bits and pieces that are not as easy to do while I do my business that I should have an expert for?”

John replied that there is no one criteria or line to cross at which point a business should hire a consultant. He did however point out that there comes a certain point where doing SEO is time consuming and takes a business person away from the tasks that are directly related to running their business. That’s a point at which hiring an SEO consultant makes sense.

He said:

“Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a one-size-fits-all answer there because it’s a bit like asking, when should I get help for marketing, especially for a small business.

You do everything yourself. At some point, you’re like, ‘Oh, I really hate bookkeeping. I’m going to hire a bookkeeper.’ At that point where you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t appreciate doing all of this work or I don’t have time for it, but I know it has to be done.’ That’s probably the point where you say, ‘Well, okay, I will hire someone for this.’ “

SEO Should Have Measurable Results?

The next factor they discussed is the measurability of results. Over more than twenty-five years of working in SEO, one of the ways that low-quality SEOs have consistently measured their results is by the number of queries a client site is ranking for. Low-quality SEOs charge a monthly retainer and generate a report of all queries the site has ranked for in the previous months, including garbage nonsense queries.

A common metric SEOs use to gauge success is ranking positions and traffic. Those metrics are a little better, and most SEOs agree that they make sense as solid metrics.

But those metrics don’t capture the true success of SEO because those ranking positions could be for low-quality search queries that don’t result in the kind of traffic that converts to leads, sales, affiliate earnings or ad clicks.

Arguably, the most important metric any business should use to gauge the effect of what was done for SEO is how much more revenue is being generated. Keyword rankings and traffic are important metrics to measure, but the most important metric is ultimately the business goal.

Google’s John Mueller appears to agree, as he cites revenue and the business result as key measures of whether the SEO is working.

He explained:

“I think, for in SEO, it kind of makes sense when you realize there’s concrete value in working on SEO for your website, where there’s some business result that comes out of it where you can actually measurably say, ‘When I started doing SEO for my website, I made so much more money’ or whatever it is that goal is that you care about, and ‘I’m happy to invest a portion of that into hiring someone to do SEO.’

That’s one way I would look at it, where if you can measure in one way or another the effects of the SEO work, then it’s easier to say, ‘Well, I will invest this much into having someone else do that for me.’”

There is a bit of a problem with measuring the effects of SEO. The effects on sales or leads from organic SEO cannot always be directly attributed. People who are obsessed with data-driven decisions will be disappointed because it’s not always possible to directly attribute a lead from an organic search. For one thing, Google hides referral data from the search results. Unlike PPC, where you can track a lead from an ad click to the sale, you can’t do that with organic search.

So if you’re using increased sales or leads as a metric, you’ll have to be able to at least separate attributable paid search from earnings, then guesstimate the rest. Not everything can be data-driven.

Hire Someone With Experience

Another thing Mueller and Splitt recommended was to hire someone who has actual experience with SEO. There are many qualifying factors that can be added, including experience monetizing their own websites, ability to interpret HTML code (which is helpful for identifying technical reasons for ranking problems), endorsements and testimonials. A red flag, in my opinion, is hiring someone from a cold call.

John Mueller observed:

“Someone else, ideally, would be someone who has more experience doing SEO. Because, as a small business owner, you have like 500 hats to wear, and you probably can figure out a little bit about each of these things, but understanding all of the details, that’s sometimes challenging.”

Martin agreed:

“Okay. So there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this one, but you have to find that spot for yourself whenever it makes sense. All right okay. Fair.”

Red Flag About Some SEOs

Up to this point, both Mueller and Splitt avoided cautioning about red flags to watch for when hiring an SEO. Here, they segued into the topic of what to avoid, advising caution about search marketers who guarantee results.

The reason to avoid these kinds of search marketers is that search rankings depend on a wide range of factors that are not under an SEO’s control. The most an SEO can do is align a site to best practices and promote the site. After that, there are external factors, such as competitors, that cannot be influenced. Most importantly, Google is a black box system: you can see what goes in, you can observe what comes out (the search results), but what happens in between is hidden. All search ranking factors, like external signals of trustworthiness, have an unclear influence on the search results.

Here’s what Mueller said:

“One of the things I would watch out for is, if an SEO makes any promises with regards to ranking or traffic from Search, that’s usually a red flag, because a lot of things around SEO you can’t promise ahead of time. And, if someone says, “I’m an expert. I promise you will rank first for these five words.” They can’t do that. They can’t manually go into Google’s systems and tweak the dials and change the rankings.”

Listen to Google’s Search Off The Record podcast here:

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Google Explains How Long It Takes For SEO To Work via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed how long it takes for SEO to have an effect. Google’s John Mueller explained that there are different levels of optimization and that some have a more immediate effect than other more complex changes.

Visible Changes From SEO

Some SEOs like to make blanket statements that SEO is all about links. Others boast that their SEO work can have dramatic effect in relatively little time. And it turns out that those kinds of statements really depend on the actual work that was done.

Google’s John Mueller said that a site starting out from virtually zero optimization to some basic optimization may see near immediate ranking changes in Google.

John Mueller started this part of the conversation:

“I guess another question that I sometimes hear with regards to hiring an SEO is, how long does it take for them to make visible changes?”

Martin Splitt responded:

“Yeah. How long does it take? I’m pretty sure it’s not instant. If you say it takes like a week or a couple of weeks to pick things up, is that the reasonable time horizon or is it longer?”

John answered with the really old “it depends” line which is kind of overdone. But in this case it really does depend on multiple factors related to the scale of the work being done which in turn influences how long it will take for Google to index and then recalculate rankings. He said if it’s something simple then it won’t take Google much time. But if it’s a lot of changes then it may take significantly longer.

John’s explanation:

“I think, to speak in SEO lingo, it depends. Some changes are easy to pick up quickly, like simple text changes on a page. They just have to be recrawled and reprocessed and that happens fairly quickly.

But, if you make bigger, more strategic changes on a website, then sometimes that just takes a long time.”

Next Stage Of SEO: Monitor Progress

Mueller then says that a good SEO should monitor how the changes they made are affecting the rankings. This can be a little tricky because some changes will cause an immediate ranking boost that will last for a few days and then drop. My opinion, from my experience, is that an unshakeable top ranking is generally possible if there’s strong word of mouth and other external signals that tell Google that the content is trustworthy and high quality.

Here’s what John Mueller said:

“I think that’s something where a good SEO should be able to help monitor the progress along there. So it shouldn’t be that they go off and make changes and say, ‘Okay, now you have to keep paying me for the next year until we wait what happens.’ They should be able to tell you what is happening, what the progress is, give you some input on the different things that they’re doing regularly. But it is something that is more of a longer term thing.”

Mueller doesn’t go into details about what the hypothetical SEO is “doing regularly” but in my opinion it’s always helpful to be doing basic promotion that boils down to telling people that this content is out there, measuring how people respond to it, getting feedback about it and then making changes or improvement based on those changes.

For content sites, a great way to get immediate user feedback is to enable a moderated comment section in which only comments that are approved can show up. I have received a lot of positive feedback from readers on some of my content sites from what’s in the comments. It’s also useful to make it easy for users to contact the publisher from any page of the site, whether it’s an ecommerce site or an informational blog. User feedback is absolute gold.

Mueller continued his answer:

“I think if you have a website that has never done anything with SEO, probably you’ll see a nice big jump in the beginning as you ramp up and do whatever the best practices are. At some point, it’ll kind of be slow and regular more from there on.”

Martin Splitt expressed how this part about waiting and monitoring requires patience and Mueller agreed, saying:

“I think being patient is good. But you also need someone like an SEO as a partner to give you updates along the way and say, ‘Okay, we did all of these things,’ and they can list them out and tell you exactly what they did. ‘These things are going to take a while, and I can show you when Google crawls, we can follow along to see like what is happening there. Based on that, we can give you some idea of when to expect changes.’”

Takeaways:

SEO Timelines Vary By Scale Of Change

• Simple on-page edits may result in quick ranking changes.
• Larger structural or strategic SEO efforts take significantly longer to be reflected in Google rankings.

SEO Results Are Not Instant

• Indexing and ranking recalculations take time, even for smaller changes.

Monitoring And Feedback Are Necessary

• Good SEOs track progress and explain what is happening over time.
• Ongoing feedback from users can help guide further optimization.

Transparency And Communication

• Effective SEOs regularly report on their actions and expected timeframes for results.

Google’s John Mueller explained that the time it takes for search optimizations to show results depends on the complexity of changes made, with simple updates being processed faster and large-scale changes requiring more time. He emphasized that good SEO isn’t just about making changes because it also involves tracking how those changes affect rankings, communicating progress clearly, and continuous work.

I suggested that user response to content is an important form of feedback because it helps site owners understand what is resonating well with users and where the site is falling short. User feedback, in my opinion, should be a part of the SEO process because Google tracks user behavior signals that indicate a site is trustworthy and relevant to users.

Listen to Search Off The Record Episode 95

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Google’s Quality Rankings May Rely On These Content Signals via @sejournal, @martinibuster

The average SEO strategy begins and ends with keyword research, with keyword volume as the deciding factor in what topics will be written about. It’s an outdated approach that fails to resonate with users and no longer reflects how modern search engines evaluate content. Content that delivers a meaningful experience across the factors that matter most to users earns trust, signals quality, and attracts links, shares, and higher rankings.

User Behavior Has Always Been A Part Of Search Ranking

User signals play a central role in Google’s ranking algorithms and the recent antitrust lawsuit against Google revealed how important these are.

One of the exhibits in the recent DOJ antitrust trial against Google featured a confidential presentation called Ranking For Research where Google noted that user behavior signals are noisy and that it takes a lot of data in order to see the patterns.

They wrote (PDF):

“The association between observed user behavior and search result quality is tenuous. We need lots of traffic to draw conclusions, and individual examples are difficult to interpret.”

Another Google document stated that user interaction signals are important to search rankings (PDF):

“…not one system, but a great many within ranking are built on logs. This isn’t just traditional systems, like the one I showed you earlier, but also the most cutting-edge machine learning systems, many of which we’ve announced externally– RankBrain, RankEmbed, and DeepRank.”

Google has used many kinds of user behavior signals for ranking purposes:

• The Google Navboost patent ranks pages based on user interaction signals.
• Google’s Trust Rank patent describes an algorithm that relies on user trust signals to identify trustworthy sites and then identifies sites that are linked from those user-trusted websites.
• Google’s Branded Search patent describes an algorithm that uses navigational queries as implied links for ranking purposes.

PageRank is commonly thought of as just a link algorithm but it’s actually a way to leverage user signals in the form of the links they publish on websites. It’s also a model of user behavior because the linked nature of the web can be used to indicate which sites a user is likely to visit.

Google’s PageRank research paper explains:

“PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior.”

Do Keywords Matter Anymore?

Yes, keyword still matter. But it’s been a long time since exact match keywords were a major factor that determined which sites are ranked. Look at virtually any search result and you’ll see that many top ranked sites do not contain an exact match for the keywords in a search query.

Content strategies that rely on keyword-based hubs or silos should be given a second look. Those kinds of strategies originated in the earliest days of search engines when adding exact match keywords into titles and headings was a sure way to be ranked.  That’s no longer the case, so why are SEOs still stuck with keyword-based strategies that map keywords to a hub and spoke content strategy.

Logical site structure is a part of a quality user interface and makes it easy to find content. Focus on that and interlink in ways that make sense to users.

Try thinking in terms of topics that users are interested in and see how far that takes you.

Write With The Purpose To Be Understood

I’m going to share an advanced concept about writing that helps sentences, paragraphs and entire web pages reach an audience more effectively.

Cognitive Load

There is a scientific concept called cognitive load. In the context of reading, cognitive load is the amount of mental effort used to process information.

For example, sentences with confusing instructions or jargon can take extra effort to process. When the load exceeds a certain threshold, the person’s ability to understand or learn from what they’re reading suffers.

Cognitive Dissonance

I have my own theory that’s similar to cognitive load that I call cognitive dissonance. It’s not something scientific that I read, it’s just my own theory.

Dissonance means a lack of harmony, when sounds clash. Poor writing can be dissonant due to the choice of words that are abstract (lack a clear meaning or have multiple meanings) , using jargon, or simply using words that aren’t commonly understood.

Another source of dissonance is writing a paragraph that rambles rather than builds up to an idea.

Cognitive dissonance causes a reader to lose track of what they’re reading and consequently engage less with the content.

Here’s the same sequence of paragraphs you just read, with an explanation of their purpose:

1. Define the idea: I explain that I have a personal theory

I have my own theory that’s similar to cognitive load that I call cognitive dissonance. It’s not something scientific that I read, it’s just my own theory.

2. Explain my idea with a definition and metaphors

Dissonance means a lack of harmony, when sounds clash…

3. Apply the metaphor to writing:

Poor writing can be dissonant due to the choice of words…

4. Expand the definition to paragraph structure

Another source of dissonance is writing a paragraph that rambles rather than builds up to an idea.

5. The big idea I was building up to: What it all means

Cognitive dissonance causes a reader to lose track of what they’re reading and consequently engage less with the content.

SEOs like to talk about hooks and other little tricks to writing, but good writing is not about tricking the user. It’s about clear communication. It doesn’t always come out right the first time the words spill onto the page. Sometimes it helps to step away and come back to it for the errors in sentence and paragraph structure to become visible.

Crafting Content Around the User Experience

Publishers who build sites around keywords face an uphill struggle obtaining links, and since links remain an important ranking factor, it makes sense that the SEO strategy works together with obtaining links. This is where user experience marketing shines.

Nobody links to a keyword-based site because the keywords make them feel good about the site. Keyword-based sites feel sterile because they are optimized for keywords, not people. That approach also results in a made-for-search-engine website structure. Nothing screams “made for search engines” like sitewide title tags with keywords ripped from Google’s People Also Asked keyword lists.

What I would suggest is to acquaint yourself with who you’re writing for by speaking to people who are interested in your topic, joining some Facebook groups, checking out popular forums, listening to podcasts about the topic, watching YouTube videos about your topic, and reading the comment sections of those videos. This will not only give you an idea of what people are talking about, it will show you how they’re talking about it and quite possibly give you ideas for your business, whether that’s selling things online or writing about a topic

Users Share Experiences, Not Links

Perhaps the best kind of link is the kind created because of a positive experience (learning, usefulness, fun). Scientific research has discovered that experiences motivate sharing and that positive experiences are shared the most.

Insight: Those aren’t just links that people are sharing.  Links from one website to another website or even on social media, are the expression of the experiences people had with a website.  Cultivate positive experiences and people will begin linking and sharing your website.

Insight: Devoting time to the user experience is a pragmatic approach to promoting a website because inspiring site visitors with emotional resonance, a feeling, is a sure way to encourage more sales, more links, and more traffic. And that’s why we optimize, right? To make more money.

Make Visitors Want To Return

• Make your content (even if they’re products) easily viewable from the top of the fold
• Make your content easy to scan (with headings)
• Offer related articles at key points where visitors tend to become disinterested
• Encourage messaging opt-ins

Post-Transaction Experience

Successful entrepreneur Justin Sanger pointed out that everyone knows about the sales funnel, but less well known is the funnel that opens up after the sale. He calls this upside-down funnel the Post-Transaction Funnel. The Post-Transaction Funnel represents all the things you can do to send a signal back to the search engines that site visitors had a good experience at your website. This activity includes:

• Encouraging social sharing
• Cultivating good reviews
• Encouraging word of mouth referrals
• Cultivating relationships with non-competitors in your space

I believe it is a good practice to consider the post-transaction funnel because those are the kinds of activities that tend to cultivate more sales. Post-transaction marketing is something to consider outside of the Classic SEO box.

Watch Justin Sanger Discuss Post-Transaction Funnel

Takeaways: User Experience Marketing

1. User-behavior signals are used within Google’s various algorithms and machine learning systems as evidence of page quality and trust.

2. Logically considered, visitor-friendly sentence, paragraph, page, and site architecture that makes it easy to understand information supports strong quality signals.

3. Content that uses clear, jargon-free sentences and paragraphs that build logically enables readers to process information effortlessly and helps build a better user experience.

4. Content planned around user experience rather than exact-match keywords makes pages feel more human-centered and less like they were made for search engines, which contributes to greater trust.

5. Positive emotional experiences that motivate natural sharing and backlinks act as strong indicators of authority and trust.

6. Page design that includes above-the-fold visibility, scannable headings, related-article prompts, and opt-ins helps keep visitors engaged, active, and returning, reinforcing external content quality signals.

7. Post-transaction funnel actions, such as encouraging reviews, social sharing, and word-of-mouth referrals, feed satisfaction signals back to search engines and strengthen trustworthiness.

It is important to recognize that the foundation of a successful website is the user experience. Even a successful PPC landing page is crafted with the principle of a quality end-to-end user experience, from the layout and ease of data delivery to convenience.

User experience marketing is about moving beyond simple keyword phrase optimization, with a content strategy built on understanding what that content means to the user. Is it important? Is it entertaining? Does it rock, and does it roll?

Relevance is still king, but the definition of relevance is now focused on the user, not your keywords.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Andrii Nekrasov