engagement / structural content elements

Creating content that ranks well in Google is easy. It's creating high quality content that's hard.

And this I think is where a lot of SEOs get tripped up. They feel like in order to rank well in Google, they have to create high quality content.

So let me tell you what kind of content Google does rank, why you should still create high quality content anyways, and how we do it. The truth is Google's algorithm is terrible at assessing the quality of content.

They have no idea if your content is factual or accurate. They can't tell if your insights are profound or helpful.

The closest they can do is approximately measure how well your content satisfied the intent of the searcher. From user behaviour data, they can get a rough idea of whether or not the searcher was satisfied with the content you created.

But the only thing Google's algorithms really good at is detecting relevance. How relevant is your content to the search term?

And modern AI tools make it fairly easy to create relevant content that satisfies the searcher's intent...

the H1 or the title of the article and any smaller secondary terms are in H2s or subheadings. To satisfy user intent, you need to increase engagement on this page.

Best way to do this is with structural elements like a table of contents, tables, charts, graphs. You can make infographics with Gemini or gamma app.

And as long as the website you're publishing the content to has enough authority to rank for the term you're trying to rank for, the content will rank well even if the article is full of hallucinations and inaccuracies. That just doesn't matter to Google's algorithm, which is why many people have started automating this process completely and just spamming AI content.

It's because it works. But if you care about your brand at all, you shouldn't do it that way.

If you care about your brand at all, you need to make sure your content is high quality. Just know you're not doing that for Google.

You're doing that for your users, for your perspective customers. Fortunately, while this does take longer, it's still incredibly efficient...

the Claude is able to speak on behalf of the brand. That brand ambassador alone will get us a long way, but we'll still need someone in the organisation to review the content, at least at first.

For that first piece of content, if you have very high quality standards, it's not uncommon to have 20 or more edits. But here's the key.

We don't just make the edits to that piece of content. We update the brand ambassador to make sure we never need to make those edits again.

We'll either update the existing documents or we'll make a new document called something like Crucial Content Guidelines. After just a few iterations of this, you have a well oiled machine that can produce high quality relevant content that still satisfies search intent.