Think about the user above anything else

Amanda says: “It’s the same as it has been for the last 10-15 years: always think about the user.

Historically, we’ve had things like the Panda update (12 years ago now) that stopped people from focusing on content farms, blog networks, scraping content, and filling the web with low-quality content. Even back then, if you focused on the user, and you wrote for that user and gave them the information they were looking for, you were not going to get caught out by the Panda update.

The same was true with Penguin in 2012. Previously, you could focus on building backlinks just for the sake of building backlinks and gaming the system so that the more you bought, the more link equity you could get, and the better your results would be. However, who was following those links? Was anyone coming through those links and bringing traffic to your website? You weren’t focusing on the user; you were just focusing on numbers. Then, when Penguin hit, you were likely to get caught up in the algorithm update and lose that authority, and your websites would decrease via SEO.

Even back then, you needed to focus on the user. Now, it is even more important. This year, we got the helpful content update and Google was saying that you needed to be creating content ‘by people, for people’. Recently, they changed that to just ‘for people’. They’re saying it’s okay to use AI and lean on it, and they’re not going to penalise you because it is part of what the future is going to be.

Always think of the user. Always think about that customer and whether they are going to get value from that content – whether it’s written by you, written by AI, assisted by AI, or written by somebody else.”

How do you identify who your ideal user is?

“You can utilise user profiling to find out who your user is. That could be through research on your website and looking at your analytics data to find your demographics. It can be as simple as having questionnaires, pop-ups, or quizzes where you ask your customers those questions to bracket them into your audience profiles and audience types.”

Is that also how you should decide what content to create?

“Absolutely. If you have a search function on your website and your customers are searching for content on your website, you know what answers they’re looking for. You know that you should be giving them those answers if they can’t find them already.

If you’ve got it set up in your Google Analytics, you can see all the queries that your customers are typing in. When you’ve got those queries, if they’re already being pushed to a page that gives the answer, you’re already covered. If not, then that’s content that you should be creating for them – to answer those queries.”

Do you prioritise those on-site user queries over opportunities you find through keyword research, even if they don’t have as much search volume?

“It should be a bit of both. If you’ve made the effort and you’ve got those customers to your website (whether that’s through SEO, PPC, social, etc.), they’ve already shown an interest. They’ve clicked on a call to action and they’re on your website. If they are then typing in a search term or query that historically doesn’t have much data yet, that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. It could be a trending topic.

You’re getting that data directly from the user before it’s become popular. You might be able to get that content out first, get it ranking, and beat the competition. Whereas, when you’re finding topics through keyword research, everybody else can find those topics too. You can use your own data to your advantage.”

Can you take user queries from your site and ask ChatGPT to write and publish that content for you, or do you need humans?

“You always need humans. I don’t think human interaction is going away anytime soon. We’ve had the BERT infrastructure in Google since around 2019, which already uses AI to understand language, the nuances between keywords, what the person is searching for, and what answer is being given on the page. Using AI isn’t something new for Google; they’ve been using it for years.

If you are taking a search query and popping it into ChatGPT, and it’s churning out a piece of content for you, just read it. Proofread it and see the quality of it. If it’s robotic and impersonal, without much character to it, then you can start putting in extra prompts to give it character.

Using AI as a starting point to give you the bones of an article, and then using that human interaction to add personalisation and tone of voice to it, is absolutely fine. I don’t want to use robots; I want to use humans. However, the future is AI.”

Are users satisfied with written content or do they gravitate towards video?

“There will be more distrust in written content as AI becomes mainstream because it will become harder to tell if it’s been written by a robot or a human. Users will be wondering whether they are just being given the answer that the AI thinks they want to read because it has already written every single version of said answer – the good, the bad, the ugly – and it’s just giving them what they’ve asked for.

I was talking to some completely untechnical people at the weekend about cookies, and they said they just press ‘accept’ because that’s what they do. Even now, people don’t really understand anything about cookies. The same thing could happen with AI. People might not be able to tell whether content has been written by a human or a bot.

It is becoming more mainstream, and there is a lot more talk outside of our industry about it. As that continues, hearing real human voices (with or without video) will become more popular, as people lose trust in the written word. Then, that could be turned into a transcript for written content as well. Of course, even videos that appear to show real humans talking could be AI-produced, but that’s another issue entirely.”

Is it still SEO if you optimize your content to be seen on other platforms, like podcasts and video?

“SEO already encompasses things like YouTube optimization, and making sure you’ve got your keywords, your transcripts, your descriptions, and your titles done in the right way.

There’s already an element of video and image SEO. This is just the next transition of what we always used to call SEO. It’s always changing; it’s never going to stand still.”

What other marketing channels should SEO be working more closely with and how should they do that?

“I’m a huge advocate for PPC. The terms you can pull out of PPC are real-time. If you are seeing your customer search for something in the afternoon, you can have something written by the evening, answering that query. Utilising PPC data to influence your SEO content strategy is key for me. The data is there, and you’re literally getting it from the horse’s mouth, so you should use it.”

Should SEOs use PPC for testing?

“It does depend. If it is a very low-investment piece of SEO content, such as something where you used ChatGPT to write it and that was as far as it went, then you can absolutely use PPC to test it. As opposed to content where you’re organising interviews with people, you need case studies, or you need to use lots of data sets, and it’s going to be very involved and time-consuming to get it through organic.

If your cost per click suddenly goes through the roof and it’s hugely competitive, you know that putting out a quick ChatGPT answer isn’t going to work. It’s going to need that time and investment. Use the PPC as a testing ground to see what’s out there first.”

Do SEOs need to narrow their focus towards answering users’ questions on their website and maybe seek the initial inquiry phrase traffic from other sources?

“The internet has changed over the years. Now, we think about answering the user’s query and being the solution to problems. There is still a massive space for content that is, not just being produced for content’s sake, but for people to enjoy. You’re not just there to do SEO and answer the question. You’re actually giving something of use or benefit. You might be portraying your brand as nice and fun, or showing that they do something with charity. It doesn’t always have to be focused on SEO; looking at keywords and content, and having that as our main focus.

The internet will become very boring very quickly if all we’re doing is focusing on answering keyword queries. Brands that show their own personality and shine, above and beyond answering the query, will be the ones that succeed. They might be using AI, but they’re showing that there are still real humans behind it.”

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 2024?

“I’m still getting cold emails in my inbox on a daily basis saying, ‘Do you want to buy some blogroll links?’ and ‘Do you want to buy guest posts on these terrible blog pages?’ It didn’t work ten years ago. It’s not going to work in ten years’ time.

If your main focus as an SEO is trying to sell low-quality content, then stop. Stop annoying me, and stop annoying everybody else. AI is likely to be the future, so maybe we’ll start to see emails with, ‘Buy my AI content that I’ll post on my blog’ instead. Cold emailing for guest posts and backlinks is done. It’s over. Stop wasting your time on that one.”

Amanda White is an SEO and PPC Consultant, and you can find her over at AmandaWhiteDigital.com.