SEO Expert Insights: April 2023 News Round-up

Another episode of our SEO Expert Insights, hosted by our Co-Founder, James Owen.

In this April news roundup James delves into how SEO may look in the next decade of search, and the different areas expected to evolve. Moreover, James touches on the Google April 2023 Reviews update, changes to Google Helpful Content Guidance and continues with AI talk, as we factor in Google’s John Mueller say on the topic.

Video Transcription

Part 1: How Will SEO Change In the Next Decade – James Owen’s Predictions

Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is my own predictions on how SEO change over the next decade.  This piece of content I wrote for our own blog and it basically goes through the changes that we’ve been seeing.  It’s an interesting piece of content because we’ve had a huge amount of updates and turbulence in the SEO industry over the last twelve months.  We’ve had Google updates, Google Bard, and ChatGBT being rolled out, so things have shifted quite quickly.  These are my predictions that I wrote around the end of April, so let’s dive right in. 

The first area I’m going to talk about is predictive SEO analytics, and this is really cool I think.  Let’s say you are involved in an industry that promotes events or to does it to any event that happens on an annual basis, like Eurovision or Cheltenham Festival, or bit further out with a World Cup, and you need to maybe build a website or update content about the event.  You can look at past event data through Google keyword tool, SEMRush, ahrefs, and you can even look at WaybackMachine to see what your competitors are doing last year or the last couple of years and basically tailoring the user experience to what the users are expecting to see.  So essentially tailoring your content to what users going to want and there’s huge amount of data for you to make your website kind of work in that way, which is really cool.

Voice search has come on leaps and bounds.  I think as people evolve we have a search at the moment for people who want to speak to it for convenience.  This is a stat from pwc.com, it’s a table of information, essentially different types of search queries or types of searches that people do.  I certainly use Voice Search for writing an email or if I’m writing kind of specification, or maybe using Google Voice Search if I don’t know how to spell word or something.  So I’m using it like that and also trying to find local restaurants or reviews for restaurants.  Voice search will continue to evolve and I think we’re going towards that kind of medium, moving on. 

Okay, so hybrid content creation. 16 years ago when I started in SEO, we were still writing keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. tags in the head section of the website just to let Google and other search engines know what basically the page is about, what keywords we want to target, and what keywords we found for we’re going to search when someone types in a search query. Now, 16 years on, things have massively changed. We’ve got the EEAT principles, for example. When we’re doing searching in Google before we write content, what content is Google actually featuring?  We need to ensure that the content we’re writing matches what Google is kind of looking for to display the SERP.  So this is only going to continue evolve. If you aren’t going to be doing those sort of things, with the EEAT principles, looking at the SERP and what Google is displaying right now, I think you’ll be falling behind and losing traction.

Next thing to talk about is visual search engines in terms of the imagery (I’ll talk about videos in a minute).  But essentially how people are searching and how people want to view their results are evolving.  It’s no longer just text based, and very much a multimedia SERP. So assuring that you’re following the basic principles or optimising your images has never been more important.  Again, this is the multimedia side of the SERP is only going to continue to evolve.

AI, I talk about this quite a lot on the SEO Expert Insights. I talk about Google Bard, ChatGPT and the emergence of those kind of technologies.  For me, this is only going to start.  They are going to get a lot more experience, they’re going to get brighter, more intelligent, and for me as a business owner, it’s about what can we enhance to help us with our clients efforts, with more in depth data analysis?  So it’s an exciting time for sure, and AI isn’t going anywhere.  It’s all about enhancing, taking advantage of this technology.

Next thing to discuss is Local SEOLocal SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank on the 1st page of Google for a search term and geographic location that is relevant to your business..  Super important if you’re on a local business, or if you’re a nationwide business but have local branches, it’s super important to have a local strategy.  Users are now doing a lot more local searches.  SERP has changed massively over last kind of decade.  Even the last 12 to 24 months has changed massively.  Essentially, ensuring that you’ve got a solid SEO strategy for local search in place as users are doing a lot more searches on their mobile, voice search (that we mentioned before) with ‘Where is a local Thai restaurant? curry house?’, or whatever it may be, and ensuring that your local SEO strategy is in line with how people are searching.

Video content, as I said, with the content creation of a multimedia or image search, is only going to continue. For us, Video now as a medium is huge.  Users have changed their habits, how they’re actually viewing their content. Now it’s video they view on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, so on and so forth.  The way that people are actually taking on board video now is on Netflix, Disney etc, and they’re literally watching it when they want to watch it, as opposed to when it’s kind of ‘online’ (ie. Live), let’s say.  So it’s about video engagement, ensuring that video marketing is correct and ensuring that the videos are optimised for the best reach.  So it’s only going to continue to evolve.

The last thing to discuss is always the wild card, always online, always on social media, and we get asked by clients all the time; is SEO dead?  My response always has been, and I truly believe it, no, SEO is not dead.  Has it changed? Absolutely. Of course it has.  It’s evolved massively.  It’s got a lot more intelligent. Google 16 years ago were very primitive; what they use, machine learningMachine Learning is the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. and the amount of data they were using. Now, it’s all about machine learning, personalization, enhancement.  The user experience is huge.  Google is trying to keep you actually within Google itself a lot more than it has ever done, opposed to clicking you off.  Obviously, with the emergence of Google Bard.  Let’s see how that evolves. It’s about taking advantage where you can, but also knowing that Google is still on a journey of discovery and better user experience.  So, yeah, will SEO exist in 10 years time? Absolutely.  But it will be a lot different than it is today.

Part 2: Google April 2023 Reviews Update Rolls Out

Okay, so the next story we’ll talk about is ‘Google April 23 Reviews Update Rolls Out, Expands To Cover Reviews About Product, Services and Things‘.  This story was broken by Search Engine Roundtable.  The update kind of happened around April 12th and 13th, when it started to roll out.  Essentially it rolled out fairly quickly after the March Core Update and to paraphrase “product has now been removed from the name and now that the system covers reviews about product, service and things”.  It’s not the first time Google has updated the review system.  It’s happened quite a few times last year, but essentially they just changed some of their wording in terms of how they are handling product reviews now.  If we go down the news article, we can see here that it discusses the change: “The reviews system aims to better reward high quality reviews, content that provides insightful analysis and original research, and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well”. 

If we go on to the Google Update Notes, Google Search review system and your website, and then around April 26th, kind of 13 days later, the review update is done from rolling out.  Essentially for all review content, including products, services, destinations, games, movies, other topics.  It’s not penalty, it promotes and rules insight analysis and original research.  It’s not core update, it was just targeting reviews only.  Google has not told Search Engine Roundtable what potential queries or searches were impacted by his update.  Essentially Google probably refreshed the algorithm, but may not communicate these updates in the future.  This may be a first refresh that Google has done and it’s the first refresh information that has communicated about it. 

Essentially the impact; it was slow to start but with a big ending.  Looking at the kind of tracking tools [on graph], it went live around about here [14th April] and it ended over here, about the 25th. It went a bit cold around this point [19th] and then obviously had a big impact around the 20th of April.  Similar stats on Rank Ranger as well.  We scroll down to the bottom here [of the article] there was kind of other updates in 2023 regarding this. So we have February 2023 and then we have September 2022, July 2022, March 2022 and also September 2021.  So Google’s essentially been looking at how they can improve reviews that people are writing.  Google goes on to say about advice, again, there’s a link to that over here. But to kind of paraphrase, they’re talking about evaluating from user perspectives; demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about what you’re viewing (again linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. with EEAT: Authoritativeness, Expertise, Experience, Trust); share quantitative measurement about how something measures up to the various categories or performance; to focus on important decision making facts based on your experience or expertise, again a bit like EEAT; to include links to other useful resources, consider including links to multiple sellers; when recommending something your best overall, or best for a certain purpose, include why you consider it [the service/product] to do best, or provide first-hand supporting evidence.  So essentially, like what Google’s been doing with just general updates, or with a core update i.e. EEAT, it is a signal we need to improve the overall content of a website and include reviews.

Part 3: What Changed With The Google Helpful Content Guidance?

So the next three news stories were written on Search Engine Roundtable and it’s where basically Google’s updated their guidelines on Best Practise.  The first news story that we’ll talk about from April 21st was about Google Drops Mobile-Friendly, Page Speed, Secure Sites and Page Experience As A Retired Ranking Systems.  This actually had a big impact because I had quite a few web developers, who I work with on various projects, come to me and say, why does Google not care about page experience and mobile friendliness, and page speed, and have a website that’s secure?  You then have to explain to them that no, it’s still important, Google’s just changing their documentation.  So essentially Google is now saying that Google page experience system, mobile friendly ranking system, pages speed system, secure site system are not part of a ranking systems guidelines.  This is the first news story.

It then goes on to the next one [news story] which is essentially from April 28th, where the confusion has continued. But then Google comes out and just confirms, hey guys, actually this is what we’re doing.  That is basically Google now saying that page experience, mobile friendless, page speeds and making a site secure are ranking signals, not ranking systems.  Although some of the systems we use them as signals.  So web developers I was talking to I was like, no it’s still really important, don’t worry about it, because they’re going to start scrapping while we have secure sites.  [Web developers thinking] Why am I painstakingly sorting out, making sure a website is super fast with CDNS? And making sure that we’re using the right size images?  And so on and so forth. So that was quite interesting that Google has come out and confirmed actually this is what we mean, this is what we’re doing, we just change the documentation.  So it’s different terminologies.  Essentially Google is sort of looking at the basic premise of what we’re trying to get across here and then this sprouted because on April 20th, Google came out and kind of changed it, moving it from one document to another document.  So then we say, okay, Google announced the change of guidance around what makes content considered helpful, including adding in paid experience as one of those areas. 

Essentially on top of that, we go on to EEAT, which we explained about early on that video is super important for multimedia content.  I started kind of delving into some of the guides that they’ve updated just to confirm the confusion.  Google wants you to kind of look at your landing page and kind of self-assess the content page experience as well.  Do you have good core web vitals?  Are pages served in secure fashion?  Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?  So we’ve already got three of them for, right?  Does content lack an excessive amount of ads that distract from the interface of main content?  Do page lack intuitive images?  How easy can businesses navigate to all locate main content on your page?  Is a page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from content on your page, from other content on your page?

I then move on to this document from Google. Updated to creating helpful, reliable people-first content.  Self assessing your own content, similar to the understanding of Page experience in Google research results, but going a bit further into depth, to take a couple of bullet points from here. Does your content provide original information regarding research analysis?  Does your content provide substantial, complete or comprehensive description of a topic?  Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?  Is this a sort of page you want to bookmark, share a friend, or recommend?   Would you expect to see the content in, or reference by, printed magazines, encyclopedia’s or book?  Again, it’s about elevating your content.  It’s about making sure that your content is as good as it can be and is well thought out and is cited and authoritative.  Essentially that’s what Google is kind of going for. So to sum up, it’s three, I wouldn’t say major updates, just kind of rejigging what they’re saying in different documentation, but we’re still talking about the same thing.  Ensuring that your page experience is as good as it can be.  You’ve made your site as mobile friendly as possible, the page lays as quick as possible, the whole website loads as quick as possible, and the website and content is secure.  Ensuring that the content adheres to the principles of each.  So I thought that was quite interesting and I’d share it with everyone.

Part 4: Google’s John Mueller Stance On AI Generated Content

Something I’ve spoken about quite a lot on this channel is around Google’s stance on using AI to write content, and kind of chat GPT, the main one that everyone is using.  So on Twitter [in this news story] someone asked ‘should we use ChatGPT from now onwards for publishing content on our website? It’s giving 80% unique content.’ Sounds pretty good to me. John Mueller Connor comes back and said:

It’s like food with only 20% toxic chemicals. Sounds tasty. 

John then continues the conversation on Twitter, saying

If you had  an important legal case, would you want your lawyer to use ChatGPT and Google translate to make the argument before judge?

A bit more context to this conversation on Twitter.  He then goes to say:

Using automation – including AI -to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating rankings in search results is a violation of spam policies. That said, it’s important to recognise that not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam.  Automation has long been used to generate helpful content such as sports scores, weather forecasts and transcripts.

This makes sense.  Google is interested now in very much EEAT and has changed their core documentation towards that as well, and they basically spelled it out to you on what they’re looking for: to self assess your own content. 

It goes back to, well, ChatGPT.  You can’t put a face to that content when you’re reading a blog article or any article, you want to be able to cite who’s the author of that content is.  Is that content written by someone who’s got years of actual on-the-ground experience about that subject?  ChatGPT has not got on-the-ground experience about that subject.  It’s impossible. It’s never going to happen.  So AI has its place and that moment is literally just to help you come up with ideas, let’s say, on articles, help you maybe rewrite product descriptions, maybe rewrite meta descriptions, come up with article titles, and that’s as far as it goes.  It may help you rewrite some of your own articles, to use more descriptive words, perhaps, but that’s as far as it goes. 

The bulk of your content needs to be written by someone who has EEAT principles.  If you can’t do that, then you bring someone in-house to your business who can help you write that content, opposed to going down the ChatGPT route, which Google will have filters to detect AI content and how to deal with that.  So you’ll get to a point where it’s a waste of time using AI content because it’s not going to rank particularly well.  They’ll put filters in, there’ll be updates, and you’ll lose traction.  I thought it’d be interesting just to show this.  It’s not anything groundbreaking, at least John Reese said that there are sometimes automated content that can be useful.