Are you familiar with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
It has been around for years (until now), and it broke the dos and don’ts of SEO.
They go much more in-depth with what they like and don’t approve of. A lot of it is vague, similar to the old Webmaster Guidelines but they do provide some specifics that will help you out when it comes to SEO.
Here’s what you need to know:
They spend a lot of time covering automated content. And it makes sense because there are a lot of tools that provide AI-generated copy.
But I’ve been one of the biggest critics of AI content because no matter what tool you decide to use none of them are good enough to replace a human.
Instead, you can use them to give you a head start, but you need a human to help modify the content to help make it better as well as to add creativity to the piece.
The big takeaway for you here is that Google isn’t saying that you can’t use AI-created content. They have an issue with the quality of AI content.
Just think of it this way if you create AI-written content on a mass scale and don’t have humans editing it, people won’t find it valuable, they will bounce away, and the user metrics won’t be great… which all just means it won’t rank well.
With your content marketing efforts if you want to rank well you really only have a few good options:
If you choose option 3 and still want to rank well, when I say you need someone to “heavily” modify it you’ll have to do a few things:
And can you guess what type of content social media prefers?
It’s video.
Something like almost 40% of young people when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.
When you are creating different types of content on your website you need to make sure Google can easily classify and index it.
This will help ensure that you get the SEO traffic you deserve no matter how Google adjusts its results in the future.
They didn’t really specify that it is for local SEO, but partly is. They don’t want you to keyword stuff and here are some examples of what they don’t want:
A lot of companies have multiple locations. Or if they just have one physical location they tend to create pages for each city/region that is close to their location. That way they can get more SEO traffic.
And what happens is they tend to use similar blocks of text with the same keywords on each of those pages, but they just adjust it slightly by adding a new city or region-based content.
Those pages don’t really add value. They are just for search engines so you can capture traffic from a user searching for local results.
I bet you will see Google cracking down more on that in the future.
If you want to create multiple pages for each city that your company serves you need to add more value.
For example, if I were a solar panel installation and service company that serviced Los Angeles, CA I would want to create city-based pages. Because within Los Angeles you have sub-sections such as Hollywood or Beverly Hills.
I would customize each city page and make it very specific. For example, in Beverly Hills, you can’t place solar panels on the roof that are visible to people on the street or your neighbors. And you can’t place Tesla solar roof tiles that just look like normal “roof tiles” as the Beverly Hills design board won’t approve it.
I would even go as far as showing an image of the Tesla solar roof, like the one below so people know what won’t be approved.
Or I could discuss how long it takes to get city approval and what the process is for Beverly Hills as it is different than Hollywood.
There are many more ways to customize your local city pages, but the above are just two simple ways I would make them valuable to both users and Google.
If you want to create multiple city pages think about what value you can provide. Sure you want the traffic and rankings, but to get that put the user first and make sure they are getting more value from you than the competition.
There are a lot of things Google covers in Search Essentials, but most of it is old or nothing that you already didn’t know.
The bigger things are:
So what do you think about the Google Search Essentials?
