Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:00):
I’m monitoring a bunch of queries and I’m like… Oh, we’re live? Hello everyone.
Casey Markee (00:00:05):
Hey, welcome.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:08):
All right. [inaudible 00:00:08].
Casey Markee (00:00:08):
Come aboard, we’re waiting for you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:11):
Casey, tell us which holiday is today.
Casey Markee (00:00:13):
Guys, today is National Brisket Day.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:17):
Brisket.
Casey Markee (00:00:17):
Or as I like to call it, Wednesday.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:21):
Is every Wednesday, brisket day?
Casey Markee (00:00:23):
It’s every day. There’s a smoke to meats day in the Markee Mansion, like every week.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:26):
Cured meats.
Casey Markee (00:00:27):
So I’m pretty excited about it. Cured meats, fantastic. Good times.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:30):
I love it. Awesome.
Casey Markee (00:00:32):
Never boring.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:33):
Let’s get some people in here. Welcome to episode 47 of SEO for Bloggers Webinar. This is another exciting episode of our new Top Hat Chat series. Top Hat Chats focuses on in-depth conversations with experts like Casey, and we’re going to cover specific topics. Don’t forget, just like with all of our other webinars, I want you to type the letter Q before you question in chat if you want us to see this question. Melissa, our host from the main webinar is here, but she’s in the background pressing all the cool buttons. So, for her to see your question, put letter Q in front of it and she will see it and then she will surface it for us. Today I have my really good friend Casey Markee with us. Casey, say hello.
Casey Markee (00:01:21):
Hi everyone. Thanks for having me today, my friend.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:23):
For those of you who don’t know, Casey’s a leading SEO expert, the founder of Media Wyse and renowned voice in the food and lifestyle blogging community. He’s known for his deep audits, practical advice, and not chiding away from tough questions facing creators today. Casey and I will be talking about the evolution of search results and what this means for you for content creators. We’ll cover AI, we’ll cover content adaptation strategies, we’ll talk about the DOJ versus Google, which I’m not up-to-date on what’s going on there, trial implications, we’re going to talk about providing clear actionable guidance for everyone. Casey, welcome back and welcome [inaudible 00:02:03] you.
Casey Markee (00:02:02):
Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Tip of my top hat to Melissa who probably wrote that entire intro for you, the unsung hero behind this stream yard. So thank you very much for that, your check is in the mail.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:02:17):
She’s the puppet master, she’s pulling all the… All right, let’s dive right in. Casey, so you and I had a conversation before this, a lot of the people who signed up, so when people were signing up, they were submitting questions and what I’ve done with the questions, and there was a lot of questions this time, and what I’ve done with the questions is I throw them, threw them into Gemini and they said, Hey, tell me what is the overall theme. And I want you to formulate questions that are going to be broad enough to provide answers for everyone.
Casey Markee (00:02:50):
Right.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:02:51):
Everyone is concerned with how AI technologies like AI Overviews from Google are directly changing search and how their content is being sourced, credited, and used by AI systems. With that, let’s jump into the first question. How do AI Overviews gather information? What are the remedies for incorrect usage or poor attribution to the source of the content?
Casey Markee (00:03:17):
Well, I suggested sacrificing a chicken to an audit client the other day did not go over what did not realize they were vegan, my bad.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:03:25):
Oh, no.
Casey Markee (00:03:26):
But there are other things that we can do and that’s our goal today is to provide you some actionable information. So, when we’re talking about what is this AI source information, we have to understand that AI Overviews basically use Google’s Gemini to quickly pull and summarize info across the web, kind of like, it’s a recipe roundup by a robot chef. It’s a good way to look at it. It grabs ingredients from different sites using LLMs trained on vast data sets, and it summarizes that information and answers questions based upon the information that’s learned and then mixes it with a quick summary to make it digestible for all of us looking at that information. Now, sometimes when it returns that information, it will check specific web pages or your specific recipes for those of you joining us today, and it will use a technique called RAG, which is short for Retrieval Augmented Generation to double check all of these facts that it’s giving us.
(00:04:23):
Like you can add glue to a club sandwich. I don’t know what site it pulled that from, but it definitely got that right when it was pulling that information. But just like with any rushed cook, it can still mess up the recipe retrieval information and it could leave out a lot of key details or add the wrong ones like we saw several months ago when we started to see this glue AI Overview that was being generated. So the second part of that question is what do we do, what’s the recourse if we see inaccurate use or poor attribution? And basically what we have to do is there’s several different things that we as content creators can do and that includes fact checking. We always want to fact check what we’re seeing through other sources like Bing. We also want to examine the linked citations for obvious trust triggers.
(00:05:13):
Is it as trustworthy as it can be? We want to say who’s the author? We want to say, does the author cite their sources? We want to say, is this a well-known or legitimate website that the information is being pulled from? Is the author or new source potentially biased? I’m not sure that no, and I know Amy and a lot of other very high quality vegan food creators are on the call today, but I’m not sure that I would go to them if I wanted to season my brisket. So I just want to make sure that I’m using an unbiased source that is related to the query that I’m searching for. And we’d also want to say, is the account or website devoted to satire or contained parody content? Now that’s a good one Arsen because we’re seeing more and more AI Overviews being pulled from parody websites because the AI doesn’t understand that it’s a parody or satire website in the first place.
(00:06:00):
So that’s fantastic. But what you can do as a creator, if you see something that you know is just jinky, you’re getting the Scooby-Doo shivers, you can go to the bottom of these overviews, especially in Google, and there’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down so that you can rate the overviews here. If you find the overview helpful, tell Google that it’s a good overview. If you don’t find the overview helpful, tell them that it’s a bad overview and it’ll pop up a dialogue box where you can provide specific feedback as to why you found it so unhelpful. So, I would certainly take those routes if you are looking to get your feedback to those who will actually listen to it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:06:40):
And I guess we touched on this, how can creators ensure their content is represented and sourced accurately by AI?
Casey Markee (00:06:48):
I think the first one is pretty simple. Don’t block AI. That’s the thing, I am talking to you, Raptive, don’t block AI. If we block AI bots, then we know we don’t really have any control over what and where they’re going to pull that information. And I know that several of you may have seen my article that I published in Search Engine Land in April, but it covers everything.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:08):
I’ll pull it up.
Casey Markee (00:07:08):
Yeah, please, please have you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:11):
I’ll do it.
Casey Markee (00:07:11):
Melissa, our beautiful elf will do that, I know. You’re appreciated, Melissa. So, when she’s putting this information in here, but what we’re doing is when we’re looking at this information, we want to make sure that we have done everything we can to make our sites and our content AI friendly. And Google just published an article and I think that, I’m not sure if you have that one, but I’ll go ahead and paste it over here.
(00:07:35):
They published this back on 5/21, I’ll paste that over here. Melissa can tell me if that actually came through. But, their article specifically lists eight things that you as a content creator can do to make sure that you’re as visible as you can for Gemini and LLMs in general and that’s of course focusing on unique, valuable content for people, which all of us hopefully are doing anyway. We want to provide great page experience, we want to make sure that our core vitals are aligned, that we don’t have any excessive pop-ups or dialogue boxes. We just want to make sure that our content is easily viewable, that we can actually access it. We want to ensure that we can access your content. So again, don’t block AI bots. We want to manage visibility with preview controls. Now respectfully, this one is mostly using snippet tags, which I think Arsen would agree with me.
(00:08:26):
The average blogger is never going to do. So that’s just not really a concern for you. I would skip that one completely. But we also want to make sure that we have structured data that matches the visible content. If I’ve got FAQs on my page, I want to have FAQ schema. If I have some how-to blocks, maybe I want to have how-to schema unless, very big caveat here, we have how-tos on recipes. We don’t want to mix how-to and recipe schema because it’s very confusing to Google, they will specifically call that out on the guidelines. But we want to put web page schema when we can, what are we using? Is it an organization schema? Is it web page schema? Is it recipe schema? Is it how-to, depending upon it on the content, we want to use the available schemas as much as we can, but we also want to go beyond the text of our recipes.
(00:09:08):
We want to use, Google’s very big on pushing multimodal success videos, audio clips, making sure that everything is digestible. Emails, can we repurpose our content into other snippets that we can share to our audience through various channels. We also want to understand the full value of our user visits. What are they interacting with? Are there specific things on the page they’re interacting with more? And that’s why Clarity, Hotjar, usertesting.com, these are things that I am using every day when I advise clients like yourself, I do not pull these recommendations out of the air, it’s based upon the data, and we’re going to review some of that data today specifically. But, that’s what we want to do. And the final thing is that we want to evolve with our users. If we know that our users are asking or interacting with our content in very specific ways, we have to change our practices to take advantage of those new behaviors.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:10:02):
So with that, Casey, what technical and content requirements would be like, let’s say super important right now to make your content AI friendly?
Casey Markee (00:10:12):
I would say that we would want to make sure that basically everything in the article that I shared, we want to make sure that we have digestible nuggets, we want digestible nuggets. We want to make sure that we are using H tags. We have H2s if it appropriate. We have an H3, but it’s not required. We want to make sure that we’re using short snippets. We don’t need one paragraph sentences, but we need to have short snippets that tell the user exactly what they’re looking for.
(00:10:36):
We want to tell the user right away, why is this post worth their time? I mean, we’re going to get into this today in more detail, but the user does not need another eggplant parmigiana recipe. So what is it about your recipe that’s going to provide value to users? And to do that, we have to make sure that we’re providing everything that the user needs on our page. Because the goal of course, is that we’ve lost the first AI click. Our goal is to capture everything after that. And that’s going to cause… That really making sure that our pages are as sticky as possible.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:11:09):
I mean, there’s also something I’ve seen advice around making your content conversational to help LLMs better understand context because there’s no algorithm with them and just it’s content. It’s all about the content at this point. Okay, so Casey, you and I exchanged some emails back and forth. We’re slightly changing focus here. We exchanged some emails back and forth and you mentioned AI Mode is now live in Google search. I’m going to ask you to explain what that is and how it can be potentially problematic for recipe bloggers. There’s no carrot [inaudible 00:11:42] there’s no, any of that.
Casey Markee (00:11:45):
Amy has a good question here. Let me jump in and say we’ll be able to see traffic from AI and Google Search Console? Yes and no Amy. Google has announced that they’re going to mold, they’re going to allow us to see AI Mode, but we can’t segment that out, so basically it’s useless. So good times and I’m sure we can talk about that later. But yes and no. They’re saying that they’re going to provide that information, but it’s going to be a melted version that you’re going to see along with rich snippets, video and all the rest of the stuff that we can’t filter out. Good old Google, good times. So, back to our question here. So AI Mode is like a deluxe tasting menu at Google. So it’s like a more thoughtful, personal and interactive way to steal your content is basically what it’s, it goes beyond regular AI Overviews by digging deeper into the question and then breaking the query down into smaller bytes and pulling in info from across the web.
(00:12:36):
So, even any Google apps that you might be using. The goal of AI Mode is to serve up smarter, more personalized answers complete with links to where they found the info, that’s the goal. The problem is that this is going to significantly hurt bloggers and creators because number one, we’ve already been testing this considerably. There is no carousels at all, carousels are gone. Instead, what they’re doing is that they’re providing stripped down recipe information, they’re providing, this is going to result in fewer clicks to websites. There’s a loss of attribution, Google may or may not link to your full recipe. We’re seeing this really crazy, we call it a Frankenstein search result, it’s a blended search result. Your recipe may be mixed with data from other recipes resulted in this melded result that may or may not be accurate. And the worst part is, again, I mentioned this, the cannibalized recipe cards, there are no clear carousels.
(00:13:35):
Instead, you’re getting, Google is reading all that structured data and they’re going to strip all that directly off a presentation. And Google let us know this was coming at Google I/O. They basically said, our recommendation for Google I/O is, hey, you should expect less traffic and focus more on branding. So, recipe bloggers who are going to succeed here are going to have to adapt, they’re going to have to focus on stronger personal branding, clear author expertise, publishing content that users are going to be engaged with. I mentioned this before, so that we can capture them in the funnel after AI has delivered the first bite of the apple. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing here.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:14):
Right, and there is for certain industries and for someone like our e-commerce clients, we are seeing, and this nicely leads us into the next question, we are seeing less traffic, but conversions have not been as drastically impacted, it’s not proportional. And Google has made statements like this, Google said there may be less traffic to you, but it will be higher quality. You should be looking at visibility more than traffic, which is, good luck [inaudible 00:14:46].
Casey Markee (00:14:45):
Yeah, I can’t, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know about you on the call, but I can’t pay my mortgage [inaudible 00:14:51].
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:51):
Right, right. You don’t get paid per visibility, right?
Casey Markee (00:14:55):
Right.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:57):
So what does this really mean? I mean, look, at one point we would expect, yes, you are getting a more “qualified visitor” because they’re somewhere down the funnel in their discovery journey because they’ve had this interaction with AI Mode and they’ve learned some information and they’ve clicked over to you because there was some kind of a trust signal or relevance or somehow they got to you after reading what’s in that result. So, we can safely assume that users, so maybe there’s going to be a better dwell time, better engagement with the page because they’re a little bit more qualified, we don’t have to qualify them, we don’t have to sell them on our content. Do we think that at one point RPMs will catch up to that saying that, hey, this visitor is much more valuable now and even though we’re getting less page views, these page views are worth more money?
Casey Markee (00:15:46):
Well, that would be an ideal, but I don’t think it’s going to happen, what’s happening right now is that CPCs are through the roof.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:15:53):
Right.
Casey Markee (00:15:53):
Google Is making record profits because when they started rolling this out, everyone moved to paid and CPCs have gone through the roof. They’re like up 20, 25 to 30% in some aspects. And what’s happening is that in many cases, this is more gaslighting on the part of Google. There may be less traffic right now, they’re saying, hey, there may be less traffic, but don’t worry, the traffic’s going to convert better, but we haven’t seen any of that. They won’t publish any stats saying or supporting that claim at all. There is no, anything that I have seen specifically, and they didn’t publish it at I/O saying that this is true. So right now, we just have to hope and pray that that AI Mode stays optional because right now it’s just an option. You can go in and choose AI Mode, but the default is still all, because I can tell you this could be devastating if they make AI Mode the default.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:16:46):
Right. Can we talk about Google shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine? Potentially creating more of a walled garden? Can we talk about that for a second?
Casey Markee (00:17:02):
Yeah. So, I love this because it’s basically what’s old is new again, do you remember this little business called AOL? Does anybody, raise your hand? Do you remember AOL?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:17:12):
The disc that they used to send?
Casey Markee (00:17:15):
Yeah, AOL didn’t just give you access to the web, it was the internet for millions of people. You logged in, you checked your email, you shopped, you read news, you chatted. It was an all in walled garden, sound familiar?
(00:17:30):
Because that is literally what Google is becoming with AI Overviews and AI Mode. They are literally the AOL of the 21st century. And I think what’s worse, and we’ll use a simple metaphor here for food bloggers, it’s like you’re running a bakery, but Google’s handing out free samples of your best stuff right on the sidewalk out in front. People are going to taste your work, but they can’t walk into your shop and buy it or even remember where they got it from. That’s what’s happening with AI Overviews. And that could be what happens as the default for AI Mode.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:10):
There’s shifts that happen, evolutionary shifts, let’s say to the search ecosystem. And I’ve been in this business long enough to have lived through a bunch of them, but we had a similar, not as impactful, at least I don’t believe it is, but we had a similar shift with the introduction of featured snippets. I also remember this because we had a lot of bloggers who were making a lot of money from conversion tables.
Casey Markee (00:18:42):
That’s right.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:43):
And then Google said, you know what? No more I’m going to give the result right there. There’s no reason for the user to click over to you because I can just answer that it’s a fast request.
Casey Markee (00:18:53):
And again, that was the rise of zero clicks.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:56):
Right, right. But we changed the way we optimized. There was a change in how people actually search now because of that, because they were able to get these quick results, we can safely say that this is happening again. But on a much larger scale, and this is what you and I again in the email that the Google’s push to AI isn’t happening in a vacuum.
Casey Markee (00:19:22):
No.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:19:23):
There’s a generational divide in how different age groups utilize ChatGPT, Gemini, different brackets, 20 to 30. And then there’s the older, and let’s talk about that, let’s talk about how people actually use LLMs.
Casey Markee (00:19:42):
Yeah. And again, you mentioned the generational divide. Basically think of this as ChatGPT has become a Google replacement for older users. Again, I would consider myself, I just turned 51, I’m more of maybe a soon to be older user, but my in-laws, they use ChatGPT all the time. My father-in-law specifically loves it. If you are younger, maybe you use it as a life advisor in your twenties and thirties. I know plenty of people, especially audit clients that I’ve worked with, and I ask them, I polled them how they’re using ChatGPT. In many cases it’s as a personal assistant or as a therapist or as a counselor.
(00:20:23):
It’s very therapeutic in many cases. And then you’ve got the other group, the college students, my son Blake, who just finished his junior year college. He and others in his class are using ChatGPT and LLMs as their own personal OSs, operating systems. And that’s what’s happening here is that’s the transformation we’re seeing from Google into an answer powered by AI is… Their goal, this is why Google is doing what they’re doing, they’re trying to keep the older users from defecting to ChatGPT and they’re trying to make search fill smarter and more conversational for those 20 and 40 something. So they stay invested and then they’re trying to create a platform for these younger college kids so that they can go in and plan their daily lives through Gemini and AI Mode as opposed to just being reactive and using some third party tool.
(00:21:16):
So, What does this mean for you as a creator? I mean, that’s the million-dollar question today. Well, you have to basically, number one, you have to adapt your tone and format for younger AI users first. And number two, we have to lean into branding, storytelling, multimedia things AI can’t mimic. They can’t take your voice, they can’t tell your story. Those are the kinds of personal details we’re going to have to continue to push when we’re writing recipes and recipe first content, but we also have to build a community and try to focus our businesses beyond search.
(00:21:52):
And I know you and I have said this multiple times in many webinars, we have to build our business as if Google did not exist, and that has even become more prescient now with what we’re doing. Creators have to also realize, and this is a hard honest truth, we’re not just competing with the platform itself, we’re not just, well, I stumbled over my own words. As a creator, you’re not just competing with everyone on this thread, you’re competing with the platform itself.
(00:22:23):
It wants to keep all of your traffic. It didn’t happen, that wasn’t the case before. But now not only do I have to worry about, oh my gosh, do I do this recipe when I know that Emily over here on this blog has already done it last week, and how am I going to make my recipe, which I thought I was going to be able to do first, more unique and to stand out to be something that possibly others will interject with. And that’s just going to be a continual battle that we’ll have to fight.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:22:49):
Okay. Let’s shift focus a little bit. When people are registering for our little chat here, a lot of questions arose about how creators should adapt content strategy on-page SEO. In our email you highlighted critical areas for recipe bloggers based on observations and data. With that, how has keyword research changed and how important is it now for discoverability, especially for unique valuable content rather than, as you said, another eggplant Parmesan recipe?
Casey Markee (00:23:26):
Yeah, and let’s use that. Let’s stick with the eggplant Parmesan, one of my wife’s favorite dishes. So, when we’re talking about a standout strategy for food bloggers specifically, one of the things, and again respectfully, I’m going to push everyone to read my article if you haven’t read it, this is directly out of the article and I got personal feedback on this article from people that are much smarter than me and at Google, and they loved it, and that’s why I really tried to push that article as much as possible. But the thing about standout strategies for food bloggers, the first thing is we have to go deeper and be more specific. Instead of an eggplant Parmesan recipe, which the world does not need, maybe we try an air fryer eggplant Parmesan without breadcrumbs, or we go gluten-free eggplant Parmesan for meal prep. Then we have to look at maybe trying to push in a local cultural or personal-driven perspective to that post my Sicilian grandmother’s version of eggplant Parmesan and was made with homemade ricotta.
(00:24:20):
Or maybe we add history and traditions or family tips that AI can’t replicate. Then we have to look down and say, what is it that we could put here that AI can’t answer easily? So, using our eggplant Parmesan, we could say, why does eggplant sometimes turn bitter? How can I freeze eggplant Parmesan for the best texture? Or, there are questions with nuance, perhaps Google’s web links under AI Overviews. Maybe we have to look and see what Google is returning for those and then tailor our content to steal those links. It’s very similar to how we would approach a people also ask strategy.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:59):
Right.
Casey Markee (00:25:00):
We always want to look at what Google is showing, and the people also ask collapsible menus because our goal is to steal those. Our goal is to find what Google is returning and then write a better question from my own content that Google can pull instead as a citation. And we also have to look at building topic authority. So that means, and this is where categories come in, I know you do a lot of work with categories, but we want to cover the full category. Maybe our category has roasted eggplant and eggplant dips and eggplant dishes, and what is it that we can do to make our category the go-to category for eggplant-related content?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:25:37):
Right.
Casey Markee (00:25:38):
And then of course there’s the, what you would call the 50-foot signals or the 100-foot view, which is that we have to strengthen brand signals. We have to include author bios, expertise, structured data, dial in our internal linking. We have to make it clear through our site that we’re a trusted source and no disrespect, but I can’t tell you how many times we have an audit or a blogger comes to me and I’m like, Casey, I just don’t understand why I’m not making inroads. And it’s because the site is just so technically unsound that Google does not algorithmically trust anything that’s on it.
(00:26:18):
And that’s why a good understanding of technical SEO is so important. That’s why my audits and in my opinion, are one of the best investments a user will ever make, period. We show you, how does Google algorithmically view you and your content? What can we do to make our content so algorithmically attractive to Google that they would be embarrassed not to rank you or not to include your content as a possible AI Overview or something that provides a link as a supporting citation in AI Mode. And that’s our goal, and that’s what we want to do. We want to make it so that we can’t be ignored. And I know everyone says that that’s their goal, but in reality is far different.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:27:09):
Going back to the whole evolution aspect of this, right? As the search engine evolves, as people change the way they engage with the search engine and how they search, our practices have to evolve as well and how we approach it and what used to work, and then we’re kind of getting into this territory of content optimization now. What defines high quality? And this is a question, high quality, helpful user first posts now that EAT, Depth, no fluff, UX, and with that in this context, how do we balance reducing fluff or unnecessary content with providing comprehensive information, including labeled ingredients, shots, process shots, FAQs and everything else that we have historically have grown to be like this is a typical recipe post. How do we balance that? And you and I’d love to have a discussion about this because we have different viewpoints on this, right? And we are [inaudible 00:28:18]. Go ahead.
Casey Markee (00:28:19):
We do. We do. And I think that as you said, that the term is balance. What is the number one ranking factor for Google? Helpfulness.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:26):
Right.
Casey Markee (00:28:27):
It’s been helpfulness for years.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:28:28):
Right.
Casey Markee (00:28:29):
I’ve always said my number one overriding goal in audits is to teach the user to be useful and helpful in many cases. And that’s what we’re looking for when we’re balancing out these recipe posts. Is it useful and helpful to provide 15 substitutions and variations? Probably not. Is it useful and helpful to have five photos of the finished dish? No. Is it useful and helpful to have an incredibly elongated recipe card that takes up seven to eight scrolling screens when you add on ads and other photos that you might be stuffing in there for no reason other than someone told you you should do it?
(00:29:04):
The thing is that you can write a high quality, helpful user first post that contains all the elements you said, and it’s not superfluous or needlessly long. And I’m going to tell you, all you have to do is look at Google to see how that’s happening. Look at the top ranking queries, whether it’s banana cream pie or chicken noodle soup or lasagna. Everything you mentioned is in those posts that are ranking in the top, everything. And that’s just a small selection of thousands of queries. There’s nothing wrong with the template, it’s just that people don’t implement the template correctly, period.
(00:29:36):
So when we’re talking about things like, and I know we’re going to get into this when talk about recipe structure, but really it’s all about you providing the best value you can for the user. Sometimes that means a recipe that has these elements, sometimes it means a much shorter recipe. It’s just a matter of can you get across what you need to get across in the least amount of work is possible. And it’s funny because a blogger will come to me and says, “Well, I just really think that this post is ready to go and I don’t understand what else I can cut.” And I’m like, you got six paragraphs in your intro.
(00:30:10):
Are you telling me that you need six paragraphs in your intro? And we go in and I show her how to condense that down to two. And just like that, we’ve saved two whole screens of scrolling on mobile. So understand that being useful, optimizing for the user doesn’t necessarily mean moving a ton of stuff out, and I disagree vehemently with that. There are ways for you to be successful. You just have to be a better writer. And you have to understand that we want to condense things down to make the best experience we can for users and these nameless, faceless bots who will probably control our destiny in the near future. So again, make sure you continue to say please and thank you when you’re talking to your LLMs.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:30:48):
Even though they said that you’re wasting electricity by saying “Please, and thank you.”
Casey Markee (00:30:52):
Yeah, I’m fine with it, I’m totally good.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:30:53):
Not our electricity right? Okay. So look, what we agree on is that we need to make sure that helpfulness and uniqueness, and not from a content perspective, but from a perspective, perspective perspective, there’s uniqueness in that post and that’s evident also in the search results. And you can do this. You can easily go in and just any search result, any recipe, download, print every single result in there, throw it into ChatGPT and ask it and say, what is everyone doing in common? And what is everybody doing that’s unique?
(00:31:34):
And you’re going to notice that there’s everyone who’s in the top 10. There is a unique perspective, and it’s not very easily evident just from looking at headings or titles.
Casey Markee (00:31:45):
It isn’t, not at all.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:31:45):
You have to actually read the post, and a lot of times I miss it when I read the post. I’ll miss that. Hey, this particular recipe for cobbler uses Chinese seven spices or whatever. That’s completely unique to everybody else on that page. Google has said this time and time again, we interpreted it, well not we but people interpreted it in a weird way. Unique content, they didn’t mean unique words. It was about perspective. Google does not want to show the same 10 recipes written in different words from 10 different sites, like you said, with our chicken parm, right?
Casey Markee (00:32:24):
Right. And we’ll probably get to this later, but if you were to go into the Quality Raters Guidelines and search for the term paraphrasing, it is repeated multiple times. That keyword basically is relatively new in 2020.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:36):
Well, also filler and everything else we have, Marie…
Casey Markee (00:32:39):
Paraphrasing is very important. For the paraphrasing because you’re going to see that a lot of bloggers are doing that. They will go and they’ll just use ChatGPT to compare and contrast other related recipes, and you’ll get a paraphrased version to use. Google is very clear that that’s not necessarily high quality content. We don’t need to paraphrase, we need to clarify something that stands out to be unique, comprehensive information. And that’s where things like labeled ingredient photos and process shots and FAQs and expert tips come into play. That’s not paraphrasing, that’s you using clear demonstrated expertise to add those apart. So, I think we might as well just move on when we talk about recipe structure, but I know you said we talked about this in detail. I’ve been doing this a long time, I’ve been doing usertesting.com surveys since 2017.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:33:25):
Can you talk about what you’re seeing there?
Casey Markee (00:33:28):
Yeah. Clarity, Hotjar usertesting.com strongly suggests users don’t scroll past recipe cards. So if you have anything below recipe cards, hey, probably not going to get read. Now does that mean Google sees it? Absolutely, they’re crawling everything on the page, that’s fine. But if you’re asking yourself, well, jeez, I’m going to move my recipe card up, you better understand and have a valid reason for doing it, because it really comes down, and this is, it’s not even a disagreement between you and I. It’s a clarification of the goal behind the advice.
(00:33:59):
So, let’s talk about that. Some experts may say, I want to move the recipe card up for UX or ad viewability, totally fine, and then they can track that. I tend to recommend, and I’ve recommended this for years, I want to keep the recipe card down because that encourages longer engagement, that encourages increased scrolling, which is going to trigger more ads, and it also encourages invested storytelling. And that’s why I feel that I have been incredibly successful in this [inaudible 00:34:26] of my clients, is that we have taken that template and refined it in a way that makes us stand out a little bit specifically. And neither of these approaches that we just talked about are necessarily wrong, it’s just a different approach.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:34:40):
And we talked about this right before we started the webinar, it’s about implementation. It’s about understanding the problem at hand, applying critical thinking and implementing. So, our methodology is, recipe card, and when we pull in the data, and I look at things from a completely different lens than you so, I’m looking at it from a perspective of topic prioritization from this is what a user is here for.
(00:35:10):
So, when we’re looking at a recipe card, it’s content on the page, and from the coaching sessions and from all the consults that we’ve done and just observing how people utilize a typical recipe post format, the recipe card is just something that they do because they need to do it. It’s placed at the bottom, it’s considered the last part of the post, the entire post is there, the recipe… And if we talk about in reality, you don’t really need to have a recipe card visible on the page because the content on the page can already be the recipe card. If you have ingredients, instructions, you just need to mark that up. The problem is…
Casey Markee (00:35:46):
And the problem is that that’s not…
Arsen Rabinovich (00:35:48):
With WordPress, it’s difficult for bloggers, it’s difficult. All recipes, they don’t have a recipe card, it’s the entire post, is a recipe card, right? The schema behind the post is what the post is about, and that’s how things are supposed… The recipe card is there, and it became a visual aspect because it has a little border around it. Yes, I understand you fill it out on the other side of the, but it’s content to Google that’s indexable content on the page. And I’ve been preaching, and again, you and I disagree in this, I’ve been preaching that that H2, the recipe card H2 should have the word recipe because that’s where the recipe content is.
Casey Markee (00:36:22):
Yeah, not necessary. The schema tells Google that it’s a recipe. See, that’s why, it’s just…
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:26):
Well, I’m talking again from a structure organization…
Casey Markee (00:36:29):
From a structure.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:29):
Topical flow.
Casey Markee (00:36:31):
Yeah, again. Totally get it, just not needed because Google has literally said, the schema on the page tells you it’s a recipe, you don’t have to be redundant and say it’s a recipe.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:39):
I agree with you a 100%.
Casey Markee (00:36:40):
Yeah, totally get it. Now, let’s talk about the process shots, because I know we got a question. Nobody likes process shots and recipe cards, and I’ve said that repeatedly. And so, when we talk about why process shots live, if not in the card, what can we do to make that user-friendly? The issue is that process shots being moved into the recipe cards, why did that start? It started because of guided recipes. This was pushed by Google as an attempt to get people to embrace guided recipes, which has been an abject failure. So, let’s talk about that and why this is such a failed initiatives. Guided recipes were designed for Google Home, Nest and Nest Hub Max devices. Sales never took off. I don’t know if anyone please on the call has a hub device, please let us know, I’d be interested to know that because there are literally whole warehouses filled with them that they can’t sell.
(00:37:36):
This is why they didn’t push this anymore. Sales never took off, and the user behavior that they were trying to push, which was that we think that users are going to do full recipe walkthroughs on Google Hub devices, it never materialized. So, there’s also no consistent evidence anywhere that implementing full guided recipes, which means that you have the step issues, the step images in the card, you have individual instructions ever led to any increased clicks, any increased rankings, or any increased visibility. And trust me, I looked, I have 600 plus sites at any one time in my search console. We’ve had sites do this. There was never any uplift at all, none, doesn’t exist. So if people are saying, hey, I really think that I’m going to get some increased attention from Google by putting the process shots in the recipe card, publish the information because it doesn’t exist, we’ve looked.
(00:38:30):
And there’s also no… We also have to look, if Google you something, you have to listen in many cases. If Google tells you, hey, I can’t be trusted, you have to listen to that as well. Google shut down the Google Assistant Conversational Actions Platform in 2023. If you guys don’t remember that, that was us trying to get our recipe sites verified with Google so that they could use it on Google Nest. And that’s what Alexa is doing with their thing. They went all in on Gemini since then, they’ve completely shut that down. So if you’re asking me, Casey, is there any SEO or UX reason to add individual step-by-step to a recipe card? No. And Google also specifically says, this is just optional. If it was really a big deal, it would be a mandatory error, they’d have more information. But we could go on and on about this.
(00:39:24):
When we talk about users, users like scrolling through process shots in a post so they can read the context and the tips and the troubleshooting. In line photos, when there are near written explanations, help users follow along, especially on mobile, they just convert better and you have longer time on site. That’s what Clarity shows. That’s what Hotjar shows. That’s what any of the user testing we’ve done, whether it’s scroll tracking, I mean, it is what it is. I mean, it’s easily a mic drop. There is no evidence that exists that any bloggers should be including process shots in a recipe card, no reason.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:01):
So, a recipe process shots are not a ranking factor, we can agree on that.
Casey Markee (00:40:08):
Yeah, and I think the SEO principle here is very clear. Google wants you to create helpful content. If your users find content more helpful with inline photos, which most of you on the call should agree they do because that’s what you’ve been using for the last several years that you’ve doing just fine, then it makes no sense for you to go all in on vague optimizations for a barely used feature that Google is not going to support in the future. And that’s what guided recipes are. Guided recipes is going to go along with what’s the most recent thing, Grok? Grok that they got rid of? But there’s a whole list of filled products. Guided recipes will probably end up being the next one.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:48):
So, we are seeing across multiple queries and some of them are very popular chicken Alfredo recipe, potato soup recipe. We’re seeing across braised chicken recipe, post ranking without process photography in the top three spots. We’re seeing posts like even budget bites has process photography below the recipe card. Process photography is there for the user. It’s to help the user, it’s to retain the user on the page. The problem that we saw from the cleanup that we’ve been doing post helpful content system updates is that the content surrounding the process photography was a re-writing of the steps in the recipe card. Sometimes, word for word, you can literally copy paste into. Yes, and this goes back to what you and I were saying earlier.
Casey Markee (00:41:47):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:41:47):
It’s how you execute on it.
Casey Markee (00:41:49):
Yeah, let’s talk about that. So you said basically the issue is one of content redundancy. The question is, “What information from the recipe card instructions, ingredients should also be mentioned in other parts of the post? How does Google view this?” Well, here’s the key, and this is very clear, there is no hesitation on this. They literally said this in the guidelines, “Google does not penalize or devalue a recipe simply because the same information like ingredients or steps appear in both the recipe card and the post body, that is a myth. This is a common misunderstanding.” On-page redundancy is not the same as duplicate content, and I think that’s where a lot of people go.
(00:42:25):
So when we talk about duplicate content, we’re referring to substantially identical blocks across multiple modals, preferably multiple pages. You can’t have repetition like that across the site. But when you have ingredients or instructions appear in the post body and then in the recipe card, Google understands that these serve completely different purposes. I mean, that’s just how it is. The body context is for context, storytelling and additional explanation. We touched on that previously. The recipe card is a structured format meant for parsing search features tied to rich snippets. So, it’s just like, I’ve had this argument with you before. I can publish a post today and rank number one in Google for recipe query.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:08):
Without a recipe card.
Casey Markee (00:43:10):
But if it doesn’t have a recipe card on it, I’m not getting into carousel because that is what the carousel is for.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:13):
But that’s not the recipe card itself, that’s the recipe schema behind the recipe card.
Casey Markee (00:43:17):
Which is the recipe card that 99% of everyone on this call is using. So yes, it’s the default.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:22):
But the content inside the recipe card is still indexable content. It has a heading, it has instruction [inaudible 00:43:27].
Casey Markee (00:43:27):
Right, so it works in conjunction, but it doesn’t take away from the post itself. Google reads the surrounding content. They do it for the whole page so they can assess page quality, helpfulness, expertise, completeness. But the bottom line, and I mentioned this before, usefulness is a ranking factor. So, if I’ve laid out in detail what the user wants, I know that I’m going to be rewarded by Google with regards to the helpful content.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:49):
Absolutely.
Casey Markee (00:43:50):
Content documentation.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:50):
Absolutely. If you’re approaching it from a unique perspective viewpoint, and the section that is in, let’s say above the recipe card, with your instructions, provides a unique perspective on the instructions, and you have your process photography in there, a 100% agree, useful, and it will work and it will rank. But if there’s zero usefulness, if it’s pretty much the same thing as already, [inaudible 00:44:21].
Casey Markee (00:44:21):
And let’s talk about that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:22):
Let’s hang on. Let’s separate content on the page from recipe card. Remove the markup, remove the CSS. If that wasn’t there, you just have a heading, potato soup recipe, and then underneath you have ingredients, instructions, process notes, all of that. Forget that it’s a recipe card. It’s a part of a post, it’s a subheading, it’s an H2. You have that, and then you have another section on the post which talks about ingredients and instructions, and they’re pretty much saying the same thing, but in two different places.
Casey Markee (00:44:52):
Yeah. Well, but that’s the thing. You can’t say they’re saying the same thing in two different ways because they’re not, and let’s say that they were Arsen, let’s say they say this exact thing. Let’s say that you copied the information from the recipe card to the post.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:04):
Right.
Casey Markee (00:45:06):
Google will tell you that, that’s fine because there is no such thing as duplicate content on a per page basis.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:10):
We’re not arguing the duplicate content, I’m talking about…
Casey Markee (00:45:12):
Yeah, it’s fine. It just might not be super helpful. I could literally have a client go in and put the same paragraph four times on a page. They’re not going to get penalized for it. It’s just not a very good experience for users.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:22):
There’s no penalty, there’s no penalty, but…
Casey Markee (00:45:23):
Then why would they do that?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:24):
Listen, there’s no penalty, nobody’s said penalty, nobody’s talking about duplicate, we’re talking about content redundancy and filler content as outlined in the Quality Raters Guidelines. At the same time, what I’m trying to convey that I agree with you a 100%, but if we…
Casey Markee (00:45:38):
I wish I could get my family to take that approach.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:43):
If you look at the content in the recipe card as content on the page, forget that it’s a recipe card. You have two places, in the post saying not duplicate content, not duplicate content, we established that. From a usefulness perspective for a user, Google will most likely find a page that doesn’t have this repetition, that is much more focused and not diluted to rank above them. So it’s not a penalty, you’re just not going to show up as high as you want to show up. Now, if you have a structured post that’s focused, that’s providing you perspective, that doesn’t have hints of filler content in it, as again outlined in the Quality Raters Guidelines, and I’ll post a link to that, you will have a post that’s much more focused and has much better opportunities at ranking. We’re not looking at it from a perspective of what’s the usefulness of the recipe card?
(00:46:32):
Yes, we establish that that’s the carousel, and that’s that. If we take the actual physical part, the viewable part of the recipe card off the page and just leave the schema, it will still have the same effect. So we’re not arguing that point. I’m saying the content that’s in the recipe card, if you’re repeating those concepts without providing unique perspective, you’re going to be less likely able to rank in the top three spots compared to somebody else who’s utilizing those spaces properly.
(00:46:56):
And just like you educate people in your audits using that area to provide a unique perspective, not just the rewarding, so it’s not a penalty, you’re just likely to rank, and this is, we do this, we do this in our coaching, we do this with our deliverable as soon as we start cutting out the filler, and I’m not saying remove the ingredients section, leave the ingredients section in there, let it stay there, but that section should talk about your unique perspective around these ingredients.
Casey Markee (00:47:23):
Well, and again, and that’s common sense. I mean hopefully…
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:27):
But it’s not because look at everybody…
Casey Markee (00:47:27):
Those of you on the call here that have had an audit. If you have a section, your goal should be in the post to show your expertise by talking about some, but never all of the ingredients. We know based upon user testing studies that people love the out shit of labeled ingredient photos. They like to walk through the store…
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:42):
And this is where we agree…
Casey Markee (00:47:43):
And Grab things off the shelf. But that doesn’t mean that you need to list every one of those ingredients in the post, that’s what the recipe card is for.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:50):
Thank you. So we agree, that’s what I said. We agree on this.
Casey Markee (00:47:54):
On some of it, the whole point is that Google relies heavily on structured data.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:58):
Absolutely, nobody’s going to take it away.
Casey Markee (00:48:01):
We know it’s probably [inaudible 00:48:00] away. So we know that to populate the recipe carousel, you got to have a card. We know that to show star ratings and cook times and calories, you got to have a card. And we also know that Google is still trying to support voice search and doing a terrible job with Google Assistant integrations. But even then, that would still be tied to the card itself, not the post.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:19):
So, the problems that we saw from cleaning up a lot of the sites that were maybe not even because they deserved to were affected, were cohorted into that not helpful classifier. When we actually look at the post, and this is the stuff that we’re cleaning up, I’m having one-on-ones, running experiments, when we actually look at this, and I presented that as a case study in my presentation with Tastemaker, that gluten-free bread recipe, that once we cut out repetition and fluff and filler, that wasn’t necessary there. Yes, from a helpful perspective, she thought she was very, very helpful by providing gluten-free baking techniques, but that’s not what the user is there for. When we started cutting that out, she bounced back, and it’s not saying that she wasn’t ranking, she was on page two, she was still relevant. She just wasn’t as relevant as somebody above her because she was providing too much. It was way diluted.
Casey Markee (00:49:12):
And we’ve discussed that. I think we’ve covered that repeatedly over the last 30 plus minutes, is that superfluous means needless, superfluous means unnecessary, superfluous means not helpful, so we don’t need eight photos of the ingredients. We don’t need, or eight photos of the finished dish. We don’t need a list of 12 ingredients and talking about every one of the ingredients when the recipe itself may only has two or three ingredients that really require a specific finite deep dive into.
(00:49:41):
Those are the kinds of things that are helpful. We just don’t need to cut… Well, cutting out fluff doesn’t mean, Hey, I’m going to move my FAQs below the recipe card so no one sees it. Cutting out fluff doesn’t mean I’m going to move my process shots from the post to the recipe card. I do not agree with any of those recommendations, and I think it will hurt anyone who tries to implement them, especially considering that it’s going to be substantially harder going forward if Google flips the switch and brings AI Mode live.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:08):
Right. I disagree with that just because from what we’re seeing in actual results from moving things around. Now, look, again, it’s almost looking at it from the lens, and I’ve been very consistent in this since 2020. We had our first episode, we talked about this. I’ve been very, very consistent about this, how I like to structure posts to be in line with jobs to be done. The user is here for the recipe, tell them what they need to know before they make the recipe, tell them about the recipe, how to make the recipe, and then tell them everything they need to know once they’ve made the recipe. Just following a logical flow,
Casey Markee (00:50:41):
And that’s fine, but the data doesn’t support that. I mean, again, I get that’s your opinion, and I agree with it, but again, the user testing does not show that. It is what it is, that’s why when we’re looking at this, people don’t need, for example, to have… They want, for example, substitutions and variations before the step-by-step, common sense.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:05):
Yeah, absolutely, that should be above…
Casey Markee (00:51:06):
Why would you not give that? And you’d be surprised at how many people put that information after the step-by-step.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:10):
Well, that’s just…
Casey Markee (00:51:11):
There’s a logical place for that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:51:13):
The implementation aspect. Misinterpretation of advice and improper implementation. We never recommend it. Substitutions, different preparation methods. All of that is unique perspective. Because you as a recipe creator, you’re saying, Hey, you don’t want to use butter. You could use yogurt, right?
Casey Markee (00:51:33):
Yeah. Now, what we have seen to be successful is we have been seeing, hey, let’s sell the top of the post a little bit better. Let’s put a comment from someone who really appreciate this, or let’s put a personal notation saying, Hey, I know that there’s plenty of other eggplant Parmesan recipes out there, but I think you’re going to find that this one is the best because of this. Sell them right at the top of the post and then have them continue down the page. We’re seeing, I’m seeing noticeable success in that more stickiness. What we don’t want to do is bombard the top of the post with needless ads, opt-ins, maybe save this’s, maybe we need to move some save this boxes down the page a little further, and maybe we need to make sure that auto-playing video ads load a little bit further down the page.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:17):
A 100%. Right, right.
Casey Markee (00:52:19):
You don’t need to worry about stuffing the top of that all-important first 10 seconds.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:23):
Casey, I’m cutting you off, man. We have eight minutes left, we got into this conversation.
Casey Markee (00:52:27):
What do you mean we have eight minutes. We got plenty of time.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:31):
We covered majority of the questions with that conversation. We have two topics, and I’m going to leave it open to chat, I feel like it’s such a young person. Hey, chat. Let us know. Do you want us to answer some of your questions right now or do you want us to talk about DOJ or Casey wanted to cover some of the ChatGPT prompts, the rice queue method and all of that? Give us something in chat quickly or I’m going to make the decision myself. Questions? Casey questions from people?
Casey Markee (00:53:02):
Yeah, that’s totally fine. Again, there’s no way we can ever cover everything, but it’s fine. I mean, I cover the rising method and everything else.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:53:08):
We’ll do another one, we’ll do another one. Okay. ChatGPT prompts questions. Okay. Let’s do questions Melissa, let’s get to questions. Casey, why would we help AI do better? Good question.
Casey Markee (00:53:26):
Because you have no choice. You have no choice. You will either become someone who can help lead AI into a better outcome, or you will be whatever AI rolls over. That’s your two options. There is no… There’s strength in numbers here. There is no raptive once I saw to block AI bots because there’s strength in numbers. No. This administration for the next four years has specifically said there is no chance the Department of Justice is going to do any sort of a, we’re going to have a class action lawsuit for AI or any of that stuff, not even on their agenda, and it’s fine, but there are things that you can do to improve yourself, to improve how your content is presented in AI, and we’ve covered a ton of those today. You just have to make yourself so algorithmically attractive that Google has no choice but to rank you and also provide you that citation with your name and your web address.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:28):
Melissa, there’s a question from Tammy that I want to answer. How can we tell stories if we’re trying to… Thank you, if we’re trying to make our posts more focused.
Casey Markee (00:54:39):
You learn to write more succinct. I mean, Tammy, I’ve seen some your stories.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:45):
Stay on topic, right.
Casey Markee (00:54:45):
I’ve seen some of your stories Tammy, come on. Got to make them a little shorter, all right? We have to be focused. Use ChatGPT as a writing assistant. Here’s the story I’m trying to tell, and I’m going to condense this down. Maybe I need to rewrite it into a way that goes down.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:57):
It works very well, ChatGPT and I had some of those prompts in that presentation, we’ll put up a link. But you don’t have to, it’s nothing difficult. You literally can ask ChatGPT, “Hey, am I staying on topic with this post?, And it will tell you exactly. It does a really, really good job telling you what’s on topic and what’s not on topic.
(00:55:15):
At the same time, Tammy, you want to make sure if you are going to be telling a story, that story has to be topically relevant to what you’re writing about, so you want to make sure that you’re reinforcing that topic. So if it’s a recipe, that story needs to be specific about the recipe and not dilute away from the recipe. The more the diluted content you add, the less opportunities you’ll have ranking. Next question is, let’s do… Here, I’ll show [inaudible 00:55:41], I’ll press the button. Here we go. How is this not plagiarism on Google’s behalf?
Casey Markee (00:55:46):
Well, I think you guys all know that Google Recipes, you don’t own anything but the photography. In many cases, you don’t own the instructions, you don’t own the ingredients, and what Google is doing is they’re basically taking, as I said, the Frankenstein approach, which is they’re taking information from so many different places that it literally becomes unique to them.
(00:56:06):
Doesn’t make it right, we’re not defending it. That is the reality and that is the Frankenstein type of composite that we’re getting when they’re using vectors and embeddings and they’re using RAG to pull all this information for various sources in AI Mode, and we don’t have to like it, but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:29):
Right. Joanna has another question, sorry Joanne. How do you discern the difference between minimal yet helpful content and minimal thin content? I’m always afraid to write too little in case it’s termed thin content.
Casey Markee (00:56:47):
You know what, Joanne? That is a very valid question, and I think the question is, I think the issue is that we write for what it makes sense. If you feel that this is a complete recipe and you’ve done what you feel that the user needs, great, but that’s also why we have user testing. You could do a survey, a blog survey, ask friends, ask other bloggers, do you feel that this is a complete recipe? Pop it into ChatGPT. Say ChatGPT, you are an expert in food, blogging, SEO, Google quality guidelines.
(00:57:15):
You have a deep understanding of word content length and how to write a complete post that goes to the root cause of Google helpful content suggestions. Knowing all of that, that’s you setting up the role here is my recipe. Tell me if you think this is too thin, what could I do to improve it? And oh, by the way, ask me probing questions so that I can provide you better output. Those are the kind of things that you need to do to make sure that you’re getting the best value you can out of ChatGPT.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:57:49):
I always recommend to publish regardless of how you feel about it, and then monitor, you’re going to see how Google is pulling that content into which direction. If you’re looking at your keyword inventory for that page, you can look at it in search Console. You can see which keywords you’re starting to rank closer to the top. The closer to the top, the more relevant that piece of content is towards those keywords, and that helps you understand how Google is contextualizing that content.
(00:58:10):
So if you’re being pulled in one direction from a topic perspective and that’s not direction that you want to go into, that’s kind of a cue to you where you need to either add saturation, create more content around that topic, or create dilution, take away saturation around the specific topic that you’re ranking for, if that’s not what you’re trying to achieve. Let’s take a look at another good question. I’m trying to see who has the most stars. How do we gauge, okay, here we go. “How do we gauge when to update historical top ranking 1-3 posts in today’s ranking volatility when it’s changing daily?” Casey, I know your answer to this.
Casey Markee (00:58:47):
Well, this is a good question because personalized search is so paramount now, there is going to be no way to track rankings anytime. I mean, it’s very unreliable as it is now, but I think your question is if you know that it’s not in the top three and you definitely see regularly, maybe you have a couple other people who verify the ranking, then I’m all for it. If it’s not in the top three, all bets are off, I want to improve it. But one of the other things you could do is just immediately start sending external signals in.
(00:59:16):
We know that Google tracks click data. We know that there are external signals that Google is using. We know that pogo sticking is a real thing. We know that social signals based upon the APA link is something that Google might actually be using. So, I would look at doing all of that stuff offsite first into the post before you worry about making any dramatic changes. As I’m sure Arsen would say, we already know that the intent of the post is high or you wouldn’t be ranking where you are.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:39):
You wouldn’t be there, right.
Casey Markee (00:59:40):
It’s just that there’s a big difference between ranking the top three and ranking below that because those top three listings are usually locked, and because there’s both an external and an internal signals match there that you’re going to have to break through, and that usually requires you to look offsite to do that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:58):
The user signal is a very strong signal that Google has no control over that noise. So, if you’re getting clicks, you got to look at your pre-click and post-click data. If you’re getting clicks and they’re dwelling and they’re staying around, you’re going to hold that position. Regardless, if you’re a 100% SEO 101, if you’ve checked all the boxes, if you [inaudible 01:00:15] clicks.
Casey Markee (01:00:15):
Exactly, very good.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:16):
You can have like zero… I’ve seen number two positions without a recipe card, without headings, without process photography, just content on the page and maybe one shot. They’re there because they’re getting clicks and people are staying there and Google sees that and Google is learning from that and it’s gauging everybody else against that. We’re at one hour, Casey, we should do a continuation of this. This is really, really good, I love this. We’ll try to hopefully in the write-up, answer as many of these questions as possible, we had some [inaudible 01:00:47].
Casey Markee (01:00:46):
Yeah, absolutely. Please submit your questions. I’m happy to look at them, that’s no problem at.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:50):
Awesome. Other than that, thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming today. Really enjoyed this talk.
Casey Markee (01:00:56):
Bye everyone. Really, thanks for turning out.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:57):
Bye.
Casey Markee (01:00:58):
Good luck.
