Prepare for a renewed and increasing emphasis on EEAT

Kavi says: “Follow Google’s lead and adopt a renewed focus on EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust.

Google has already started emphasising EEAT in the recent messaging they direct at site owners. That suggests that they’re predicting a corrective pendulum swing away from the recent swell in AI-generated content.

Not that we’ll stop using AI to create or augment our content, but they’re accurately predicting that people are going to have more of a thirst for user-generated content with the growth of all the AI content we are seeing in search results. Organisations need to be prepared for that swing to happen as well.”

What are the useful ways of using AI within content in 2024?

“It’s really important to have a process for getting AI to give you the output you’re actually looking for. That means knowing the right input to give to ChatGPT or any other tool. You can’t just hit copy, paste, and publish on the content that it spits out for you, without taking the time to refine your prompts and know exactly how you should be talking to those models.”

Asking the right questions upfront, and letting the model know exactly who the audience is and what the content is going to be used for, is often really important. That helps to refine the voice and tone that it will use in what it spits back out. If you don’t, it uses a generic tone that won’t match your brand and won’t sound authentic or human-written. If you feed it a little bit more information upfront, that helps to tweak it more closely to what your users actually need.”

How does Google Perspectives factor into EEAT?

“The Perspectives idea is really interesting. We haven’t seen exactly how it’s going to play out in its final form, but the fact that they’ve introduced that new kind of search result suggests they’re predicting people will be looking for human perspectives, user-generated content, and content from subject matter experts – not just what you see in those generic search results.

Of course, we don’t know if the SGE experience is going to play out exactly as it looks today either but, if it does, we will see more people clicking through to those Perspectives results as opposed to just being satisfied with what’s on that first page.”

What type of content is likely to appeal to the Perspectives filter?

“Video, definitely. We’re not just talking about textual content here. It’s short-form videos and even longer videos of the type that you see on YouTube.

When we’re learning how to write in school, we’re told, ‘Don’t talk in the first person.’ Now, we need to start thinking a little bit opposite to that. Don’t be afraid to speak in the first person and say, ‘My experience is this. This is why I am qualified to talk about this.’

Especially in videos, try to sound like you’re talking to a person or advising a friend on the topic rather than generically stating facts. That will come across as more authentic and it will be rewarded in search results as well.

These are typically vertical videos. When I’ve played around with Perspectives a little bit, I’ve seen a lot of that. To some extent, they’re looking at Perspectives as a competitor for TikTok because Google sees so much of its traffic being pulled away by TikTok right now. They’re thinking that short-form, vertical video is the best way to compete with what people are used to seeing on that platform instead.

If a brand is already set up with a solid TikTok strategy or Instagram strategy, then they’re probably already making content that looks quite a bit like this. Brands that have stayed away from TikTok and Instagram might have a harder time adopting the format. Speaking to your audience in a more casual, friendly way doesn’t feel natural to a lot of brands but it is going to be really valuable, where it makes sense.”

For a longer sales cycle, where does this content fit in the user journey and what comes before and after?

“If you’re an e-commerce website, this type of content (coming from the brand itself, short-form video or text that demonstrates more authority) is probably more useful at the top of the funnel, where people are starting to learn about whatever they’re going to eventually buy.

It’s less relevant once you get down to the nitty-gritty of actually hitting ‘Add to Cart’ and making a purchase. When you get to that point, you want to incorporate more user-generated, or customer-generated, content by encouraging comments, reviews, and that sort of thing.

We already know that Google is training some of their own models on reviews at this point, so they’re obviously taking a much closer look at user-generated reviews and considering those to be even more valuable than they did before.”

Should brands try to incorporate users in the content on their own website or should they encourage users to talk about the brand on their own social platforms?

“Both, but if a brand can incorporate user voices in their on-site, housed content, that’s something really interesting that we should start seeing more of. A lot of brands aren’t doing that right now, but it demonstrates more authority and more trust from users in the brand and the product. Pushing that to your own in-house platforms makes a lot of sense.”

Do SEOs need to work more closely with social media departments to achieve this?

“One of the most exciting things about this shift is that it’s naturally going to lead us toward less siloing of marketing departments and more cross-department work. I’ve always advocated talking to your customer service representatives about what customers are asking about and how you can solve those pain points using content or SEO.

We’re going to start seeing more of that on the social media side now too. SEOs should be going to the social media directors and asking, ‘What are people saying about our brand on Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit right now? How can we use this conversation that already exists outside of our control, bring it within our control, own that messaging, and encourage users to contribute to it too?’

I don’t think about this as social media teams giving up responsibility but simply sharing information. Social media managers can keep doing the job that they’re doing while passing off what they’ve learned and any content ideas to the SEOs and content creators. It shouldn’t create a particularly different division of labour. It’s collaborative work that we get to do together, which is really exciting.”

With SGE, are Google going to incorporate Perspectives into partially AI-generated results, creating an opportunity to stay on the SERP there?

“It does look that way right now. Again, once SGE is fully rolled out we don’t know if it’s going to look exactly like it looks right now. They’re certainly getting a lot of negative feedback on it, and I’ve heard quite a bit of chatter around the SEO universe that SGE is relatively useless as it’s just scraping language from the top few results. What’s the point, when you can just scroll down and see the same thing a few results down?

However, we are going to have some version of AI-generated results in our SERPs pretty soon. It looks like Perspectives is going to live in that top bar alongside Videos, Shopping, and Images. I think we’ll see some users using both and some users opting more for one or the other.”

For newer SEOs, is it still necessary to learn all the traditional aspects of SEO?

“We’re still going to need to rely on a lot of the SEO basics. On the blogs, at conferences, and on podcasts, I’m seeing a lot of people encouraging back-to-basics SEO at the same time as all of these new things are happening. That makes a lot of sense.

Technical SEO, for example, probably isn’t going to change very much. You’re still going to need to do all of the things to keep your site in good shape. Understanding crawling, indexing, etc., is probably never going to change, but we can now use ChatGPT to help us write some of those tasks and make them go faster, which is nice.

Creating genuinely helpful content that is written for users is and always has been the basic gist of SEO, and I don’t think that’s going to change. If anything, we’re seeing more of a focus on that.

For people who are new to the industry, this is a really great time to be getting into SEO because you’re coming in with a fresh perspective. You’re not bogged down by the old-school focus on title tags and meta descriptions. Instead, you can bring a fresh pair of eyes to what we’re doing. For younger people who are more used to TikTok and the exchange that happens on social media platforms, that perspective is going to be really helpful in this new era of SEO.”

Will Google introduce some form of paid advertising opportunity into Perspectives, similar to thought leader ads on LinkedIn?

“It’s definitely possible. Putting paid ads into Perspectives seems a bit counterintuitive to what they claim to be doing with that feature, but they’ve got to make money somehow. I’m curious to see how the paid side of things is going to be incorporated into both Perspectives and the SGE too.”

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?

“Stop relying on AI-generated content without human intervention. We’ve seen GPT-4 and other large language models come a really long way in terms of creating fairly good content, but you can’t just hit copy, paste, and publish. You’ve got to interact a little bit more.

We spend a lot of time getting to know how to use AI tools and then not using them properly. Right now, the best use of ChatGPT is for automating time-consuming SEO tasks. Focus more on that and learn how to use them for the more technical and tedious tasks that you’ve been doing in spreadsheets for the past five years.

Don’t waste time figuring out what content you want to get out of it, prompting it the wrong way, and sending that off to your client or your publisher without putting the thought that’s required into making it good and authentic.”

Kavi Kardos is Director of SEO at Uproer, and you can find her over at Uproer.com.