The Problem With HubSpot – Episode 81

Since early 2012, has been saying, oh, content is everything right? Lots of content. And now they're saying, oh, but actually we only want the really good content. Please stop writing heaps of rubbish.

I think that's a really good point about the sort of editorial, um, sort of vetting almost in a way. Google's kind of trying to do that.

Having lots of content seem to be what worked for a while. Whereas now are we broadly suggesting that moving into a quality first situation makes more sense? We're trying to provide a road map of what you could be looking at in the new year to try and make sure that you, if you haven't already been caught out by the helpful content update, what you can do to mitigate. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The coalface. And this week we've got Karen and.

Julie.

And.

Alex.

And me and me, Dave. So this week, um, we're going to talk about, um, something that Google did earlier this year. We're going to talk about what they did, what our interpretation of what they did. And we're going to talk about what we're doing to address that and just kind of talk in general terms about this particular update and why it was important. Wider reaching Oscars, playing with the golf ball, the wider reaching, um, implications. By the way, Oscars, a.

Dog, for those of you who thinking we have a colleague playing with a golf ball, Oscar is our furry colleague and he is playing with the golf ball.

So, Alex, I think you might be the right person to sort of introduce this subject and give us some insights about Google's useful content update.

Yeah, I guess so. Um, so they're actually rolling out another one today or this week as we're, as we're talking about this, which is quite interesting. So basically it was an update that was designed to kind of promote, um, content that was genuinely helpful, genuinely useful, and to demote content that was kind of seen as thin or spammy or that was generated by artificial intelligence. Um, it's generally like when it first rolled out, it didn't really seem to do very much. Lots of people were kind of sat around wondering whether or not they'd actually launched it. Over time, it does seem like more and more people are noticing that it is kind of having a big impact on their rankings, either losing or gaining.

Okay, so let's just unpack that a little bit. The, the idea of helpful content, you know, as opposed to what?

I mean, I guess content designed to help you rank, right? I guess that's what the, the kind of, the primary thing going on here is lots of people were creating. You look like you.

Know, but the helpful content update isn't. It's not about content that helps you rank, is it? It's about content content. Yeah, it's the opposite. Yeah.

It's about, um, trying to demote content that is purely written for search engines. And it's, it mentions content written for humans. And they're trying to make sure that content written for humans rises to the top of the search engines rather than content that is just like stuffed with keywords and just written purely for the sake of rank ranting or ranting or ranking.

And I'm not entirely convinced that they can do that very well.

No, no. Well, it's an experiment.

It's always an experiment. And Google has explained that everything they do is an experiment because they're constantly trying to get things right for people who are searching.

So if we unpick it slightly, it's a site wide signal. So Google is looking at not just individual articles. They're looking at websites and trying to figure out whether these websites generally have good, useful, helpful content or content that's designed purely to try and get people to land on a page. So they click an advert and somebody somewhere makes some money basically.

And it's, um, yeah, it's looking at um the proportions on a site. So if you've got some kind of genuinely decent content and some absolute garbage that's just been sort of written by a machine or whatever, then yeah, it's not just gonna downgrade those pages, it's going to downgrade the whole website.

So it's like looking at a beautiful person, but they've got horrible feet and it's going to, you know, downgrade you because you've got horrible feet.

I don't think it's anything like that.

Possibly.

That's that's not a bad analogy.

So everything's got to be perfect in this perfect person.

Or the, the more than fifty percent of the person's got to be perfect or at least like, okay. Yeah. Um, if if if more than fifty percent of this person is, is not good, then you're not going to choose them.

So let's try and find a definition of helpful content. Let's just like go around the table and decide what we all think is helpful content. And, and if you like what isn't helpful content. So who wants to go first?

Well, I'll go first because that's the easiest than someone else. Everyone else is gonna have to think of something else.

Well, you see, it's easy.

I think it's content that answers a question that someone is asking. Um, I'm going to leave it there.

Okay. Ah, can add to that. Uh, it's, it's answering questions that people are asking based on whether you can help them or not, whether you think you can help them or not. So you're creating content that answers questions that you know you can answer fully and unequivocally.

Yes, it's got an authority. They are looking at authority. Like, why are you writing about this? If your website's about digital marketing and you're writing a blog post about pencil sharpeners, it would be like, why are you doing that? That that is not what you do. So they are looking at the sort of expertise and authority of the person writing it as well. So yeah.

Okay, take a picture. Alex going to add to that.

Well, it's interesting. So one of the things that they've kind of announced over the last couple of days is that they've added another E to their e a t thing, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So they've added an E which is for experience. So obviously the idea being that they're trying to encourage people or persuade people that, you know, the content they want to see is written by people who have real hands on experience, like you were saying that know this subject inside out. The idea of helpful content is it's content that adds real value to a discussion or a debate or a topic. But I think just going back to what David was saying earlier, that's a ridiculously kind of vague and generic thing to, to say and to try and do. Right. I mean, the point is, nobody really knows what helpful content is. I mean, you might pick up a book in a library, read it, and think, oh, that was useless. You know, it's still quote unquote helpful content, isn't it? It's still just someone, somebody with experience. It's still written by somebody who knows what they're talking about and knows the field. So I don't, I don't know really what, how I would define helpful content. I know how Google defines it, but I don't think it's a very good definition.

Well, here's an idea then. How about if you go to Google and carry out a search because you're trying to solve a problem, you're trying to find a product, you're trying to find a service, you have got a question that you need an answer to, and you type in that question, you might reasonably, um, click on the first result that comes up. And if that first result is clearly being created, in order to get your eyeballs on that page in the hope that you might click an advert or do something, I don't know what else you might do other than click an advert then, and it doesn't answer that question, but it's managed to get to that number one position because it's done a load of spammy link building, or it's got tons and tons of pages, which were all generated by AI, which made it for a while anyway, maybe even still does makes it look like an authority website. Then it it that it is that what we're driving at?

Julie I think it's to do, I think Google's trying to be clever, more clever about what it thinks you're trying to achieve when you type that in. So if you're typing in golf balls, are you typing in to find what golf balls are made of? Or are you wanting to buy golf balls? And it's trying to differentiate. So if you're, if you're trying to find out what golf balls are made of, and you end up in a site that sells golf balls, that's not helpful if you're trying to buy golf balls and you end up on a site that tells you what they're made of, that's also not helpful. So it's to do with what they call intent, isn't it? So it's trying to go right. Are you looking to buy something or are you getting information? What is it you're actually trying to do when you type this in? Because I think there was an example somebody gave. Um, but if you type in how many calories in a bottle of wine, it actually tells you how many calories in a glass of wine because it thinks that's probably really what you want to know. So it's trying to almost second guess what you're trying to find when you type something in.

But I think that's a separate thing to this helpful content update.

Possibly.

Because Google has always tried to give you search results that help you answer the question, solve the problem, whatever it needs to be. Yeah, what Google is doing, I think, and it was interesting that they telegraphed this update. They told everybody they were doing it, and they kind of made it very clear in two weeks time, we're going to bring out this useful content update, which was an odd thing to do. Uh, it's not usually the way that they do it. And most people, I think, are seeing that as Google sending out a message to say, we are not going to tolerate the search engine results being dominated by websites full of AI, artificial intelligence generated content. Mhm. Um, but I'm not entirely convinced that I'm not I don't know how good they are at spotting AI content is what I'm trying to say. And I think a lot of people don't know how good they are either. And I think that's where a lot of the debate at the moment lies. Alex, you wanted to say something.

I can't tell the difference between rubbish, AI generated content and just plain rubbish internet content.

That's a very good point.

Stuff around. That's the problem, isn't it?

There's some there's some there's some content written by people that's a lot worse than some of the content written by AI, to be honest.

So maybe like the signals need to be right. Things like this website has suddenly appeared and it's got twenty thousand, and, you know, it's just suddenly appeared, things like that. They could maybe go, well, that looks a bit suspicious suspect, but a website, say a website like ours, if we dropped in for every two or three articles, blog posts that we wrote ourselves. If we dropped in one or two articles, is it a going to care and b going to be able to spot that?

I wouldn't have thought so.

Mhm. So if Google's trying to, you know, why is Google trying to push back on AI content? What's what's the driving force behind it? And by the way, where we're trying to get to with this podcast, if you've still if you're still listening, is we want to get to a point where we can provide a kind of roadmap for people for 2023, um, or 2024. If you're listening to this, uh, a lot later than most people.

2027, yeah.

We're trying to provide a roadmap of what you could be looking at in the new year to try and make sure that you, if you haven't already been caught out by the helpful content update, what you can do to mitigate.

Are we looking at content in the round? I mean, we were saying- I was saying that, you know, everything Google's doing is constantly tweaking, looking at the landscape, seeing what people are up to and trying to stay relevant so that it's the pages that it's finding. And the pages that it's serving up are going to help human beings who use the interweb to get help or find answers to questions. So it's whether it's, I think it's about looking at content in the round and evaluating the value and.

Evaluating the value.

Evaluating the value. I wrote that in inverted commas when I made my note, because I thought I thought that was good, evaluating values of, um, content relative to the other content on your site. So Julie was saying, you know, if you've got some poor content and it's, it's a weighty amount of poor content, it's probably going to pull down the, the relative authority, value, trust, whatever, in Google's eyes of your site and of your pages. But if you're writing across the piece. So you're writing stuff that educates people who are at the very beginning of their learning journey, if you like, and you're writing content that speaks to people who already understand a little bit of this and people who understand a lot, then, you know, you're painting the whole picture. So, you know, how is it, how is it in its experiment going to figure that out as well? So Alex has got a point to make around that.

Well, no, I was just going to say that. Yeah. Like what you're sort of touching on I think kind of speaks directly to what David was asking earlier. And also the point I was trying to make at the beginning, which is that what Google really doesn't want to do, I guess, is keep pushing search results that are poor quality that people are going to land on and think, oh, this is rubbish. This, this doesn't actually answer my questions, isn't helping me. This isn't right for what I'm looking for. Because ultimately, Google's main concern, I guess, is that people will stop using Google eventually. I mean, certainly I've spent a lot of time recently reading threads on, on places like Reddit and the comments section of Search Engine Journal and stuff like that, where people are saying, oh, you know, know, Google's rubbish now I don't use it anymore, I use DuckDuckGo. I guess eventually if they continue to let people push and kind of rank content, that is very bad. Mhm. Eventually people just stop using it.

I'd be interested to know how the other search engines are better. I mean, how are they ranking content that makes their search results better than Google? I wonder?

I've heard just like that thing about the bottle of wine glass of wine thing. I think because Google's trying to be so clever and guess what it is you want. Sometimes it's not getting it right. And that's what people have been complaining about that. Um, it's trying to guess what you mean and giving you what it thinks you mean, when actually that's not what you mean at all. So I think it's, it's in a process of probably, it probably will get to the point where it does it, but at the moment it's not quite. Nailed it.

Yeah. But I still think we're confusing two things there. We're confusing Google trying to be clever and give you the search results that you that it thinks you want with the search results. It's actually giving you the pages it's actually serving up and whether they're any good or not. Because and how is it figuring out how is it doing that?

Yeah, because it's, it's looking and it's storing information and data in its index based on what it's seeing out there, what it's found out there, what it's evaluating out there, what it's measuring, and the relative values of different types of content. So I think you're right. There are two sides to this. One is the data. It's gathering and how it's organising it and the data it's gathering and how it's serving it up when, when people are looking for that.

If we go back to say 2006, then we had content spinning tools. So you might have a self storage company, for example, and they operate in Bristol, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Preston and Carlisle. And you would write a piece of content. The spinning tool would then just go and do what it needed to do so that you could use one piece of content, spun four or five different times, all talking about different places, for example. That's very easy to spot. It's very easy to find. So that the content spinning tools stopped working. And the extreme of those content spinning tools was random words gobbledygook with the keywords embedded in there that linked back to other websites and things like that. And that was the ultimate in, in spun content, if you like. So if, if Google figured that out, that probably wasn't very hard. Um, what it's trying to do now is using machine learning. It's trying to do the same with AI and, but let's like, what is the main reason that Google's even embarking on this endeavor? What is the, what is the purpose? Some, you know, people who listen to our podcast are people who run businesses, run websites, etc., not other digital marketing companies. So what does it, you know, there might be people might be confused like, well, what are you you're actually getting at here, what you're talking about. And maybe they don't realise that there's an entire industry out there of people who are just pumping any old crap onto web pages, getting indexed by Google to sell affiliate links and to, to, to try and get adverts clicked and sell products that they don't even, you know, that they just dropship and the whole kind of just cesspit, if you like, of rubbish that's out there.

I think maybe that's why it's pushing the sort of expertise, authority, experience thing. It's trying to look at what experience the author has, the company has, you know, is this something they know about so that it's saying that, you know, you have a right to, to comment on this subject, whereas, you know, other people who are just basically trying to suck people in so they can sell the leads to someone else. They don't have the right to speak on that topic because they're not experts. Um, how about how it figures that out? I don't know, but if it if if those people aren't experts, they're obviously not going to be able to write about it themselves. They're they're then using these AI tools to write about it. If Google can spot certain patterns or AI tools are just finding content elsewhere and figuring out what it means and then.

Mashing it together.

Yeah, mashing it together. So if Google can spot that, then it goes well, you're obviously not an expert in this topic because you've used a machine to write this, and we want genuine experts showing up when somebody asks a question.

I think the machine learning is probably an embryonic stage when you know, with that respect, no doubt artificial intelligence, written content, AI content must have some sort of fingerprint. And that is what Google's trying to figure out. It's trying to try and learn how to spot the fingerprint, which is the giveaway. Um, but Alex, you want to say something?

Well, I was just going to say that. Yeah, one hundred percent agree with what you're saying, but I think probably Google is also quite keen to get rid of just, you know, content that is written by humans still, but is it's still sort of low value, right? Yeah. Yes. The AI stuff's really important, but generally Google know that for a given search term, somebody is only going to click the first couple or few links. They don't really want the search terms kind of studded with articles that are that are generally bad, irrespective of whether they've been.

Where they came from.

Or an AI. Really?

Yeah.

Okay. So Google, you know, I almost find it nauseating that we say that so often. Well, Google wants this and Google wants that. You know.

It's so annoying.

It's so annoying. It really is so, so annoying. But you know, they dominate the search market. And people use search engines when they're looking for stuff. Whether, you know, whatever it is we all do, whether it's Google or YouTube or DuckDuckGo or any of the others. Um, so what Google wants is what Karen, what does Google really want?

It wants to serve people up answers to questions they ask in terms of relevant.

In terms of content. What is, what does Google want in your view?

I want to say things like well written, authoritative, trustworthy, expert comment and opinion or information about any given topic. But when I speak like that, I feel like I'm talking about a person, not a Google, you know, a bot or a spider or whatever. And so it just feels wrong.

It seems to want, you know, a mixture of words, pictures, videos. It seems to want something that when somebody lands on it, it gives them a really good experience. So it's got, you know, plenty of information, but it also has of other elements to make it make it nice for the user. So the user goes, oh, this was a, this was a great thing to land on, you know, makes Google look good.

But does anybody feeling this like this, this sense of irony around. We're talking about Google as if it's a person, and it's using the very tools, the machine learning that it's trying to spot in the content that we're talking about, you know, the, the, the, the spun content. I, I find that I find that interesting and baffling all at the same time.

Yeah. It is, it's, it's kind of bizarre that a machine is trying to weed out stuff that's written by machines, but there you go. That's what we do for a living.

But ultimately, I mean, if you look at a piece of content and read it, or you read a book or you read an article, or you read an advert or a poster stuck on a telegraph, telegraph pole about, you know, a concert next week at the local village hall, you can spot something that's been written well and something that hasn't. So ultimately, does it not all fall to common sense? And Alex looks like he's going to say something now.

Well, yeah, I was going to say ironically, I think what Google really wants to see is content that, you know, prior to Google, before it existed. The only way to get your content out there really before the internet was around was to get it published in a magazine or newspaper. Right? Ironically, Google now sort of only really wants to see the kind of content that would have been published in a magazine or a newspaper in the past, you know, stuff that is actually interesting, stuff that's actually useful, stuff that adds value, stuff that a human editor would look at and say, oh, you know what? Actually, this is really cool. We'll publish this. The difficulty is there is a sort of Pandora's box element to this, isn't there? Since kind of early 2012, Google have been saying, oh, content is everything, right? Lots of content. And now they're saying, oh, but actually we only want the really good content. Please stop writing heaps of rubbish.

It's just.

Yeah, yeah.

It's realised that the internet is now absolutely jam packed with absolute nonsense and it's going, oops. I think we um, we've sort of a victim of our own success and it's realised that a lot of it is rubbish. Um, but I think that's a really good point about the sort of editorial, um, sort of vetting almost. Yeah. Because yeah, in the past, if you wrote something to a journal, the only, only the really good stuff and the really relevant stuff would actually get published. So in a way, Google's kind of trying to do that and, and add some editorial weight. Yeah. Um, so yeah, vetting, I can't think of the word, but yeah. Um, to, to actually what, what gets seen so that the absolute garbage doesn't, I suppose that's what it's all about.

Okay, so Google wants well structured content, but not necessarily highly search engine optimised content. Yeah, possibly.

Um, apparently.

And traditionally, I think Alex mentioned this earlier having lots of content. Somebody mentioned it seemed to be what worked for a while. Um, whereas now are we broadly speaking, suggesting tentatively that moving into a quality first situation.

Seem to be.

Makes more sense.

I think it also very much depends on the industry, because some industries there's not actually not that much stuff out there. And so, you know, if there's not much choice, then you can still kind of appear with something that's maybe not very good. Whereas other industries where, you know, there's, there's a lot of marketers and, um, you know, people have worked really, really hard on, you know, optimising their websites, then there's just too much stuff. So I think that very much is a sort of quality first element to it in, in certain industries at least.

Where there's a lot at stake.

Just where, where there's, as I always say, as a marketer, I say marketers go into things and, you know, get involved in something and they kind of break it. You know, they broke Facebook and they, um, they broke, um, search engines and they're, you know, they're breaking TikTok and everything else. So, you know, you let you let marketers loose and they, they find a way of, um, sort of gaming the system and, and then it makes it really hard for the decent stuff to show up.

Okay. So what? In order to provide something of value to people listening. What should marketing managers be thinking about next year? Um, when it comes to content, should they be thinking of leveraging the AI tools, which are getting better and more sophisticated so that they can produce content at scale and dominate simply because they've got huge websites? Should they be paying lots of money to get really well researched, well written content that ultimately is going to work better? Question mark. You know, is it really going to work better, I don't know. Um, well, what do we think.

We don't, we don't, we don't actually know. But from what I've been sort of reading and listening to it seems that really, really well researched, well written, well illustrated multimedia pieces of content that have really, you know, really taken a massive effort to produce are the way forward and not just churning out loads and loads of stuff. Um, less, less is more. I think that that seems to be what the, the message is that's coming out, um, from, from Google and the like.

So we're really saying that good content relies on expertise and ultimately that is what's going to work the best in the long run.

We think.

So we have to be. I mean, it's interesting because I was doing a thing earlier today where I was trying to come up with ideas for our blog for next year, and for the first time ever, I found myself sat there thinking not just, you know, when I googled a search term that I was thinking of writing a blog post for, not just can I write something that's as good as what's in position one? Or can we write more content? But can we actually add something to this conversation? You know, do we actually have a unique take on this? Is it worth doing? And I guess that's probably the winning approach, right? It's to ask yourself, can I, can I, if I'm going to try and rank for this search term, actually add something new? Can I knock it out of the park? Or am I just going to be copying what everyone else is doing and just let that lead you? Really, unless I sense from you a kind of skepticism towards this, I guess unless you're going to say, actually, do you know what, forget about spending loads of effort, time and money on on really in-depth content. I'm just going to see what I can get away with writing my fear with that would just be that it has a finite lifespan, right? If you just spin or use AI tools to, to create loads of content for loads of different search terms, eventually your website will get penalised for it, I think.

So I think that's where we're going.

But haven't we learned in the past? And it will take a little bit of time to unlearn that, uh, you know, producing slightly, uh, bad content at scale can win you rewards in the short term. And people are still reluctant to give that up. And, you know, if you tell people it's going to take a long time or it's even going to take a sort of a long time for something to rank and to bear fruit that, you know, people are going to get, you know, short, they have short, short attention, attention spans or, or short waiting times and fuses that can't be one hundred percent.

So I was just going to say, you know, the whole chat g t thing. Yeah. Yeah. Over the weekend. So I was reading a LinkedIn post where someone was like, oh, I've gone from zero to three thousand daily visits on my website in a week just using ChatGPT, you know.

And how were they using it?

They've just been using it to churn out content, like literally just generate articles for search terms. Um, there is always going to be people that get away with that stuff. I guess the thing is, most of our listeners are the kind of people who have invested a lot of time and effort and energy in their business, the kind of people who leverage these AI tools in the short term for that gain. Don't mind just closing up shop and walking away if it all goes wrong and.

Starting.

Up somewhere else and starting again. But if you've spent five or six years trying to grow your business, you're attached to the domain name. You're attached to the brand. Can you really afford to take that risk?

There's a lot more at stake. Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's, there's more at stake there. So you have to be in tune with your brand and the value that that holds to your livelihood, if you like, and to the prosperity of your business.

And I guess Google has a point in a way that says, don't think about writing for Google. Think about writing for humans. So, you know, if you've, if you've got a brand and you've got a website and you've invested in your business, you know, you don't want people to land on that and then go, what a load of garbage. You know, you want the experience they get when they land on your content to be, you know, wow, these people really know what they're talking about. These are, they're the real deal. They are the experts. I want to, you know, find out more so that, you know, that point of writing for humans is really valid, that, you know, we've we've said this all along, you know, that write something that, that, you know, you'd be happy with somebody reading and there's actually going to help them, which comes around, you know, helpful content, you know, it's, it's got to be something that somebody wants to read.

So do you think Google is trying to say you need to have faith in our ability to serve your great content up because there is a lack of faith, perhaps with some businesses, because they feel like if we do this right and we spend money on writing good content and showing people how valuable we can be to them, how we can help them. If we do that, can we have faith in Google that what Julie just said, that our page will be served up and people will land on it and go, this is a great page, because if they spend all that money and put all that faith in Google's ability to tell the difference. Are they are they are they going to, um, reap the rewards? Or are they just going to fall flat on their face?

That's been the problem up until now. Google's been saying, you know, write really helpful content and then it's been been ranking absolute garbage.

Yeah.

So it's been, it's at odds with itself. So I think it's maybe trying to right that wrong and actually, you know, do what it says it's been doing all along. And it's, I suppose it's just trying to get better at doing what it says it wants to do.

Well, I think as well, part of the problem is what it's doing now is only going to entrench bigger, larger companies at the top of search rankings and be to the detriment of smaller ones. I mean, if they're saying you need to be an expert in your subject matter, you need to have original research, you need to be able to produce tons of content, and you need to be able to produce video and audio content and all this other stuff. The people who find that easy are the large organisations that, you know, they have all that resource in-house already. The people who are going to find it really hard to compete in that space are the small to medium sized businesses, right? Because it's not just a case of, oh, that's okay, we'll tell our writing team to start churning out longer articles. You know, it's suddenly got to go away and find experts who've got to interview people who are busy doing their actual job. They've got to turn that into content. It's a big ask.

So can we give people hope in this conversation? I mean, do we feel hopeful? Can we give people some hope and reason to have faith in these changes? Perhaps?

I think if you're if you're in a niche, I mean, if you've started a business and you have very specific, a very specific niche that, you know, you're in a minority and there's not that many people doing it. And then you just write what you know, then, you know, I think it's a great opportunity. If you're in a very crowded market, then I think it's really, really hard.

Yeah. I would like to think that Google will reward the people that make the right investment and produce the great content, but you know, who's to decide what's great and what isn't great. And if I if I was a betting man, which I am from time to time, I would suggest that I would bet on Google, not necessarily winning this battle. That's my concern.

Okay.

That, you know, their machine learning algorithm, the useful content algorithm tool, whatever it is, um, is improving all the time. So is AI.

Yeah.

That's, um, that's the problem, isn't it?

Who's, who's gonna win the race at any given moment. And it's probably Google edge ahead. And then the AI will edge ahead. And obviously without video, what I'm doing with my hands is utterly irrelevant. But yeah, you know, it'll it'll be one person, one person winning the race and then the other one and. Yeah.

Okay. Well, what we decided to do, we, we've looked at this and it made us look long and hard at our own content. And we had a blog that contained three hundred posts, something like that. Um, as of right now, and it's the, what is it today, the twentieth or something? What day is it today?

20th of December 2022.

Yeah, we've reduced that significantly. We've so far culled over one hundred and fifty blog posts. And we, you know, we did it in a very structured way. We looked at Google search console data. Um, we found content that was never getting surfaced in a search result. It just simply wasn't getting put up in a search result. We looked at it and decided would, should it be repurposed, uh, or should it be removed? And so far we've removed a lot of content. Um, we haven't seen a reduction in the amount of traffic that our website's getting.

And because it was content that wasn't getting, wasn't.

Getting.

Anywhere.

But we have started to see what looks to be a slight improvement in the way the site's performing in search. And we are betting on the idea that we researched and read lots of articles about. We're betting on the idea that having lots of content, which is irrelevant and never gets thrown up in search. sends out a signal and can potentially. We talked about the useful content update being a site wide signal. And so the site wide signal that we were giving out because of our poor quality content or content that was irrelevant. Um, may well be, may well have been that there's just too much stuff in here that is rubbish, for want of a better word. And by getting rid of it, you're actually what you're left with is much better quality content, which then is no longer giving out that signal, perhaps.

Yeah. Because the proportion of content that Google didn't think was great was, was quite high. Um, now the, the proportions are maybe better so that the whole site as a overall will sort of have a better sort of score if you like.

Yeah. And the other thing that somebody else mentioned, uh, just, just before is the point of getting the point of writing content isn't purely to get a good search ranking and to get somebody to click a link and finish up on a page. The point of that content is to tell a great story, engage the person who comes to see it and try and get them to do something, i.e. pick up the phone or fill in a form or whatever, or even just tell a friend what a great company this these guys look like, because they know that their friends are looking for a particular service that we might provide, for example.

Or just go to another page on your website because they think, well, this was quite good. Maybe there's other stuff that's good and actually look at something else and then find out, oh yeah, they do this.

Yeah. I'm not a huge believer in people taking any sort of journey through a website. I think if they find an answer and they're looking to solve a problem, you know, they might go to your contact page to see where your office is. Maybe for example. Um, okay, so if we just try and try and pull that together so that we can provide something of use, um, the point of your site isn't the point of your content isn't just to get people on there. Um, but what you're trying to do is, um, improve your website by potentially thinning it out and getting rid of the rubbish that's in there. Let's just talk about that for a minute. So if we, if we think about that, we've taken a systematic approach to that Google Search Console data showed us content or showed us the content that is not appearing in search is never getting seen by anybody. Um, so we could then decide what to do with it. Um, we are also looking at, we are also making significant improvements to some content. So some content that was in a, in that was in the search console and it looked like it was getting thrown up in search, but it wasn't getting clicks because it wasn't performing well enough. We've looked at that and we're re-optimising it, i.e. that is to say, what we're what we're saying is like this is about a particular subject, and we have to then twist it and move it and adapt it to be more relevant. It's a clumsy way. It's a clumsy way of putting it. I'm trying to think of the right.

Word, though, like, yeah, it's it is exactly about that, isn't it? It's about pivoting so that your content isn't necessarily just going after the most obvious, like way of addressing that search term. It's adding something a bit different. Yeah.

And making sure it really answers the question properly and fully and doesn't sort of go off at a tangent somewhere.

Mhm. That's right.

Yeah. Even looking at some of that content and trying to figure out what, what question was it trying to answer can sometimes help as part of the process.

Yeah. Keep coming back to that and making sure that, that it kind of makes sense as a whole.

Okay. The other thing we have been doing that I think would probably be quite helpful to quite a lot of people listening is where we've had three or four blog posts that have talked around a subject, and none of them have been doing particularly well, is to kind of mash them together into longer posts. So it's not necessarily about just ditching a load of content. There are opportunities to repurpose some of what you've already written, some of what you've already paid to have written, and turning them into kind of longer, more authoritative, authoritative posts as well. It's not all kind of waste, is it, I guess.

Yeah, we've done that a few times. It's been like, okay, these are actually saying very similar things, but this is one thing that isn't covered in the other one. So yeah, we can use that, weave that into the first one and then delete the second one. So you're, you're making it more each post more comprehensive.

Mhm. It's, um, it kind of comes back to this idea of, um, giving Google what it wants, you know, this, this idea that, that we and our clients and companies, you know, any company has to do all this stuff in order to get business, I think is the thing that a lot of people still struggle with. They still don't really understand Why they should do it and what the point of it is. Yeah. And you know, this stuff we've been talking about today, which, you know, I think unfortunately some people might find quite confusing because there's still a a step back from that. You know, they still haven't even figured out how, what sort of content they should be writing or they've got pages which say we do X, we do Y, we sell A, we sell B.

Yeah.

Why do we have to put anything else in there? And they've kind of got a point in some respects aren't they.

I mean in a way it's yeah, it should be enough. But the internet is so busy now that it's not enough because you've got another company who also has that, but they've also got some other stuff that's useful and helpful. And, um, you know, people are, and basically people are finding that on search because they've got it and you don't. So it kind of again, comes down to what's happening in your industry. And if, if everyone in the industry has just got like three pages on their website and says, this is what we sell, then it's easy. But if everyone, if everyone else that you're competing with has got a blog that is really good, and they've got videos and they've got this, that, and the next thing. Then you don't stand a chance unless you do the same.

Yeah. But even that, and I'm not disagreeing with you, but if somebody could have loads of content, loads of videos and it's all rubbish, you know, it's literally rubbish. I mean, yeah, because let's face it, we've all sat down and watched a film. In fact, I was watching recently started to watch Granite Harbour, which is set in Aberdeen. It's on the BBC and five minutes in I went, this is garbage. And I turned it off. And yet it would have had a fortune spent spent on it to produce it. So, you know, yeah, it doesn't matter how shiny something is. And I think that's the bit I really struggle with. We'll write a piece of content. And we know in our view, we've nailed it. And if anybody takes the time to read it, they'll find something genuinely useful in there. Yet we'll be totally blasted out of the water and outranked by other content that isn't or as good as that in our opinion. But maybe in anybody's opinion it would. They would look at it and go, well, that's not very good.

It partly, I guess, that comes down to the sort of proportion thing. If somebody's website has a bigger proportion of good stuff, even if you put up one good thing and the rest of your website's a bit iffy, then it's not going to count as much as if the the bulk of your website's good and you put up something iffy, then it's, it's looking at the website overall, that's part of it sometimes, but it's sometimes it's just the luck of the draw because Google can't, you know, it doesn't have human beings reading every single article going, well, this one's better than that one. It, it, it just isn't. So it is part partially skill and there's a bit of chance in there. And there's not much you can do about that.

To David's point. And without making this a hideously bleak mid-December podcast, you cannot reasonably ask business people to invest tons of money in something that is ultimately going to come down to the luck of the draw. And I think this is one of the huge problems that SEO in general has, Yeah. Especially content marketing. You know, we, I can think of several of our clients who are, you know, you know, closely followed in search results by companies that have absolutely no business being in position two and three of Google for a search term. Absolutely rubbish websites. They're full of bad content. They've got barely any kind of attention paid to any of the things we just talked about, about sharing expertise, answering questions, being useful, being helpful. And it is difficult to persuade people. It's a difficult conversation to have to say, well, you know what? You should do the thing that Google's telling you to do, despite the fact you may still be beaten by somebody completely ignoring those guidelines. And I don't really know how to reconcile.

It's hard. It's really.

Well, that's because brand is is important. So it's not unusual to do a search and to see Amazon come up with its products. Yeah. And the product page you find may or may not be very good. Um, but the fact it's hanging on the Amazon brand means that it's just going to perform well. It's just the overall trust authority. Whatever you want to call it. But, you know, the strength of their brand kind of helps them. I know that's an extreme example. Um, but it's, I think you're right. I think there's a danger that this is just becoming really quite depressing and bleak. A proper middle, a proper midwinter podcast.

But you were going through some of the steps that we've, we're taking to address what we perceived to be, uh, a lot of poor content or old content on our site that really could do with a refresh or weeding out simply because we've got a very, a very big website. And it behooves, it behooves. I like that it behooves us to go in there every now and then and have a right good clear out, just like the carriage, because not everything in there is, is going to be useful to people anymore. Even though we thought it might be at one time or another. So there is hope in there. I mean, nobody wants to have a rubbish website anyway with loads of stuff sort of lurking in the corners. It's good to know that, you know, you've you've got that bit of your business sorted out. So if you do it for no other reason than then you've got a website that you can be proud of and that you, you know, what's hiding in every corner and what's sort of sort of lying there then, then keep keeping that part of your business. Even just some attention to that, uh, is, is a good thing.

It's nice to know that there aren't, there's not garbage in there that people might find. And you'd be like, oh my goodness, I forgot that was there. I wish they hadn't found it. But you know, we hope that in, you know, by the summer, we're going to be sitting here doing another podcast saying, right, we talked about this helpful content update. We talked about what we did and here are the results. And it worked. Yeah, yeah. So we're, you know, we're almost in the middle of experimenting with, with what we think is the right thing to do. And, you know, we should have some sort of hard and fast sort of answers like what worked and what didn't work. And once it's sort of all sort of filters through the system. So, you know, we we can't give definitive answers at the moment, but we may be able to give a little bit more, you know, useful advice once you know, we've finished this process and, and see what Google makes of it.

Yeah. The, the, the site wide nature, I think of the updates that have been rolling out since, I don't know, October or whenever it was or was it in the summer when they started doing this first, these helpful content updates?

Yeah, summer I think. Is it June.

Useful content updates. Okay. I mean, the, um, the changes that we've been made are in actual fact, common sense.

Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Because I guess it's like anything if you've got some good stuff, but it's kind of hidden in amongst a load of bad stuff, whether that's content or, I don't know, other things in life. It's kind of self-defeating, isn't it? Yeah. And I think that's, that's what we're thinking. Like when we've thought about this useful content update and what we're doing with a bit of a call on our blog and just upping our game with some of our normal content pages and rewriting some of the blogs that we decided to keep to make sure they're more relevant, etc.. We had effectively let that content on our blog, which had worked for us for a while, somewhat, but probably a lot of that content hadn't worked for us for a number of years. Looking at looking at the data, and that's the nice thing. It uses Google Search Console to look at the data and you say, well, you know, this, this is a big article that we wrote. And not only has it never been clicked in the last eighteen months, it's only been shown eight times in search or a hundred times, excuse me, in search. And even then it was on page six or page seven, you know, it kind of is just garbage. Irrelevant.

Yeah. Even if we think there's something in there, there's not enough for it. It's not answering the question well enough for Google to think it's worthy anyway.

That's right. Alex.

Yeah, no I agree. Sorry. I was just thinking through like whether or not I don't know whether to say this out loud, you'll laugh at me because it's half a thought. Maybe the answer is that trite piece of advice people always throw out about don't write. Don't write for search engines. Don't write for algorithms. Write for people. Maybe it is time now to actually stop and think. Well, actually, the approach you're describing is basically, don't even think about Google, you know, not just don't write for it, but just forget about it completely and say, what would people actually want to read on my website? If somebody came to me and I'd never met them before and I wanted to persuade them to buy from me, what would I need to show them on my website to persuade them and to look at it through that lens, but actually stop considering.

Bizarrely, that's what Google wants you to do. Google wants you to pretend Google doesn't exist, which is all just very confusing and hard to get your head around. But, um, Google wants you to pretend Google doesn't exist. So in order to please Google, you do what Google wants and pretend that Google doesn't exist and Dave will be leaving the podcast now. Luckily, we think we're just about finished.

Uh, yeah, I'll let you guys wind the podcast up. Yeah.

We will wind this up. Um, we had, we had just about finished. We've told you what we're doing. We hope to be coming back in 2023 and telling you how it's worked and what else we've learned. And you know, there will be a supplement or a, um, sequel to this podcast episode where we sort of tell you what's happened and how it's worked.

The elements of good storytelling, what happened next, what happened next.

We will leave you on, on this cliffhanger. Yeah, we will leave you. Um, and if you are listening to this reasonably soon after it's published, um, wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and we will be back in 2023. Um, so that's goodbye from me, Julie.

And from me.

Thank you for listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface and we will see you next year.