Is Your SEO Strategy Outdated? The Critical Shift to AI and Intent-Driven Search in Healthcare

Stewart Gandolf

Hi, everyone. Good to see you again.

This is, are you going to see me rather, haha. This is Stuart Gandalf leading another podcast. And yes, you can see us if we’re you’re watching via YouTube.

Of course, you’re streaming by one of the streaming services you’re only listening. But at any rate, good to be with you.

Today, I am going to unveil one of our company’s secret weapons. Brandon Schakola was introduced to us a while back by multiple of the best marketing people I know in search when we were looking for a new department lead that was certainly big shoes to fill an agency that already prided itself on strong search capability.

And Brandon has over delivered. I’m super proud of the work he’s done for us and doing for our clients.

Super smart leads up all of our SEO, all of our tech stack pretty much anything to do with these kinds of topics.

Brandon Schakola

Brandon, welcome. Nice to work.

Stewart Gandolf

Good to see you again. It’s a long time ago.

Brandon Schakola

been about an hour.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah. So Brandon, you know, we’re going to talk about a lot of things. I guess before I do that, can you just give people sense of your background?

So maybe they’ll love you. Almost as much as I do.

Brandon Schakola

Sure. So I’m branched coal and the head of SEO here, Healthcare Success, as well as, you know, working with all the technical product and delivery.

Previous lives, I was at Overstock during the rebrand to Bed Bath and Beyond, spent about three years at eBay through the pandemic, which was a wild experience.

Lots of really smart people there. And prior to that, it was side for about a decade at a small boutique agency based out of LA called The Search Agency, which is where I got my chops in SEO.

And then previous to that, was in various kinds of IT roles, worked for a very small startup that actually trained the US Air Force and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Section 508 Compliance back in the day.

So it’s kind of funny that my world is kind of wrapped back around to another sort of government issue that we deal with all the time with HIPAA laws and whatnot.

But yeah, it’s been a wild ride in the world of search the last couple years, for sure.

Stewart Gandolf

So those of our readers who aren’t familiar with this, the search world is kind of a club, I don’t know, it’s a club, right?

we see each other at the same conferences. We know a lot of the same people, like especially at the high level, like people know people.

And in fact, it’s funny, I was just talking to other people. were created recently and saying, oh, that was from another person I know.

So anyway, Brandon’s in the cool kids club when it comes to SEO, for sure. So, Brandon, know, this meeting was inspired today on a lot of our internal conversations about how search has changed over the years.

And, you know, we like to, at our agency, Healthcare Success, you know, always like to be at the forefront, not just where things were, but where they’re going.

Yet a lot of times when we take over accounts from clients, like they’d had SEO before, it might be something that was really great a decade ago, but really the fundamental foundation is no longer makes sense.

And I believe you said the other day, stop thinking less about keywords, more about queries and. So we’re going to talk about that today.

how do we make sense of, first of all, where we were, where our search grew up, or importantly, we’ll get past that stage for our listeners’ sake and talk about what can they do today to be more effective.

So Brandon, start off though with a little history lesson of how has search changed over the last decade or so?

Brandon Schakola

Yeah, so prior to the last decade, you and I we grew up with that exact match search world, we were early adopters of the web and that world was full of keywords essentially.

You had a keyword, it could find the word in a document and it showed up. But then as lot of that technology progressed, obviously kind of sped along by ads, in the early days, had AOL and gosh there are probably search engines I’ve forgotten about Gopher.

There were a bunch out there. And so as that ads world started to boom, they started to grow the type

the things we could look for, right? We got out of exact match, we got the broad match, we got the phrase match, and then eventually we got to, you know, being able to search for images, even, or different media types, you know, when entering into about, you know, 2008, 2010 area.

And up until then, I mean, search was fairly stable. And the algorithm didn’t change that often. old school techniques of SEO work, you put up some content, you got some internal links, and you got some external links.

It was, you know, it was, it was pretty, pretty easy in those days to make things rank. And then, you know, that world changed, we got, we started getting the penalty era, right

when Google rolled out Panda and Penguin, which, you know, they’re black and white animals, it’s a logistic function, you’re good or bad, there’s no one that’s mean.

And that kept moving, and while that did, there were some quiet things going on in the background. Google bought a company called Freebase, which is part of how they built their knowledge graph.

And Sergey and the other co-founder of Google, they always had in their mind that one of the ways that you can fix search is through entities.

Language has all this ambiguity built into it. One of the ways you clean that up is with brands, he says.

But in the patents and the papers they were writing back in those days, they were talking about entities and knowledge graphs.

And that was as early as, I think, 98, I’m going to say. So that seed was already planted way back when?

That’s interesting. Yeah, it was planted really far back in the past. And so they finally got their hands on Freebase.

And they were setting up a language between “A White House” and “The White House”, right? And typically, in these older models, you would strip out the A and the, and you would just have White House.

What do you do with that?

Stewart Gandolf

Right?

Brandon Schakola

it’s also a special entity of a place, you know? And so they needed to start defining that, you know, people, places, things, right?

It’s like a, you those labeling machines we had back in the 80s, even though it’s like that, you’re just like walking around labeling things.

And, and one of the things that does it allows them to get around that ambiguity of search. It allows them to provide a better experience for their customers.

You know, just using a keyword, um, Well, “Jaguar” can be, you know, car, you can be an animal. It can also be a guitar, right?

Like which one? And then if you look in the knowledge graph, they have different codes for those things. And based on your search history and all of these other features that Google has, they can kind of shape what that search experience is supposed to be like.

And so that starts getting us out of this area of just simple keywords, right? And then we started getting more complicated match types, even for paid.

And so when that happened was right around the Hummingbird Algorithm, notice we’re not dealing with black and white animals anymore.

We got this colorful, fast, crazy thing, you know, just looking for wherever the sweet nectar is on the web.

And, um, and we all knew in SEO that like something strange, it happened. Like we saw like it was this like subconscious shift that we all felt.

We didn’t quite, we weren’t able to quite put our fingers on it. mean, Grant and I had multiple arguments about this way back in those days.

And, you know, he’s now on kind of, you know, the same side as me with semantic search. But, you used to create a page for car insurance and you would make a page for auto insurance.

And then we saw all of sudden, you couldn’t have both ranking anymore. So this idea of entities allows those synonyms to collapse together.

So Google understands that they’re actually the same thing. And that then causes you to shift strategies. No. We don’t need an exact match term per page, right?

That’s that old, you know, think Bruce Clay kind of ran by that model as part of his trainings. And it’s not to say that it doesn’t work anymore, but in those cases of synonyms that may not be a strategy you want to follow.

Because when?

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah. Well, it’s really hard for the user to like we used to back in the day because for the listeners here that don’t know us as well, you know, we’ve built Healthcare Success back starting in 2006 with SEO.

That’s how we did it was with knowledge about leadership speaking. and SEO especially. so I’m like I’m totally an SEO geek at heart for sure.

Not as much as you are in some of our teammates, but certainly more than most CEOs. But I remember thinking about that back in the day of like how stupid it is to try to do all these sort of very artificial things to appease the search engines because the user experiences worse.

the user was like wait is it auto insurance or car insurance? Like why is that? And so it became a very contrived, you know, very bulky kind of mess.

I’d like to continue, but I think it’s like the maybe you could weed this into your comments as you continue here Brandon.

But you know, having been to the Google campuses many times, you know, they really do talk a lot about, you know, user experience and relevancy and user intent.

Even back then, like they want to satisfy the user. The whole point of this is satisfy the user there.

Even though, you know, companies like us and our clients are paying them money. Really, they look at the free user, the actual end users, their customer.

So continue, but I think it’s really interesting how it started getting more like people than just these very sort of on the nose kind of searches.

Brandon Schakola

Right. And, you know, because from a head term, right, like, were just talking about like auto insurance, we could say health insurance.

Um, you know, it’s, it’s, we have to be thinking, you know, pretty directly that what’s behind that is someone has a need, right?

And, and what is that need? So, and, and if the, the way that that’s being asked is changing, we have to be more adaptive to that in the same way as like, you had a website and then you had a mobile site, right?

Like, why not just be smart and have one code base, right? You know, um, and so I think in this case, Google thinks in that same way, like, why not have an experience that can shift and, and honor all of those intents.

And so you see that in their approach to text-based search and their extension into at that same time that Hummingbird came out, we were finally able to ask direct questions.

you know, and we were all like, oh my God, voice search is the next big thing, and what are we going to do about it out of the track, know, it’s, but it’s true.

And then it’s like, all right, we can then break down terms into like the who, what, when, you know, why, how, all of that maybe do it that way.

And it just, it started making tracking more difficult, which means even on the paid side, it starts making things like attribution more difficult in these worlds.

So long story short, what, with the collapse of synonyms and all of this bulky content that we were generating.

On top of that, remember, you also had like paid landing pages and special ones for display and email marketing, and then you’ve, you’ve multiplied your site.

Stewart Gandolf

All right, remember, I’m over. for about 10 minutes there, right?

Brandon Schakola

And so here we are. We spent like 10 years of our lives building this gigantic trash bucket of content for all these different experiences.

Whenever you just really needed one, and is it the right one? So one thing we noticed at that time, too, was we started seeing these shifts with people just kind of not searching as much on the head term front, like historically they have volume.

But then you were seeing, because of those questions, we were starting to see people ask things like, which running shoes are vegan-friendly?

And then what you do with that, right? how do you classify that as a product? Does it have to be all, do you have to have a category for shoes and then like specifically non-leather shoes?

Do you use the label vegan or like, and then you, you know, when you work with these other you know, massive sites at scale, you imagine the argument that that would cause and a product room, like, know, and those things do happen, actually.

so by that, then, like, you’re not really optimizing towards term there, you’re optimizing towards an experience of a particular audience.

This audience is interested in vegan-friendly things. So, what are they looking for on the site? That means you have to have something that curates, you know, a whole catalog to that event, or if you’re like a massive massive site, for instance.

You could think about, you know, the IKEAs of the world, for instance, as well, in that same sense. If, you know, you’ve probably noted that was like, curved furniture has been a thing in all the magazines lately, like, how do you optimize for someone searching for that?

so those are, know, Those are questions, know, that the people in the big econ side have to answer. But on a healthcare space that gets even more complicated, you know, you can track someone searching for a couch, right?

You can like haunt them in like every app that they have, including TV and billboards and all sorts of stuff, but you, it’s much harder in healthcare to know which experiences are best and which are going to drive them into their final moment of truth.

So I think part of that shift, then, as a way, it was already kind of moving away from head terms and more towards this like middle of funnel, gray area, know, your bottom of funnel, you know, it’s kind of like at that point, your other remembering a brand or you’re remembering a product name or you’re remembering the address of the house you’re looking at, like you, you kind of like hone in and you get obsessed.

Now, if that’s heading there already almost a decade ago, and I think Rand Fishkin brought this up in his bark tourist stuff, we were chatting about earlier, it means that we have almost less ability to measure anything else, but what ends up at that experience in some way, shape or for

And so one of the things that he said was back in 2012, 2013 and somewhere around there, 2014, he was looking at how much of traffic in Google doesn’t even get organic, doesn’t get the organic click through, or doesn’t get the paid click through, just gets trapped in Google’s world.

And they get trapped there because Google had a better experience than you did on your site. dummy.

They never got it than you.

they keep getting better at it. So those are challenges for us in marketing. They’re challenges for our clients. have the horror story just recently when Google released AI overviews.

You probably remember where they were telling us to eat rocks and telling us to put glue on our pizza.

And a bunch of are like, what is this flaming mess doing on the web already, guys? And then they pulled it back and then it got better.

And that’s just such a different experience, right? It’s like a SERP within a SERP.

It’s completely different. way of thinking about optimization and how you’re going to do traffic acquisition.

Stewart Gandolf

Let’s talk about the, so another topic that’s really hot today is AI’s learning language models, different things that are going on currently.

Give us a sense about what’s going on, particularly AI and other sort of related topics.

Brandon Schakola

Well, mean, like AI related topics, I mean, if you think about it, this was like the grand scheme of things for Google, right?

This was always their final, this is the part of the story arc they’ve been pushing towards for a long, long time.

And we kind of talk in the SEO world about the algorithm, right? But it’s not just a single thing, right?

It’s like thousands of microservices doing, you know, all the scoring and rating and feedback loops from user signals. It’s essentially, you know, most people

with things like chat GPT or whatnot, it’s essentially search and reverse, right? It’s just instead of sucking things in, it’s pushing things out, you know?

Stewart Gandolf

And so like the large language models, schema, AI, you know, I know a lot of our listeners aren’t up on some of these things in terms of how that impacts search, but I guess I’m just trying to figure out, you know, like we talked a lot about the history of search a little while ago, but now, and we also talk a little bit about, you know, quick search, right?

So we’ve got, you know, that’s increasingly happening. But as we start looking at where the puck is going, I mean, AI is, you know, everybody talks about death, right?

But I think, can we give us some more context around any of these kinds of topics that, you know, and like, why does it matter?

How do we prepare, you know, like, for example, you know, schema, is that increasingly important?

doesn’t lose everybody here.

Oh, Yeah, we’re too. have technical people too. But we have marketers, marketers, tech people. So I know it’s trying to appease all those audiences at once. Haha.

Brandon Schakola

All right, here come my eight heads. know, I think the way we can break it down is I’ll retrace my steps a little bit.

So we were at this that place where like labeling things, right? And not a lot of people got it at first.

And in the healthcare space, there’s like tons of ways to do this, right? Where you have to come in, you have people who may have signs or symptoms of a disease, right?

And then what happens there? And then you also need to list out the conditions that those signs and symptoms align to.

And then you have to have from there, like, what are the potential treatments of that thing? You know, is it a prescription?

Is it a shot? Is it a, is it a diet change? know, what? And so all of those connections outside of not just like labeling them for machines to understand It’s also kind of like what your brain does in general.

So we’re starting to do this this this or human mapping of the world now In the early days you have that you had to do this like strict labeling And then as these processes that that eventually is what became has become large language models Started to extract that those things from the unstructured Stuff on your page, right?

You and I we get to a web page. We automatically see a price We see a product name. We see ratings and reviews.

We see stars We see where can I do it in store pickup, right? A bot doesn’t it’s just strings of text and So it doesn’t know like what those strings of text apply to So those pieces where you go in and label it as a product and a product title and a rating and a review

to an offer price versus the regular price. They’re getting pretty good at those things. And they’ve gotten better at being able to look at a page of content and know that this page of content is about a song called Brat.

And Brat is written by so-and-so, and it knows like the birthplace of the person. And it can pull all of those details together into that kind of knowledge graph.

Those knowledge graphs are what’s behind what GPT or Gemini or all these things spit out the other side. They know that they know the facts and the interrelationships of the facts.

So if you’re a brand, the things like signs and symptoms, conditions, potential treatments, service areas, insurance providers, which insurance providers apply to which specific service that you offer, or how many services are actually offered at a location, that provides

It’s like really important data for search engines if someone needs, if someone’s trying to figure out if they need to go to like an emergency room versus an urgent care, right?

And so for us, it’s not like someone shopping for a vegan shoe. This could be like a life or death moment, what Google calls your money or your life moment.

You know, you don’t have the right information for that algorithm to pick up the right exact time, oops, but that’s a big oops, right?

That’s not somebody lost their wallet over the weekend. It’s someone like someone may not have gotten the critical care that they needed.

So the stakes are even higher, I think, for us in healthcare marketing, for sure.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, it’s funny too, and like to go step away from healthcare marketing, the way the knowledge is now organized.

I remember a couple of years ago talking to somebody and that maybe was an article, know, was talking about how to soon be able to easily give you answers to questions that are more obscure, like two or three steps.

So for example. You know, I remember this and I looked it up recently. When was Jimi Hendrix’s father born?

So you have to figure, okay, first of all, who’s Jimi Hendrix? Is there anything on that? And then find out.

And so I asked my Google Home Assistant recently, and it came back and said that Jimi Hendrix’s father was a musician.

He was born on this day in this town. gave him more than I asked for. so that sort of knowledge graph, I guess, is the way that you the terminology that you’d use for that.

Like how all these things fit together, but it’s infinite, essentially. Like, how do they do that? And in healthcare, it’s far more complicated than that.

So as it begins to pick up, and it’s interesting, like, there’s some legal issues here, but I can imagine someday people will say, hey, Google, am I having a stroke, right?

it’s like, because, you know, what are the symptoms? your hand, try to smile. Like, you know, that’s a little scary because it’s like, they don’t want take on that legal liability, but on the other hand, that might save some of his life, know, it’s like what they’d say, call 911.

So it’s extraordinarily complex, and we don’t have it today, but those of you that are, you know, sort of follow us, maybe on subsequent webinars, we’ll share with you some of the tools that Brandon brings to share these sort of knowledge graphs and how they all relate, and then how do we do that.

And I guess, you know, practically speaking without, because I didn’t ask you to do that prior to this meeting, like, as you’re looking at a new site, and you’re looking at, you know, like, what we’re trying to rank for, and all this very complex as it relates together, are there any tips on how or maybe work where the low-hanging fruit is, or is it just different every time, like, because I thought, typically, the sites we see can be pretty big and pretty complex, but they don’t usually have evidence of thinking like this, like, how does this information put together, and then versus information elsewhere on the web, and how do you rank?

Any comments on that?

Brandon Schakola

Yeah, so how this would eventually tie together, right? were talking about like, know, signs, symptoms, conditions, treatments, right, all the things.

From there, that can almost drive a lot of your content strategy, and in this case, if we’re dealing with smaller sites, it’s a little easier, because you can get into the weeds on a set of terms and the associated terms and the associated terms to the associated terms.

You can mine all of the questions that people are asking, which is a good place to start. You’re taking the central theme, the business purpose of a company, and mapping it out in that knowledge graph way.

So I know that already coming off the bat, if someone’s having trouble eating and they’re having trouble sleeping and just suffering general anxiety, then I know I have certain pieces of content that I’m going to need from that older text-based world of search.

But outside of that, there’s also what experiences are you giving them on your site? The one thing we see continually as we look through a lot of the healthcare space, particularly with mental health, I’ve been seeing it quite a bit, is like, how many tools are there actually out there that help people to self-diagnose?

the example you were just giving, like am I having a stroke? like, no, but you might have PTSD. You know, I sometimes think I have anxiety.

just turns out I forget to eat sometimes, you know. But those decision boundaries are important. And having, I think, tools and assessments and things that actually help people on, that is going to increase the reach of your brand.

And if Google says, well, brands are the way you clean up the cesspool or the web, your brand is an entity.

It’s like a living thing to the search engines. And I think that’s a kind of an important point that at the end of the day, as we’re doing all this work for SEO, it really is.

about building up a brand, right, so I’d pause there for a second, because I’m sure you’ve got you’ve got this look in your eyes, I can see it from here.

Oh, I lost your sound.

Stewart Gandolf

All right, go. So I want to bring that back to you. You’re right. So the, the, the mind meld, the Brandon and Stuart mind meld is strong in this one.

So fixing movies there. So we talked about healthcare and like, how do we’re going with the brand? And I think this is important because we talk a lot about brand strategy and what’s the messaging and how do you be relevant to the consumer.

Meanwhile, like on the search side, you know, you have a bunch of different things going on, especially emotional state and urgency and like, how does something like, I must say, like, what does emotional state have to do with SEO and like the urgency?

I’d love you to spend a little bit more on that.

Brandon Schakola

Well, if you’re looking at third party tools and you’re looking to see

be, you know, where the majority of your traffic is coming from, you know. One of the things I used to say way back in my agency days was there’s this, we have all these devices and we have all of these different avenues and paths to get to certain kinds of information.

And you’re going to have a different sense of urgency when you’re sitting at home on your laptop while you’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know, like, you know, you’re just kind of like doing research, you know, but if you’re, you know, if you’re out and about, and all of sudden you’d have this this this thing happen to you and like you need to find help, you know, park your car and open up your laptop, you start, you put the voice search on in your phone and you start, you know, looking for the closest, whatever you need.

Those are two different kinds of time and timing is how I used to phrase it after a Douglas Rush call, his famous quote.

His quote is like time is ‘dad I wrecked the car’, timing is knowing to tell dad you wrecked the car after he’s had a scotch and his paper.

so in this, there’s a pattern that we’re seeing in the data from organic search traffic, at least what we can see is that a good majority of the time in the health space, the majority of the traffic comes in through desktop.

But the majority, a good majority of conversions for people in this space come from mobile. So that tells us that there’s this kind of thinking and bubbling like that, that, that more upper funnel moment, it takes a much longer cycle to brew.

But then in the, like their moment of truth, and exactly where they’re going to, you know, on their mobile device, and they can bird there.

so what that means, kind of jokingly flashing back to our different site for desktop and mobile years, it means our mobile experience has to be up to snuff, right?

It has to be as frictionless as possible. And making that as frictionless as possible isn’t necessarily an SEO problem.

That’s an experience problem, right? But we still have to fix that as part of what we do.

Stewart Gandolf

Well, I actually have a question on that because with the leak on the Google documents recently, we should cover that on another day, you know, the idea of dwell time or how long somebody’s been on the page is something new that people weren’t giving any credit before.

that, the CRO, the conversion rate optimization, the consumer experience has a much bigger impact on that, right? And is that like, so as you’re looking at new websites and we bring in and do our audits, you know, is that one of the important things that you’re thinking about?

a lot, it’s like, you know, because that does matter.

It’s a little less obvious, but it definitely matters today.

Brandon Schakola

Yeah, definitely matters. And it’s come out in like the court cases and end the API documents, like just like how much of Google’s algorithm is them quote unquote faking it in their own words, where they’re using a lot of these user signals as proxies.

And like, it’s really, really interesting. It’s not just like dwell time. It’s also like, where did they scroll in the page and how far and how long did they stay there?

Did they go to a different tab and then come back? There’s all of this stuff, you know, floating around for years, you know, Rand Fishkin did studies on this, you know, even on a click through rate for like years.

And it plays a much bigger role. And I think that that also dovetails with design and the necessity of having design kind of be coupled with SEO problems.

projects is to create that frictionless experience, to create something that keeps them there on the page, or provides them that little extra nudge, that little bit of extra comfort, I guess, if you will, to fill out the form to get your loved one into, know, let’s say a rehab center or, you know, get them into a proper mental health system, or check that you have the right insurance before you go, you know, whatever center it is you need to go to.

All of those things, funny enough, still end up in the SEO bucket, because we have to do it.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, so it’s funny, I remember hopefully passes, but not really, we’re still not, you know, remember back speaking for maybe, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, this was really common, still a problem, actually, so this day, but at least 50% of the people we talked to,

back then would come to us and say okay great we just did our website now it’s time for you guys to help us with the SEO and my answer is no I know it’s laugh out loud funny so and also we’re here to ready to talk about the marketing again it’s like no please no and my metaphor for that was and still is it’s like buying a car then ripping the top off and making a convertible it would have been a lot better to design it as a convertible in the first place so it was all functioning together and so I mean it was complex before but now it’s really complex to do thinking about all right we need to make it work from a conversion rate optimization perspective meaning getting people to call we need to make it work for audiences and that could include for example patients families donors referring doctors employees oh and always google so how do we make that work and then how do we work through the design aspect versus the content and messaging aspect and the SEO aspect

like, oh, my God, Brandon, and it’s so hard what we do. But you have to, right? I mean, this is all those things, and you have to get best practices, and also some, I think, experience on what really matters, because it’s going to be really hard to break this down algorithmically, that every single one of these factors is 0.3% of the whole thing.

But it definitely works, or it doesn’t. And I would recommend listeners as we’re sort of talking Tech Talk today, to remember that the key thing is working with the team on this stuff to do it right, to have to be thinking about what are the pages you mentioned earlier, what are the page search people need, what are the SEO team needs, how can you do this on the same side, and sometimes we have to make special landing pages.

Sometimes it’s just daunting. the site is so bad, just have to do series of landing pages. But ideally, it all works well together.

Another thing, too, and I’ll have one more question, but I’ll make a couple of quick statements. What Google even wants and says it wants isn’t always necessarily rewarded by the algorithm. So we get into things like, for example, multiple brands under one holding company and a bunch of micro sites.

So we have a single major site. And that’s not as easy to answer you would think. And so it also depends on the history.

So there’s a lot where we may have this official position. They like this, but the real world, it turns out that they’re rewarding something completely different and it changes.

So it gets complex. So all of these things really come down to user intent. And I mentioned that earlier at the very beginning, people really care a lot about user intent, and what people are trying to actually achieve.

it fulfills what they’re looking for. But you said something very disturbing to me recently, like, SEO tools don’t typically give you any sense of intent.

What?? It’s not you, but that means because that’s the alarming.

Brandon Schakola

Well, they give you a little bit. But it’s still not great because those algorithms that they use for that, you know, aren’t really that advanced. They’re getting better. But essentially, all we can do is we can see, oh, this is more informational intent.

But it’s not the term that’s informational intent. It’s the SERP, like the actual search engine results page. Go and look at it and you just see like, okay, in the top, we get three informational sites, okay, then we might get a local pack, then a couple more informational sites before you get to something, some site that has something you can purchase.

And that’s changed a lot. And that is constantly shifting. I’ve seen on a number of occasions, especially, man, heading into COVID and coming out of COVID, it was just crazy.

A lot of the much larger sites didn’t perform well. And there were things where we saw like Google floating up or local businesses that we’re trying to kind of stay alive, that we’re trying to do something good at that point.

So there are a lot of changes there, and Google’s doing it all the time, right? At any given time, they have, you know, over 200 tests running wild out there.

Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf

we have this, I got to interrupt you on that. was a little nobody’s had a problem with the helpful content updates.

Another example, like that’s a big one. And that’s probably relevant to a fair number of our listeners. know, like, what’s the latest on that?

Those have been saw back up little, people don’t know this world. So the helpful content update or updates was starting, there’s been multiple of them.

the most recent ones about about a year old now, Brandon, the one that is the throttle with lot of websites.

So it was like, you live this every minute of every day. I just meet with you once a week or two.

But, you know, it feels like it may be the overreach of that algorithm is being corrected by Google because they just pretty much penalized anybody that wasn’t a big brand, but I’d love to hear your kind of comments on that evolution because it’s probably relevant to a lot of our listeners.

lot of them were probably smacked down over the last year or so and, you know, given some hope or stern warnings or whatever is applicable from your standpoint.

Brandon Schakola

Yeah. Well, Google’s guidance on that hasn’t exactly been the best. You I mean, because you could write content that people actually read, you know, and use, but somehow it doesn’t pass the muster of the Google helpful content classifier, right?

Like, what does that mean? And, you know, as we’ve been asking that for two years, like, oh, yeah, it’s really helpful.

And, you know, there’s some tongue and cheek that comes out of us because we have our tin foil hats on all day long.

Over this time, what you saw was the call rise in, you know, like Reddit, for instance, was all over the place, right?

They were just rising and rising and rising in terms of their traffic and fees. And a lot of that user generated content, which is where we got, you know, think that’s how the source of like, put glue on your pizza came from possibly.

But, and I think it’s that it was providing the certain that the content was providing search engines with maybe fodder that it didn’t have already in that giant web of facts, right?

And because maybe it was so unique, that was what was seen as helpful. Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah. I guess like, you know, it’s funny because, and we’ve got to wrap up here in a minute, but if we just look at, you know, for example, the trend for longer blogs, okay, longer blogs, longer, longer blogs, okay, really, really long blogs.

And then, but we know users don’t read 3000 words very, very rarely. You have to be invested to read that.

And so that sort of rubber band is snapping back, right? So it’s a complicated target that isn’t clearly defined anyway.

And oftentimes, it’s not really the right target you should be shooting for. So because, you know, those three, like I said, writing a 3,000-word blog is expensive.

And if nobody’s reading it, what exactly are you proving? then when Google looks at the data, here, it feels like, go do this.

Oh, smack it.

You did that.

So write this 2,000-word blog. Oh, wait, nobody’s making it past the second paragraph. OK, now we’re going to penalize that page.

mean, there’s not like a person doing this, but that’s effectively what’s happening, right? So I feel like a puppy like being like, wait, run, don’t run? I don’t know what to do.

So then to wrap up, then, I guess, this is obviously touched on, you know, I don’t know, the dozen or two topics out of 100 that you and I talk about and geek out about a lot.

I guess I’ll just, you know, be wrap up in case somebody’s, you know, really. They’re wondering, you know, on their own website, how do I, you know, if they’re frustrated with the helpful content update or they’re not getting anywhere, I mean, that’s why we do audits.

So, of course, you guys can call us if you’re interested in that. But short of that, Brandon, any other last comments or advice?

Brandon Schakola

I would say a lot of times, like with the helpful content in particular, a lot of people got hurt, right, had good content.

So, I think this when we maybe take a step back and maybe ask, well, you know, Google’s just going to suck this stuff up and throw it in an AI overview, and anyway, like, and it’s not going to bring us traffic, then what’s the point?

Should we should be even worry about content anymore? know, people could just be generating it on the fly and the AI eating AI all day.

Take a step back and think about what’s experience that you need to produce, right? What’s the experience of a mother that’s grieving and trying to get her son into the rehab. What experience does she need to get the help that she needs? Because at the end of the day, if you’re making a good experience, and this kind of comes back to that network you just talked about, from the Google leaks, people still seeing all those user signals, which is really what you want in the end.

So I think if you’re providing that good experience, you’ll do well regardless of the channel. SEO just happens to be the one that has to take care of most of it.

Stewart Gandolf

We’ve got plenty to do for a long time, Brandon, I think we’re going to work ourselves out of a job on this stuff.

Thank you for your insights today. It’s always fun. There’s maybe little shop talk-y for some of our clients, but this is the stuff that we do, and it’s the stuff that matters.

It does have an impact, hopefully try to translate most of this without, hold on a second, without, you know, being an SEO instructional, but try to give a sense of, you know, worth it.

are going and Brandon I’d like to invite you back periodically particularly those things that are new that are dropping are really good and they can drill down on you know more issues but hopefully those of our people made it this far through our podcast Brandon’s the real deal I’ve been there on SEO a long time I’ve worked with lot of SEO people and I just love these sort of discussions with you and me and some of our other colleagues in this space so good job I appreciate thanks

Brandon Schakola

Good deal. talks to you guys later.