Show Notes
In this episode of One Quick Question, Pam Sanderson breaks down why blogging isn’t enough for SEO anymore. Discover how Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines are reshaping content strategies, why trust is now your biggest SEO asset and how to future-proof your content in a world increasingly influenced by AI. If you’re serious about organic traffic, this episode is for you!
Decline of Traditional Blogging
- Google prioritizes user intent and experience
- Outdated and fluff content no longer works
EEAT Framework
- Experience: First-hand knowledge
- Expertise: Subject matter credentials
- Authoritativeness: Comprehensive content & backlinks
- Trust: Built through consistency and transparency
SEO Strategies That Work Now
- Use video, case studies, and training resources
- Build out team bios and human-focused content
- Prioritize mobile experience
Common Content Mistakes
- Keyword stuffing
- Walls of text
- Copy-pasting content
How to Future-Proof Content
- Don’t chase algorithms — serve your users
- Repurpose smartly, not lazily
- Focus on long-term value, not short-term traffic
Episode Transcript
Carrie
Music. Welcome to One quick question with infomedia, your source for answers to your questions about websites, digital marketing and more. On today’s episode, we’re sharing the recording of our most recent live one quick coffee event. We’re talking about how blogging isn’t enough anymore. With Google’s changes, you’ll want a content strategy that goes beyond just a blog. This presentation is from Pam Sanderson. Pam is our Director of account Development here at infomedia, and she’s counseled clients on the best ways to get Sites found by Google for over a decade.
Carrie
If you’d rather watch this presentation so that you can see the slides, the video of today’s episode is available over on our YouTube channel. That’s infomediadotcom with the dotcom actually spelled out. And if you’re in the Birmingham area, we’d love to see you on that third Thursday of every month at these live events. We meet over at little professor in Pepper place, right across from our office. We have coffee from June coffee and breakfast tacos from Ladybird taco. Grab your free ticket in the show notes to this episode, or anywhere you find infomedia, including our social media accounts, I’d love to see you there. And until then, enjoy today’s episode.
Pam
Alright, so your blog isn’t enough the content strategy that Google demands. So Carrie kind of nailed it, and she’s exactly right. Back in the day, I used to say, you just got to blog. You just got to do it. Well, now Google’s saying, Okay, maybe not so much.
Pam
All right, so a little bit about me, like she said, I’m the director of account development here infomedia. My job is to work with existing clients, clients that have been with infomedia. I work to make sure that your website’s giving you the best return on your investment that’s working well for you and that you have your needs taken care of. So if you need anything afterwards, please see me. I’m happy to answer any questions.
Pam
All right, is blogging still a relevant, relevant strategy to get organic traffic? Organic traffic is traffic that comes from search engines, so like Google, Yahoo, Bing, are the top three. And blogging can still be effective. It’s just no longer as effective as it used to be. You may have seen that blogs that maybe if you have an active blog, you may have seen blogs that perform well in the past have suddenly decreased their amount of views, like by a lot honestly, in the last couple of years. You may also seen that blogs that maybe you would have posted and would have performed well in the past, you’re just not getting the same traction with them, and that’s being seen across almost every industry that I work with, and I work with a whole bunch of them, but there is a better way to engage with your audience.
Pam
So why are blogs not working but like they used to? So actually, this, you see here is a real example of a client that I recently began working with, and that is their traffic on their overall blog over the course of two years. So you can see their blog used to get a ton of views, a ton of traffic, and then just constant, constant decrease, and they’re still posting the same amount. They’re posting relevant content. It’s well written content. It’s just not getting the same traction.
Pam
And so the reason for this is because blogs were a tried and true reason to get traffic from Google. Again, Carrie nailed it. We used to say you just gotta blog, we know people aren’t reading it. The content is there for Google. Google’s reading it. It helps Google understand what you do. And some of that is still true, but Google is prioritizing user experience and what people are looking for more than ever. And so used to it was all about consistency. With Google, they just want to see you posting all the time. It’s not like that anymore. And the reason is, were those blogs really helpful? Were they serving a purpose?
Pam
If you were a lawn care company and you were just posting two blogs a month about generic lawn care tips, were you actually doing anything helpful on to your customers, to your audience, to the internet as a whole? No, it’s just a bunch of generic content. It wasn’t actually serving a purpose. And worse, when people went to that content, were they turning into customers? Were they converting? Were they clicking on your call to actions? Probably not. It was just there.
Pam
So another thing that was happening is content was kind of old and outdated, but still performing well. Infomedia had this happen. We had a blog about how to build mobile apps. We haven’t built mobile apps in a decade, okay, and that blog still performed so well for us for years now. Did it convert? No, but did it get massive amounts of traffic? Absolutely, that’s no longer happening anymore. I mean, we are actually a little excited about it, because that blog terribly out of date, but that’s the kind of what was happening across the web. It was either old, outdated content that just performed well because it was performed well for a long time, or it was content that just wasn’t really serving a purpose.
Pam
And so Google’s like, All right, that’s not great. It’s not a great user experience just to have this stuff that doesn’t really do anything. And then AI came, and suddenly, instead of there just being some of that fluff content. It was everywhere, because with a couple keystrokes, you can have 1000 word articles written about the best lawn care in Birmingham, and everyone can do it. And so suddenly, everywhere you looked on the web was fluff articles that just repeated things and maybe just made it more wordy or added some emojis that it’s not serving anybody. So again, it’s not about quantity anymore. It’s about quality, and Google is going to continue to modify what that means. So if you were at my talk last year, some things are a little different this year, and that’s why it’s going to continuously modify it.
Pam
Okay, so how do I make sure that the content on my website? Hear me say, website, not just blog, is what Google is looking for. You need to EEAT. So EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Introduced in 2023 the Google helpful, helpful content update has changed the way that Google looks at content. This was introduced largely because of the rise of AI, with AI written articles, images and various other forms of content suddenly inundating the web. The content like I mentioned, is often parroted versions of other ideas. It lacks originality, and it caused a big issue for Google. How do you encourage content creation, but also ensure that the content that search results are delivering is quality and not just a bunch of AI articles?
Pam
So part of the way they did that is they added experience to the Eat metric to help encourage human created content over AI generated content. And the way they do that is with asking, like they want you to answer certain questions within your content. Do you have first hand experience of the subject you’re talking about? AI is a robot doesn’t have experience in anything. So by talking about your experience, it helps differentiate what you’re doing, events, all these other fluff articles out there? Do you show that there’s a real organization behind your site? Do you highlight the experience of your team and the trustworthiness of the people who write the content on your site?
Pam
So what does that mean? Do you show a little bio of that person? Do you have their bio on your website? Do you list an article on your content if you’re talking about a certain service, do you talk about the people at your company that performs that service? Are you tying what you’re doing to actual, real, living people? If you’re not, that’s something that needs to change, and this is to all content or website, not just to a blog, but if you think about like on your about page, show your employees. A lot of people do. Some people just list their names. Let’s show photos, let’s show credentials, let’s show things that actually prove that these are subject matter experts. Infomedia, We changed this about one or two years ago. We looked at three to four different people in the company that we were going to start really promoting as subject matter experts. I’m one of them. We I do talks with not only for infomedia, but for other organizations in Birmingham, we put out content, and we make sure to reiterate that across the web. So we’re trying to create our own little personal brands, so that when Google sees us, they see real people. They’re knowledgeable about this subject. It just helps boost the credibility of your company as a whole.
Pam
So experiment or expertise is adding on to that. So talk about the expertise of the writer of your content. So you want, if they have qualifications, awards, certifications, talk about that. If they’ve been in the industry 10 years, if they like Carrie, she’s a fantastic writer. She started out the Birmingham News. She is a creates a blog. She is the host of the localist, and one quick question she does, honestly, I don’t know how you do it all, but we talk about all that stuff because it adds to her credibility, which is then shared by the whole company. So talk about the subject matter experts you have at your company, show their experience, link to additional articles that they’ve written for the company. So like, for instance, I’ve had a bunch of different articles on our blog, and if you go to my profile, you can see and click on my author title, you can see all the things that are attributed to me.
Pam
Next is authoritativeness. You want to establish a pattern of covering all aspects of a topic. You also, it’s helpful to have back links from other websites. This is not it is very helpful. It’s not as helpful as it used to be, but basically, do other websites link to your content? Do they see you as a resource that can be helpful? Now, if y’all are just trading links, that doesn’t really do much for you, but if other organizations are linking to your content, that can help you, and then you want to build a digital personal brand. So I’ve kind of touched on this, so it helps to encourage, again, that authoritativeness by having those, those real people and their brand attached to yours, and then a pattern of covering all aspects of the topic.
Pam
This is really important, and it’s something that is misconstrued a lot. So if I’m selling a product and I just have a description of that product, great, but if I have content on my website that talks about the use of that product, maybe where it’s best used, it’s applications, how to put it together, whatever it may be that’s going to be, that’s even better. That’s more well rounded content. And then if I have case studies of people that have used the product, what it’s done for their business. If I have real photos of it in use, and people are doing different things and videos that just is even more well rounded. So it’s just taking it to that next step consistently across your content. I’m going to talk about more ways to show authority on a subject, but I want to keep going through the EEAT guidelines.
Pam
So next is trust. So trust is developed when we show experience, expertise and authoritativeness altogether. So this is important, because Google sells trust. Yes, they sell ads. Yes, they sell all sorts of things, but more importantly, that there’s no one to see the ads if we don’t trust Google, that when we go and search for something, we’re going to find what we’re looking for. So you have to make sure that Google wants to trust in you, so that when they show your content that it’s what people is looking for, because if it’s not, then people are not going to be using Google anymore. And we used to kind of laugh at that, like Google’s they’re the behemoth. They’re the beast. Everybody uses Google, but they’re seeing their market share slip every day because so many people are using chat GPT to search for things or other gpts like Google is not the end all be all. So they are really, really ramping up making sure that they’re delivering high quality results they retain that market share.
Pam
Okay? So if blogs aren’t effective, what is? Useful, resource content. So if you’re blogging for SEO, think about intent, not just what people search, but why do they search it? Basically ditch the hard sell and focus on clear, human and useful and resource content is very useful. So we’re talking about training articles. This is ours. So our our website, we have a training center where you can access all sorts of video tutorials, written tutorials, all sorts of things for a variety of different topics. This is great SEO content, and it’s evergreen content. Not only does it serve a purpose, it’s useful, but it doesn’t have a date that instantly makes it look out of date after two months, some of this stuff has been up for a while, but it’s still extremely relevant, and we go through and update it.
Pam
So we still blog. I’m not saying a blog is not so useful. Infomedia still has as part of our content structure. We still blog monthly, but we also post content that shows our expertise and authority and offers a well rounded view of our knowledge. We do this through the training center. We do this through our podcast. We put up content on different services. We’re always adding to that. We’re not just talking about, hey, we do website design. We’re showing our portfolio items that show, example, those things we’re just again, it’s showing that well rounded view of everything that we’re trying to accomplish.
Pam
So next is video content. And I cannot stress this enough, if you’re trying to improve your SEO and your organic traffic, using video is an incredible way to do it, and one of the smartest moves you can make, it increases the time spent on your page, which increases engagement, people are less likely to click off a video. It signals richer and more valuable content to Google. On top of that, it boosts the user experience and opens up the chance for YouTube rankings. If you’re putting your video on YouTube, which I highly suggest, and that’s one of Google’s sister companies, you can’t just add a video, though, and hope for the best. It has to match your contents purpose. I see this all the time. It’ll be an about page and it’ll just be a video stuck on there that’s basically a repeat of everything on the about page. That’s not really helpful. You want it to compliment the content on the page, not repeat it. And I’m going to talk about this some more. But if your page is explaining a process, then show it if it’s a case study, film it if you’re doing an interview, give like a clip of it. Google reads the context. So give it something meaningful to work with. Don’t just have it be a repeat of what’s already on the page.
Pam
And I’ve kind of touched on this little bit. But the other thing is, through case studies, portfolio items and FAQs, are huge because they answer a question, and Google prioritizes content that answers questions, and this will always be true. You can show your experience through the questions. If there’s common like start with your support team or the most common questions you get on the phone, and then on those pages, have an FAQ model right there. Don’t just have a page that’s all your FAQs. For instance, if you have a service page about like us, website design, at the bottom of that page, we’re going to have some common FAQs about our service for website design. Incorporate it throughout your content. Show examples of portfolio items, not just on a portfolio page, but link them on pages that you talk about the services performed on those portfolio items.
Pam
Try to look for ways to connect. Connect your content the links. That’s called cross linking, and is it extremely helpful for Google. Not only does it help your user get to things they know, but it helps Google see how your content connects to one another, how you’re showing this well rounded view of content.
Pam
For portfolio items. I just want to say one note, don’t just put a photo of completed work. Actually have written content to go along with it. You want to tell a story, you want to list the services, you want to talk about the details. You want to get a little bit meat on there. So it actually is something I see a lot of portfolios that are just a bunch of pictures, I would encourage expanding on it a little bit more.
Pam
So when is EEAT not enough? EEAT can only get you so far if your user experience is bad, and this is something that we also see a lot. So what do people most often get wrong with their web content?
Pam
So the first is walls of text. So the example on the left is content the way we normally receive it. It is just a bunch of content down a page. There’s really no call to actions. Maybe there’s one, usually it’s at the bottom of the page. That’s the most common thing. There’s no links within the content, no headers, and we’re not prioritizing the mobile experience. It’s just a wall of content. Nobody wants to read this. And used to we’d be like, I don’t care. Google’s reading it whatever. You can’t just do that anymore, because if people are not engaging with the page, doesn’t matter how well you show up in search results. If you’re not engaging with it, you’re not going to keep showing up in those search results. Google is prioritizing how people are actually interacting with the page more than ever, so you want to make your comp your content in whatever format you present it easy to read.
Pam
So things like incorporating video, headers, images, bullets, block quotes, strong call to actions. You want to make sure that it’s scannable as they go down the page. You want to make sure that when it converts over to mobile, that you don’t have an image that just you have to scroll three times to get to the bottom of the image. You don’t want that. You don’t want content like tables or graphs that don’t look good on mobile, that maybe they have to take their finger and like, scroll over to see it terrible. You don’t want that. We want to prioritize that experience.
Pam
I mentioned cross linking before. That’s super important if your look at your analytics, and if your analytics is indicating a lot of mobile users, I would highly recommend that as you add content, you’re pulling it up and checking it on your phone. Check it on if you use the Google dev tools, that you can check it there, but check it on a mobile device to make sure it looks good, because it may look great on desktop, we add most of our content on desktop, but always be checking on the mobile phone.
Pam
So again, here’s our example. Here not great content, not a lot going on. Our content writer would then take that content, and they’re going to add call to actions, they’re going to add headers, they’re going to add more things to help distinguish it. And then our designers then take that and this is the way it actually looks on the page. So as you scroll down, we’re looking at images, we’re looking at graphics. We’re using color. We’re actually making it look good. You don’t want to just be a bunch of content down a page. You don’t want an image at the top and then just straight text. No one’s going to engage with that. It’s not going to perform well for you.
Pam
So another common mistake, keyword stuffing. You would think by now we wouldn’t really see this as much, because it’s kind of been a no no for Google for a long time, but I still see it a lot, and no one cares that you have the best lawn care service in Birmingham, Alabama. And if you don’t believe we have the best lawn care service in Alabama, just ask of us about our lawn care service like it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, Google’s not going to do anything for you. To do anything for you. It’s, you’re going to get penalized. And it’s, it’s just not a it’s not a valuable tool. It doesn’t sound good, it doesn’t read well. If you’re only writing your content for Google, it’s not really going to perform well.
Pam
You see these little, hey, check my site through SEO, like this, little free things that rank your SEO, and they’re saying, Well, you didn’t use the keyword this many times. You want to look at it and look at what makes sense to the user, what makes sense to the experience. If you just write for SEO, it’s it’s still not going to perform well for SEO. Don’t forget that humans read this. We want it to be useful. We want it to be something that humans actually want to experience and look at.
Pam
The other thing is, don’t just talk about yourself. People hear me say that we need to talk about our experience, and suddenly that’s all they want to talk about. They just want to talk about what they’re doing and what they can do and who they are. But the most the content that performs the best is content where you’re talking about your what you can do for your user. So yes, you want to show your expertise, you want to talk about that, but the majority of your content should be how you’re going to help your customer, how you’re going to help that client, what you can do for them that’s going to perform better, as far as on the page for.
Pam
And then AI, it wouldn’t be a PAM talk if I didn’t talk about AI a little bit. Don’t overly depend on it. Google has relaxed again, and they’re saying you can use it. It would be crazy if they said you couldn’t, because everybody’s using it anyway. But don’t overuse it. Again, AI is there for to help you. It’s not there to replace you. It should make you a an editor of a pretty strongly, strong editor of your content. It’s not there to just write everything. Don’t overly depend on it. If you’re not getting penalized for it now, you will. Google still working there. They’re still releasing things of how they’re what they’re looking for in AI, what they’re going to look at, it’s going to keep changing. So just try to make sure that you’re you can use it, just don’t overly use it.
Pam
So does Google hate AI generated content? No, they don’t hate it. Like I said, they’re okay with you using it. They just don’t want you to overuse it and abuse it, and it should be heavily edited to reflect a human perspective. And what I mean by that is so often we see AI content that is overly wordy. It has like, there’s like, a like, you’ve probably seen a lot. It’s a green check box, and for some reason, AI puts the emojis in like consistently. So now when I see like emails come through that have all the images, I’m like, this was written by AI, so like, be aware of those things that, like, clearly make it look like AI, not just from Google’s perspective, but again, from a user perspective. People are gonna keep getting on to that stuff. Think about when movies first started coming out with like CGI. We were like, Oh my gosh, it looks so real. And now we look at a movie, we’re like, oh, that’s just CGI. The same thing is happening with AI at first. We’re like, This is amazing. I can’t tell the difference. People are going to tell the difference. So really, really think about what you’re writing.
Pam
Also, how does Google know I’m using AI generated content? So AI content detectors use machine learning and natural language processing to inspect linguistic patterns into structure. Basically, AI is using AI to track AI, so that’s how they’re doing it.
Pam
Okay, all right, so repurposing is smart, copy pasting is not. And I’m not just talking about copy pasting AI. I’m talking about copying pasting your own content throughout your website. So again, one of the things that gets kind of misheard all the time when I talk about well rounded content is it’s sort of, they just sort of repeat themselves over and over again. You don’t want to repeat yourself. If I create a case study to present details about a recent project and a video about the project, the video should compliment the case study, not repeat it. On the same note, if you reuse old content, which is a common strategy, if you have content that performed well three years ago, it might still perform well now, but if you reuse it, don’t just make slight changes to it or have aI rewrite it and then repost it. Be intentional about how you reuse content, evaluate if it meets the EEAT guidelines. If it was written three years ago it probably doesn’t and rewrite it to show that your knowledge on the subject has grown or been refined so you can reuse content. Just be smart about it.
Pam
Okay, so evaluate what’s happening on your website. First you need to set goals for what you’re actually trying to achieve, and then review your analytics, look at your pages and screens. Report under when you’re looking at your analytics, it’s under your reports, and compare your results year over year or six over six months, over six months, month over month. Even look at when you post a blog, when you first post it, you’ll probably see a lot of direct traffic. You’ll see some organic and then you may see that organic grow over the next few months.
Pam
If you have email campaigns, you need to track that. How did that look at it? Like, how many people actually went there? You want to look at how it’s performing and what’s performing well. And then if you see blogs that are not performing well, you need to evaluate those. Like, hey, what’s going on with those? Did I just not connect with my audience? Or maybe it’s just not a great user experience. What’s happening? And speaking of user experience on that same report, you can see time on page and the number of events that are happening on that page. Look at those, because those tell you what people are actually doing. Are they clicking around? Are they spending time reading what you’re putting out? And if they’re not, there might be an issue with what you’re with that page. So it’s good to evaluate that.
Pam
Okay, so, how do I future proof my content? Because, like I said, Google is going to keep making changes. AI is going to keep evolving and changing and forcing Google to change our what we see now is going to be totally different in five years, like it might be a robot Pam, up here, who knows? Um, so, how do we future proof?
Pam
Do not try and trick Google. Doesn’t matter if it works today, probably won’t work tomorrow. It’s not going to serve you well long term. Prioritize humans, not machines. Serve your user, serve your audience who you’re trying to connect with. Have content that means something to them. Don’t try to play the Google game. Serve who you’re trying to get to come to your website and make it a good experience for them. What would you want to find? Does your content serve a purpose, or is it just checking a box? Prioritize a good user experience. Can’t stress that enough, and then present well rounded content that compliments each other and serves your user.
Pam
Look for content that can be used in different formats. It saves time and money. I don’t mean just repeat it in different formats, but I’m like, if you report a video for, like, an about video, can you take some of the clips from that shoot and repurpose that in reels? Can you take the content that you talked about and have a blog post written about it that that video then in compliment, look for if you’re going out of your way and creating content, how can you use it in different formats to serve you across the different platforms that you’ve got to put stuff out on?
Pam
Thanks for listening to our live one quick coffee event. If you’re in the Birmingham area, we’d love to see you on the third Thursday of each month at little professor. Free Tickets are available wherever you find. Infomedia on our blog, social media and YouTube channels. One quick question is brought to you by infomedia. We’re a web service company, so that means we can do whatever you need for your website, whether that’s shooting video, writing copy, incorporating digital marketing, or even redesigning your whole site. To meet with us, just head to infomedia.com and fill out that contact form. We’d love to help. One quick question is developed and hosted by me, Carrie Rollwagen. Find show notes, including links to what we talked about on the podcast today at infomedia.com/quickquestion. Our producer is Alana Harmond. Our theme music is by Brad Davis, and sound engineering is done by our in house media team, including Paul Bryant, who’s in the studio with me today, and I’ll leave you with this thought, a real expert helps to clarify, not confuse. So don’t take website advice from someone who can’t give you a straight answer.