Demonstrate excellence at what you do

Eilish says: “If you are talking about anything associated with ESG, sustainability, or anything to do with your brand doing something good and worthwhile, you need to be doing it directly. You can’t be putting intruders on your site anymore.”

You also shared that there’s a need to demonstrate excellence and honesty. How do you do that as an SEO?

“As an SEO, it comes down to writing truthfully and usefully. Everyone has seen the latest algorithm update that Google is dropping about having helpful, valuable content. It’s about ensuring that if you are taking part in conversations around climate change, for example, you’re participating in them in a meaningful way.

If you’re an energy provider, you should be talking about climate change in terms of what you’re doing, your business’s impact, and the different energy sources you can use. That is much more useful than if you’re an energy provider talking to individuals about recycling tips. Since it is not your remit, that content shouldn’t be on your site.”

Does that allow you to publish unique content and rank because you have your own angle or you have interviewed someone unique?

“That comes back to expert content and leveraging experts. It is something we should be trying to bake into all our SEO strategies: making sure that real, recognised people are on your site.

Make sure they’ve got a LinkedIn, a profile page on a website, etc. It gives them an actual digital footprint, which can be scary to some people who don’t want to have one. Yet, it’s essential if you’re writing about any topics that could potentially impact big groups of people.”

How do you demonstrate that you are the best option in your field or industry?

“You need to be the best in some ways, though it can be hard to leverage on-site. You need case studies, original data, statistics, reviews, quotes, etc. It’s not enough anymore to write an article or just have an opinion or thought piece.

You must have those signals that Google’s crawlers, the search quality guideline people, and normal humans can all look at and see that your feats are backed up. All that is within the Google ecosystem with links, code, and schema, much more than simply writing great content.”

Is it possible to fake excellence in any way? Can you feed five-star reviews to the various platforms people look at in your industry?

“If it is possible to trick Google at the moment, it won’t be for much longer.

An example of why you shouldn’t even bother doing this is when we look at Glassdoor. If there’s a company that’s got a pretty toxic profile, and then suddenly it’s flooded with loads of positive reviews, everyone knows it is because the bosses paid for positive reviews. If it’s that transparent to people, it will be evident to Google. You can’t gamify these things; you need to tell the truth. That’s where the excellence comes from.”

Something else you talk about is aligning your SEO with your brand. How do you do that in practice?

“Talk to the people on your brand team, because that can be a missed opportunity when you have two different content streams at all times. We see this with many brands that will have a section of their website that talks about one type of content, and the same subject is then discussed in a different area of their website. Why not go double-bubble and join it? Put the same effort from both parties into one thing.

Usually, it’s about resource constraints, but it is also where you’ll get the experts and unique data. Imagine that you’ve got an SEO content stream based on keywords and excellent content briefs, and you push out an article. Then, your PR news team pushes out another article on the same topic, but it’s got a quote from your CEO and a case study. You should combine that into one because that is the PR team’s juiciness, which will make your article stand out in SERPs.”

Are our brand departments generally more aligned with SEO than they used to be? Or is it still a struggle to get both people to do the same things simultaneously?

“It can depend on several factors. With some brands, it works well, and with others, it doesn’t. It could come down to company size, senior stakeholders’ understanding, and priorities. To get everyone working together, there needs to be an educational piece at the front that explains what SEO is and how it can support the brand. It’s not taking away from the brand but rather elevating and collaborating with it.

Then, it’s also being realistic about the fact that they will have different targets and priorities. As such, there should be an understanding of the needs of every department in the given timeframe, regarding SEO.”

If an SEO takes the time to understand other departments’ goals, objectives, and targets and tries to assist them with achieving that, will they be more receptive to what you’re trying to encourage them to do?

“Once you get that initial buy-in, you can have the test pieces and show that it’s working. That’s when people start to have that ‘Aha!’ moment and realise you are helping them with their jobs.

Sometimes, brand teams can spend a lot of time figuring out what’s right and trying to align things. Yet, if you show others the keyword data, seasonal data, and priorities, it can easily slot into what they’re doing and do half of their research.”

What are you referring to when you talk about a world with changing priorities?

“If you have spoken to teenagers recently, you’ll notice they care more about the planet now, not just the influencers. Personally, I’m terrified - and I have changed. I’m in a position to change what brands I buy, where I go, and how I travel, and more people are doing that. Even when people and consumers aren’t able to make those purchasing decisions, they are making decisions on who they will interact with and what they share online.

Now, brands that are seen to not be taking climate change seriously - who are a couple of steps behind in terms of equality and understanding and togetherness - will fall away. You can’t just have nodes of this anymore. Instead, it needs to be part of brands, within their product creation and ideation and everything they do.”

There’s a great quote: you have to ""skate towards where the puck is going”. Where should an SEO be looking to future-proof their keyword targeting efforts?

“When it comes to predicting search volumes where you don’t necessarily have any historical data, there are several things you can do. You can look at similar keywords or topics and their exponential growth. You can start to look at how they’ve changed in the past in similar periods and think about forecasting that exponentially.

You can also look at different data sources and get data on how much things have been trending on social media, for example. It’s just about thinking outside the box, playing around with things, and also knowing that SEO is tricky to forecast and hard to predict trends. Take as many data sources as you can and start there.”

Should SEO have greater involvement with business decisions? If so, how do they go about having that kind of impact with senior business decision-makers?

“Backing up all the data as much as possible is the way. A straightforward way of explaining this is with buying and merchandising teams - determining what you should be buying at a time, what you should be leveraging, what competitors are doing, etc. That’s an excellent B2C way of looking at it. Yet, we are thinking more about B2B or branding in general. We need to start thinking about what sentiments are out there, what people are talking about, what we can talk about, and so forth.

Imagine that you have been pushing an area of your business concerned with mergers and acquisitions. What’s going on in mergers and acquisitions at the moment? Do you think you can productise in other areas of the business? Do you think you can take some of your white papers and translate them into another feature? It’s really about elevating knowledge that you already have to the primary navigation. Think about what you can dig up from the existing content and package up and sell.”

What is an ideal SEO Department’s position in a progressive organisation?

“It is more of a circular relationship - which usually sounds bad and directionless, but it all comes around. SEO should be able to feed into marketing and determine the general direction, including the search trends. Then marketing can reinforce that with other perspectives.

Everything that the SEOs do should obviously go through marketing, but marketing should also try and come through SEO. SEO teams can often leverage data-driven opportunities, but sometimes that can be missed. Then, of course, you find that SEO can also feed into the IT department, similarly to marketing. It’s all about being cogs in a machine that are all working together, with no break, and all need to be spinning simultaneously.”

What shouldn’t SEOs be doing in 2023? What is seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive?

“Jumping on things just because, without thinking about the impact on your site. We have seen many people doing audits and talking about EAT, yet it is not always necessary for every site. The process for Krispy Kreme wouldn’t be the same as a healthcare site.

Also, if your website is in pretty good technical shape, look at your roadmap. Do you need to do as many dev and tech audits when there are huge content gaps that should be filled? You’ll find an SEO checklist in your head that grows every time you go on Twitter because there is something else you need to think about or look at.

It’s about understanding what will impact your site the most and tuning out all the LinkedIn and Twitter noise. Don’t get FOMO just because someone else is doing an audit.”

Eilish Hughes is an SEO and Content Director at Mindshare, and you can find her over @dorkyeilish on X/Twitter.