I’m thrilled to announce I’m opening up spots for new client consulting. Let me share with you how I have completely reshaped my SEO strategy after spending the last two years learning as much as I can about the AI systems that determine today’s search rankings.
When the helpful content system launched in 2022, I knew that some of our current SEO practices would eventually need to change.
Google told us the helpful content system was an automated system using a machine-learning model. A machine learning model is an AI system. As of the March 2024 core update, the helpful content system is no more. Instead, a variety of new signals have been brought into the core ranking systems. A month previous to this, Google announced a breakthrough in the architecture behind their machine learning systems, making them more efficient and able to use more information in their calculations. More and more, AI is the driver behind how Google ranks results.
Some of our SEO strategies may need to change
I realized in 2022 that if I wanted to be able to communicate to my clients on how Google’s ranking systems worked, then I needed to understand more about machine learning. I took Google’s machine learning course, and I read and watched everything I could to help me understand more.
I have had hundreds of hours of conversation with other SEOs and also with ChatGPT, Bard, Claude and Gemini about research papers and patents related to search and machine learning.
Since then, I have gone on to learn even more about how Google’s systems work. In our strategy, we’ll consider:
- Deeply understanding your audience’s needs and meeting their intent.
- Navboost – This system uses user engagement data to predict what is likely to be helpful. We’ll work together to determine what your audience is finding helpful and determine how to improve so that you are most likely to be predicted as the result that would satisfy a search.
- Freshness – incredibly important for most sites. We’ll discuss Google’s freshness based ranking patent and come up with strategies for improving and creating new content that is fresh and interesting.
- RankBrain – Google’s AI brain for ranking. This system re-ranks the top 20-30 results. This means that the traditional “ranking factors” we know mean much less in today’s systems.
- Topical authority – I’m not talking about AI generated topical maps. Those are created to help a site look good to machines. Yet, Google wants to reward “people-first” content. I have a strategy on building topical authority in 2024 based on creating clusters of truly helpful original content on your topics and making strategic use of internal linking to help Google understand the unique value in each.
- Instant Glue – This is a version of Navboost that learns what people find relevant for fresh queries. We’ll discuss whether this is impacting your searches and if so, whether we can win by using our knowledge of how this system works.
- DeepRank – a deep learning AI system that learns about the world from studying the actions of searchers. Our work in understanding intent should help us here.
- RankEmbed BERT – a vector embedding space which embeds a query into that space and then finds content that is likely to be relevant and helpful. I believe that to some degree we can reverse engineer this process. I’ve built a few AI tools and prompts to help us attempt it. However in order to do so you need to combine this knowledge with a thorough understanding of your audience’s needs. This is not something that can be automated or completed by AI alone.
The DOJ vs Google trial exhibits were a huge help in understanding Google’s systems. If you have not yet, I would encourage you to set aside time to read through Pandu Nayak’s testimony that talks about how rankings work. The discovery of the Google API files that discuss the attributes potentially used in Search helped me expand on my theory as well. Remember how Google said the March core update brought new signals into the core systems? I believe that many of the attributes used in Search such as PageRank for example, are now used differently as signals to be considered by machine learning algorithms. Traditional search used one main signal in its calculations – PageRank. Today’s search uses a variety of signals.
I wrote a book with my thoughts on Google’s systems and also created a course for those who are as geeky as me and want to dedicate a ridiculous amount of time learning and testing. And if you just want to trust me that what matters most is to put yourself in the shoes of a searcher, this workbook will help you improve your pages immensely.
Will you be among the first to pioneer new SEO strategies with me?
I am looking for a few clients who want to work with me in implementing my methods.
I have partially tested some of these ideas on a few sites. In order to fully test, I need to really dig in. Early attempts at using this method have been promising. This client below had me optimize this page ranking for phrases related to a medical topic.
The above was done quickly, using just one part of my theory on optimizing the content on the page itself with an understanding of intent and vector search. It’s certainly possible the boost was related to an improvement in freshness, but I do believe our attempts to understand and meet user need were rewarded. There’s much more we can do.
Requirements to become a client
- Ownership or consulting role. You can be the owner of the business / website we are working on or the SEO who consults with this business. If you’re an SEO, we can talk about how to best work together with your client so that I help improve your work.
- Communication. We’ll meet approximately once a month via Google Meet, and communicate in a private space I’ll set up in my community, the Search Bar.
- Content Creation. You need to be able to modify and create new content on the site. I won’t be writing content for you, but I’ll be providing you with outlines and ideas for you to build upon. We may use AI to guide us and help inspire us, but all content needs to be human written by someone familiar with the business. If you are the SEO for this business, we’ll talk about interviewing staff, business owners and possibly even clients as well to better understand the needs of your audience.
- I’ll need access to GSC. GA4 is appreciated as well.
- LLM Use. I will need your permission to use LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini to help me with my research and suggestions for your site.
- Permission to share (anonymously). I’ll need your permission to share screenshots of analytics and anonymized explanations of what types of changes we made to effect improvements.
- Minimum 4 month contract. We’ll need time to build and execute this strategy. After 4 months, we can extend our relationship further if we are succeeding.
Here’s my strategy
I’ll assess your site’s performance and competition. Together, we’ll decide upon a page, or multiple pages to optimize or create. Eventually, as we determine what is working for us, this strategy should be easy to implement across other pages.
I’ll do extensive research on the queries driving traffic to these pages and the search results Google is presenting to searchers. I’ll be focusing on understanding the intent served by each page and what “information gain” each offers. We’ll brainstorm together on how to better meet user need. Then, we’ll come up with ideas for producing helpful content on this topic that is better than what currently exists on the web. We want to determine how to be a page that users consistently choose and are satisfied with and find to be more helpful than other choices they have.
We’ll talk about your reputation for your topics and whether to work on improving in this area. This might involve finding ways to get links – but we won’t look at link building the same way that SEO’s traditionally have. We may work on building out topical clusters, creating systems to inspire fresh content ideas, or I may suggest ideas for putting more evidence out into the world to build E-E-A-T on your topics. Improving the world’s concept of you and what it is that you are amazing at is the key to improving E-E-A-T.
We’ll set a plan of action for each month and thoughts on our progress so far. I’ll deliver a report with suggestions. And then we’ll meet to discuss strategy and implementation.
We can also talk about using LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini to help improve your business.
Expectations
Significant changes in organic search performance may take a few months, although I believe we can see some improvements earlier than this.
If your site has been strongly impacted by a core or helpful content update, then we will not see improvements until a future core update runs. Sites impacted by core updates should be able to improve with these ideas. However, there may be exceptions, especially if Google is ranking sites above you now that are much more authoritative. I still think there are opportunities here – but perhaps not for the same competitive keywords. I must caution that if your site is impacted by the helpful content system, while I have loads of ideas for recovery, I cannot promise it. We have yet to see a site recover after being strongly impacted, but Google has hinted it may be possible.. I do believe some sites impacted by this system will be able to grow again, but if so, it will require significant effort and even changes in business practices.
If you’re not sure whether you’ve been impacted by Google updates, I’ll assess this for you.
For most sites, I expect we should see a gradual increase in organic search performance over the months we work together and continuing onwards.
Of course, I cannot guarantee improvement as this is a new strategy. We’ll enter this agreement with an understanding that we are testing and experimenting with new, yet unproven methods that have taken me two years of intensive study to develop.
What about AI?
I’m eager to brainstorm with you on using AI, especially LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini to benefit your business. There’s so much we have to learn and I don’t think anyone in the world is an expert in the technology we are about to see! Not many people have experimented with LLMs as much as I have though. We can chat about your needs and desires in this area and how I can help.
Costs
I am determining appropriate charges based on demand.
If you are seriously interested in working with me, contact me using the form below. This will help me understand and set fair pricing.
If you are interested in short term consulting, there are some additional options here for brainstorming with me.
I am excited to start working with you and hope you are too!
Marie
