Google’s Search Relations team advises focusing on high-quality, helpful content and technical SEO fundamentals before chasing SEO trends.
The Search Off The Record podcast team at Google recently reminded everyone to start with the fundamentals in search engine optimization (SEO), as attention frequently tends to drift toward the newest trends and sophisticated strategies.
Google Search Relations team members Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes, and John Mueller clarified that a lot of websites still require assistance with fundamental technical SEO problems like site crawlability, indexing, and page rendering.
The way a website performs in search results is directly impacted by these fundamental elements. Therefore, they ought to be taken care of before less important optimizations.
Technical SEO: Establishing the Base for Innovation
Optimizing a website’s infrastructure and architecture for better search engine crawling and indexing is known as technical SEO.
Technical SEO is different from content creation or promotion in that it only concentrates on a website’s backend.
Illyes explains why he frequently shares technical SEO-related content on social media:
“I enjoy writing about technical topics because we occasionally see large site owners or SEOs overlook important fundamentals.”
Illyes shared his experiences attending conferences where people were enthralled with the “next big thing.”
He contended:
“Just ensure that your content is high quality first. I am a user trying to find things, and these websites that people have put there are not helpful or useful to me.
He also emphasized the importance of technical elements in SEO by saying:
There isn’t much that Google can do for you if the Googlebot can’t access your website, rendering is terrible, or there are no tokens (words) on the page or website.
Technical SEO “is still important – it’s like all of those basics,” Splitt concurred. Since search engines consider a website’s homepage to be its most important page, he advised starting troubleshooting there.
Neglecting these technical details can result in serious problems like rendering errors or inaccessible websites, which can negatively impact a website’s search engine ranking.
Quality Rather Than Quantity: Reevaluating Traffic Measures
The assessment of content and the widespread misconception that high traffic equals high-quality pages was another important topic of discussion.
Mueller issued a warning about depending just on analytics and ignoring user experience:
“There are times when I think it’s misleading to focus only on the traffic.”
He gave the example of a website that ranks highly for generic keywords but offers little to users. The overall statistics appeared alarming when the amount of traffic from those low-quality keywords dropped, but the loss was insignificant.
What Is It That You Should Focus On?
The hosts stressed that more reliable measures of a page’s quality and usefulness are those that go beyond traffic, like user engagement and satisfaction.
Mueller claims:
“Although it’s almost necessary to consider the larger picture of all the traffic that has disappeared, bear in mind that Much of this was pointless.
To gain a better understanding of a website’s performance, he suggests tracking lower-level pages and concentrating on pertinent queries.
How Can High-Grade Content Be Created?
Producing a lot of content isn’t enough; it also needs to have a purpose and benefit the target audience.
Illyes, however, makes the argument that producing content of a high caliber may be easier than most people realize.
The secret is to concentrate on the aspects of the page that will assist visitors in reaching their objectives. This could be addressing issues, giving thorough responses to frequently asked questions, or telling interesting and captivating tales.
Illyes says:
What if quality is genuinely easier to achieve than most people believe? What if the goal is to write the thing that, when they get to the page, will enable people to accomplish whatever goals they have?
Conclusions
Two important points are emphasized in this conversation amongst Google Search Relations team members.
Before tackling more complex strategies, it is imperative to grasp the fundamentals of technical SEO. Second, a site’s success can be measured by factors other than traffic volume, such as the caliber of content and user interaction.
They suggested that by concentrating on these areas, websites can dramatically increase their SEO performance.
