Focus on actual expertise as part of your content strategy

Lily says: "It's more important than ever for SEOs to focus on actual expertise when it comes to creating content on their websites.

By this, I mean the expertise of whoever is involved in producing or reviewing the content, to make sure it's demonstrating to Google that it comes from people who have the proper credentials to write about these topics. As opposed to, perhaps, copywriters or freelancers who don't actually have the real subject matter expertise."

A few years ago, Google highlighted authors of different articles and gave you an opportunity to add a little snippet within the code to demonstrate that you are the author. What are they doing now?

"I think they are trying to bring back something similar, but not necessarily in the same search features that they've had in the past. For example, 'rel=author' was deprecated. Now, however, they're launching some new features surrounding who's in the Knowledge Graph, and potentially linking up those Knowledge Graph experts or authors with content they've written in organic search. That's one interesting area.

Also, pay attention to projects like Google Cameos, where experts can contribute short videos in the Knowledge Graph. They've also published some documents lately that make it very clear you should list your authors for transparency purposes and have a dedicated bio page for them. They're clearly going down this mission of enhancing Expertise, Authority, and Trust."

What are some of the best ways to give you an opportunity to appear as a knowledge panel?

"Generally speaking, it's best to have some type of creative work that you've been associated with, such as publishing a book or music album, or have some type of very noteworthy events taking place. Google My Business is a great starting point for a lot of businesses. There is a whole running list of the different databases that Google pulls from. Some of them you wouldn't expect, but it's a way to shoehorn your way into the Knowledge Graph. I would recommend looking at Jason Barnard's work to help you with this."

Is this a strategy that SEOs working in large organisations should be thinking about, and maybe research the potential authors within the business to ensure all of the authority is taken back to the website?

"Yes. It's the job of an SEO team to ensure that whoever's producing content, and has their name associated to the content, has proven expertise in that area - that's conveyed properly throughout the website. There's not always an opportunity to use every author as a dedicated expert, but maybe there are experts you have on staff, or expert reviewers that you can hire. It's also really important to bridge the gap between the SEO team, who might work with this set of content writers, and the actual experts at the business - who should probably be more involved in the content creation process. Some of the more effective and successful SEO campaigns in the past couple of years have the expert's name associated to the content they're creating, even if they've just reviewed what other people have written."

What does this mean for the type of content the expert is able to write? Is the expert pigeonholed into just one niche type of content, or are they able to write about different forms of content freely and easily, and still take authoritativeness from Google?

"It's becoming increasingly difficult to be a jack of all trades. You should focus on the areas where you're an actual expert and produce content that stems from your own experiences, and your own real expertise. For example, some of the best performing content on gardening was from a guy that does gardening all day. He has a podcast, and the company transcribes his podcast - and that's the content.

You didn't have to do any keyword research for that, you are just using what the expert's encountering in his day-to-day life. That content does very well because it adds a lot of value and comes from a real place of expertise. There are so many people doing SEO and content creation nowadays that are reverse engineering search volumes, topics, and everything else based on the existing data. That doesn't account for the real contributions experts can provide in the content."

If you need to reach out to people outside of your organisation, is there a way of ranking authorities to get the best possible person writing for you?

"There are tools that basically surface those types of insights. If you're using one of these tools, that has a database of expert writers and contributors, it'll say what areas they're experts in, where they've gone to school, and what their credentials are. It's obviously very important to pick the ones that have expertise in your category.

It can depend on the topic. For example, if you're doing 'Your Money or Your Life' pages (YMYL), you do want to look for people who are willing to put their name behind it, and maybe link to the other places they've been cited. You want them to have built a personal brand for themselves and to be trusted as experts. If you encounter a writer who's not comfortable using their name, you have to be careful. Google's made it very clear they care about transparency regarding who's writing content. The more sensitive the topic, the more important it is to work with somebody with a clear brand and expertise."

Does this mean you'd be better off working with just one or two people, and getting them to write multiple articles, instead of reaching out to lots of different people to write just one article for your site?

"Yes. One of the analyses that my team works on is overlaying author names on top of SEO performance. A lot of the time, you'll see a small subset of authors outperforming the rest, and they write on certain topics. There might be some other authors not performing as well, writings about other topics. Maybe this is not necessarily only because of their writing, but because your website could be perceived as authoritative in certain areas. If you venture too far outside of those areas, I think Google has a perceived authoritativeness that it assigns to certain sites. You're not necessarily able to write about finances and internet security on the same website - unless you've been doing that for a very long time. It's becoming increasingly clear that Google's focused on these niche areas of expertise at the domain level."

What about frequency? If you've got someone writing for you, are you better off going for 5,000-10,000-word articles, or is it better to have a more frequent publishing cadence?

"I don't think it's one or the other. It really depends. If you're a news publisher, or someone trying to get lots of traffic from somewhere like Google Discover, then frequency is very important. Those areas of search are pretty short-lived in terms of how long you can rank.

On the other hand, if you're writing science or health content, frequency is perhaps not as important as the accuracy and quality of the content. One of the big mistakes SEOs make is arbitrarily creating the cadence of how often new content needs to be created. In reality, maybe 80% of your content is not doing anything for the site. Why not double down on the 20% that's doing well and make improvements to it with updates? This might result in less content than we're used to, but Google's already not indexing and not ranking a lot of content that's already out there."

If a writer's personal brand gets associated with a business, but moves on somewhere else, will the authority they build up for the website stay?

"As long as they're willing to keep their name associated to the content after they leave, it should be fine. Writers come and go, but their brand doesn't - especially if that's what they do. If you have a chef contributing to your recipe website, they could have contributed 20 great articles with a lot of links and social media signals, and they've done well for the site. Just because that chef left and now contributes to other sites, it won't work against you in any way. It just shows you work with high-quality content contributors."

To measure success, is it a case of looking at conventional SEO metrics - at organic traffic for the created articles - or is there some other way?

"It's getting tricky. We should look at the rankings of the content and how much traffic it drives, but it's becoming more challenging to evaluate the performance of content. Google is getting so much better at determining intent. In some cases, people are too focused on rankings. You might have moved down three positions, but that's not to say your content writer is no good. It could be because Google determined there's a different type of intent for the query. It's really important to make sure that the keywords you're focusing on are actually associated with the type of keywords that matter for your business."

How does this fit in with your overall SEO strategy? Is this something that should be planned on a quarterly basis, or does it need regular tweaking?

"This is an ongoing work. We do this type of work ongoing for a lot of our clients. One of the biggest problems we see is that they've produced too much content over the years, and many of these sites have been doing SEO a certain way for so long. The result is that 80% of their content is not performing, which could equate to tens of thousands of articles – and Google's grappling with having too much content. There's always work to be done to ensure you're focusing on the right areas."

What should you do if an article isn't getting any traffic? Get rid of it, or redirect it to a more relevant page?

"It's a decision you have to make based on the data. If there's an applicable article or category that makes sense to redirect it to, then it's probably better for SEO. Don't fake it just for the sake of trying to redirect it somewhere if you don't have that corresponding piece of content.

Another thing we run into is when a publisher wrote about way too many topics in the beginning. They might have some sensitive, political or emotionally charged content that is not going to do well in search. In those cases, you don't always want to redirect it somewhere else, because this doesn't get rid of the problem. We have examples where clients don't want to be associated with certain content anymore, and we just let it 404 and get rid of it."

What should an SEO stop doing to focus more time on creating highly relevant content?

"SEOs tend to build out a process where they produce X number of articles per month, using the same keyword research tools as everybody else to determine the highest volume version of the keyword. This is how they write that article. They are not thinking about whether they have anything new or unique to say on the topic.

Google's going to see your content as the same as everybody else's. Can you change your content creation process to consider what you are doing that's different? You can be at the forefront of leading this conversation, and this might involve working with people you're not used to talking to, such as customer service. Using these resources to curate a content strategy is going to be far more effective than trying to reverse engineer what will drive the most traffic - it's just too competitive. Nowadays, there are too many SEOs doing the same thing."

You can find Lily Ray over at LilyRay.NYC.