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Understand the questions in People Also Ask boxes. Notice how Google talks about having to search after a search to find answers? How else will you know what searchers ask for next?

Use trends, PAA clues, and news to drive your questions and ask them what they think.

This concept can be scaled to create exceptionally strong pages by first breaking all the competing pages for a search phrase into a table showing the underlying entities and their relative importance to the main query.

A “binary scoring system” suggests that Google might decide that a document either IS or ISN’T about any given entity.

Later clues suggest that “salience” is now measured by Google on a sliding scale from 0 to 1 (for example, the scoring given in its NLP API).

This is perhaps the most crucial element when sending an SEO report to your CMO. Reports that fail to emphasize SEO’s influence on revenue can make the C-suite think the channel is unproductive.

Initialism: CWV, CSS, JS, API, GA4, XML, CTR, CMS, CPC, DA, LSI.

Corporate fluff: Circle back, touch base, agile working, low-hanging fruit, caveats, bandwidth, cascade to the wider business, take things on board, utilize all the tools in the box, results-driven, reinvent the wheel, etc.

Google recently added an extra “E” to the search quality standards of E-A-T to ensure content is helpful and relevant. The extra “E” stands for “experience” and precedes the original E-A-T concept – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. 

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab compiled 10 guidelines for building web credibility based on three-year research with over 4,500 participants. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site. Make it easy to contact you. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). Make your site easy to use – and useful. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently). Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers). Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem. – Stanford Web Credibility Research If the above doesn’t scream, “Be a human, care about your users and your website experience,” I don’t know what does.

Experience is especially important in a digital world moving toward generative AI content

How much is Bard like Google search in a local use case?Would I be able to get any tips for local business inclusion in Bard?Do local SEOs need to change tactics to adjust for Bard

With only 3 of the restaurants appearing on both lists and all the others being different, Bard’s recommendations are only a 50% match for Google’s local finder results. Moreover, the ranking order of the individual entities is a 0% match. Look at La Carreta at the bottom of Bard’s recommendations, but the top of Google’s local rankings, for example.

I found Bard’s advice to be extremely interesting and worthy of sharing because it matches, almost point for point, the tips you’ll get from a good local SEO consultant: get listed in Google’s local environment, get positive reviews, invest in community involvement, offer a unique product, provide great customer service, and don’t expect instant results. Encouraged by Bard’s initial tips for performing within its ecosystem, I decided to shake the bottle to see if any Google local ranking secret sauce would come out: