Search is Changing, But Content Entrepreneurs Should Still Take Google Seriously

Have you heard someone say they’ll “search it up” rather than “Google it”?

Mike King, founder of iPullRank, heard it first from his children’s babysitter.

“Younger generations are defaulting to searching in a variety of destinations,” he told attendees at the Content Entrepreneur Expo (CEX) during his presentation.

And it’s not a generational shift due to artificial intelligence options like ChatGPT.

TikTok is a place people search. YouTube is too. (Amazon is a big one for product-oriented searches). So search is changing, but don’t think that means you no longer need to pay attention to Google.

The behemoth search engine is still growing in use, and many people who search on one platform or generative AI tool will then turn to Google to verify or learn more about what they found, Mike says.

“Google is still the main event, but we are going back to a world where we need to optimize for multiple search engines across a series of channels,” he says.

Those nascent channels will be satisfied by the search engine optimization (SEO) tricks of the early 2000s, like keyword stuffing. Mike explains that TikTok, for example, will search a transcript to see how many times you mentioned the keyword and deliver it in its search results accordingly.

But don’t revert to the pre-2013 model to continue attracting the likes of Google and generative AI tools. As you type into the search bar and have related conversations, Google’s Search Generative Experience, ChatGPT, and others will remember. They will want to deliver more robust and comprehensive responses as they show more results.

To do that, Mike says, you should optimize your content based on what’s already working and give little or no time to what’s not.

He points to Aleyda Solis’ flow chart for pruning your website. The first question asks whether the content is driving value, then walks you through the process of dismissing some content and investing in the content that’s likely to deliver the best results.

Mike has his own process to decide what to keep, revise, kill, or review. He created a formula that determines an asset’s Content Potential Ranking. 

The first step is to identify what content is decaying. Mike explains that this content did well but has declined in rankings, clicks, etc. You can use a tool like Semrush’s organic research report to identify the keywords and relevant landing pages. From there, use Google Search Console to compare time periods of those pages to learn which ones are decaying. 

With that information, you can drop the data into iPull’s Content Potential Ranking worksheet (free, registration required) to get its CPR score (zero to 100). Each URL is designated keep, revise, kill, or review based on the keyword opportunities available and the effort to capitalize on them.

If the content is labeled keep, you don’t have to do anything. A review label indicates the content has a low CPR and a minimum of 500 monthly search volume. Assess based on your goals if they would still be valuable to the business to revise. 

Whether it’s labeled a revise or a review you opted to revise, Mike suggests doing these things: 

• Review content across the topic cluster. Use co-occurring keywords and entities in your content – words related to but not exactly the target keyword.
• Add unique perspectives that can’t be found on other ranking pages. Say something that isn’t already being said on that topic.
• Answer common questions, such as the People Also Ask questions found in Google search results.
• Restructure your content using headings relevant to the related words, unique perspectives, etc. 
• Add relevant structured markup (how-to, FAQ, etc.)
• Expand on previous explanations.
• Add authorship.
• Update the dates.
• Add to an XML sitemap of only updated pages.

If the content is labeled kill, don’t just delete it as it could be valuable outside of organic search channels. Kill relates to changing Google’s experience of your website. The best approach to these pages is to “noindex” the pages, “nofollow” the links, and submit an updated XML sitemap with the changes.

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