spicy tea inside 🫖

Marketing has been spicy lately, so I think it’s high time we had marketing high-tea. Come sit, let me fill you in on all the goss.

🫖The Google API Leak

A Google engineer leaked Google search API documentation to friend of the course, Rand Fishkin. The link exposed over 14,000 potential ranking features for Google’s search algorithm. Rand, then, being the good SEO samaritan he is, published a bombshell article detailing his findings.

Ohh a verified internal document leak revealing some of the ways Google has been lying to marketers? THE TEA IS HOT Y’ALL.

What did we learn from the leak?

A lot, and *John Mulaney voice* we don’t have time to unpack all of that. Here are three highlights you can action in your SEO strategy in the short-term:

1. Google is using AI to measure “effort”. Look at that! Google cares about what goes into producing a great piece of content.

What do I do? Create good shit. Think tools, quizzes, images, and content that requires effort and thoughtfulness to produce— that solves a real problem for your customers. This kind of content should be hard for your competitors to replicate.

2. Clicks matter! You’re thinking, well, duh. But for years Google team members told the SEO community that they don’t. The leak says otherwise, and it’s backed up by Google’s congressional testimony that revealed an internal tool called NavBoost that uses click data to increase a site’s rankings in search.

What do I do? Create content that users click on, (and don’t immediately click the “back button”). Make sure you’re matching user intent to the content you’re creating. Use tools like SparkToro to do good audience research. Ask: what does my customer really want when they type in [insert keyword here], and then make the most useful version of that.

3. Focus matters. We see ’siteFocusScore’ as a ranking factor in this leak. That’s measuring how much of a website is focused on a single topic. We know Google is measuring this, and measuring deviations away from the topic.

What do I do? Make sure you know what your core content is solving for, stay focused. Remove pages that aren’t topically relevant and pages that aren’t performing.

If you want to dive deeper into the tea, Rand’s got a quick video outlining the ways this leak should change how we do SEO.

What we know for certain is that Google cares about quality content. So go forth and create things that are actually beneficial for your people.

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