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My $1,800 Zoom call with Marie Haynes
Perrin Carrell
December 10, 2023
Helloooo content connoisseurs.
It’s Perrin from Content Bites.
I talked to one of the THE premier content & SEO experts on the planet, and I spent $1,800 to do it. And today, I’m going to tell give you all of her predictions, and maybe, just maybe, give you a few ways to put those things into play.
Appetizers: Links from Ahrefs, SEM Rush, Neil Patel & more…
Main Course: Breaking down my $1,800 Zoom call with Marie Haynes
Let’s dig in.
Appetizers: Content about content 🤯
Main Course: Breaking down my $1,800 Zoom call with Marie Haynes
I spent $1,800 on a call with Marie Haynes so you don’t have to.
If you don’t know who Marie Haynes is, she’s one of the top minds in SEO. Always has been, really.
Her blog is one of the best SEO blogs on the planet. She’s got real friends on the “dark side” at Google. And she’s one of THE voices on the future of SEO.
I paid $1,800 to have a zoom call with her.
We talked about lots of stuff, but the bulk of the call ended up being about the future of SEO.
I was really happy to h ave the chance to chat with her because SEO is changing.
When ChatGPT broke onto the scene, we career SEOs felt like we could immediately see the writing on the wall.
Since… well… forever, the game of SEO has been producing as much content as possible.
And it seemed like overnight, that got an order of magnitude easier.
Truth be told, we all kind of felt like the jig was up, the game was over, and it was time to pack it up and go home.
Over the next couple of months, emotions stabilized a bit, hype cooled off just a touch, and we started to see companies renew their investment in SEO.
But SEO certainly wasn’t the same.
It’s still not.
Google is still going to be – and will forever be – flooded with an absolute tsunami of mediocre content.
It’s no longer enough just to publish a couple dozen articles on a topic and hope that some of them rank.
It’s now a game of trying to understand what Google is likely to reward in its search engine in the context of more useless content than has ever been created in human history.
That’s what I asked Marie about.
What’s the future of SEO look like?
Obligatory grain of salt: Marie is a very good person to ask about the future of SEO, but she does not, of course, have a crystal ball. She’s also something of a purest, and she generally aligns with Google’s ethos; or, at the very least, she’s pretty far from the gaggle of SEOs who think ranking in Google has mostly (and will continue to be) about links.
K. Let’s get into some of these predictions.
Marie Haynes prediction #1: “Information gain” is probably going to be the key to ranking in Google.
I actually hadn’t heard of the concept of information gain until my call with Marie.
The concept of information gain actually comes from a sneaky patent Google filed in 2020 (if you’re interested, you can read the patent here).
But here’s the gist…
Information gain = the likelihood a user is to find information that is new to them by clicking a link.
I’ve read a lot about this to make sure I understand it correctly, and if I do, in fact, understand it correctly, this is a pretty radical departure from how SEO currently works.
Here’s how SEO currently works:
Google tries to understand what users want from a given query (keyword)
They try to find the content that fits that intent
They rank similar content that fits the intent
SEOs see what ranks and copy it
The result is that (1) everyone copies each other, and (2) all the content at the top often looks the same.
If Google really does move toward an information gain model, this might be turned on its head.
Instead of ranking lots of similar content, Google might start to show content that has the highest amount of high quality but novel information.
If true, the path to success will no longer be to just copy what’s already successful.
It’ll be to add the most new information you can. To add to the body of knowledge.
And this makes sense right?
Google is in a war against AI-generated content.
And what’s AI best at? Scraping the internet & regurgitating information in a nicely packaged way.
Google can’t really sort results according to rudimentary ideas of content quality anymore. All the content looks the same. All the content has the same information.
So what’s “good”?
Content that doesn’t just have the same information.
I like this.
It rewards people like you and me: the content marketers who know how to make truly great content.
Here’s a totally off-the-cuff and janky brainstorm on how you could add “information gain” to content:
Proprietary data / research
Quotes from experts only you have access to
Coming up with new methods and explaining them
Offering novel opinions on trending topics
Being among the first to discuss a trend
Talk about your own experience
Tell stories
And that last bullet actually brings us to our next prediction…
Marie Haynes prediction #2: Google is going weight real-life experience over almost everything.
Partly because of the shift toward “information gain,” but mostly because of Google’s long standing preference for for EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), Marie thinks that real, first-hand experience is likely going to be a crucial part of content.
If you didn’t know, Google actually added that second “E” in December of 2022.
Before then, it had just be “E.A.T.”, which stood for “expertise, authority, and trust.”
No “experience” required.
Now we have the extra “E”.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen Google shift more and more in this direction.
In a recent test, I was managing a website in which one of the core categories was losing traffic.
I pulled 10 URLs from that category, and all I did was add “How I” to the title.
The 10 URLs I tested not only stopped dropping, but they were the only pages in the category to start growing.
After a few weeks, they’d gained about 50% traffic while the rest of the category had continued to drop.
I’m NOT saying to go add “How I” to a bunch of titles. Please don’t lol. Not unless it actually makes sense.
But it’s solid (albeit small) piece of evidence that Google already has mechanisms in place to reward first-hand experience.
I agree with Marie that this is going to be a much more important factor than it has been.
On my end, I’m mostly solving for this by hiring writers who themselves have real experience.
Then, I ask them to include as many personal anecdotes, first-hand experiences, and original opinions as they like.
For us, even this early, it’s paying off.
Marie Haynes prediction #3: The best way for AI to enable content is for it to make content interactive.
This prediction was a little more nebulous, but it’s worth pointing out.
A big part of our conversation was about AI (which conversation isn’t these days?).
Marie was pretty adamant that there WERE benefits to using AI for content, but that the benefit wasn’t creating content – it was making content more interactive.
Marie speculated that AI chat bots (or other AI integrations) that could help users actually interact with content.
For example, if there were two blog posts about running shoes, and one of those had an AI assistant that could answer your questions about the content (and about running shoes, but in a way that bran d would answer them)...
Marie speculates that the blog post with the AI assistant would do better.
I definitely like this idea, and I’m on board with the theory, but I’m fairly skeptical about the how and why of it.
I’m not sure why Google would prefer one over the other except for slightly boosted UX.
Marie Haynes prediction #4: Content optimization will be more important than links.
This is one I disagree with.
The last prediction (and it was really more of a recommendation) was that companies should focus much more on content optimization than they should on building links.
Her hypothesis is that Google is going to start to care so much about information gain & filtering out results that don’t seem relevant, that they’re going to heavily reward the very best content.
And her approach to content optimization is to find ways to be unique and talk about your experience.
If you have experience, talk about it.
If you have data, talk about it.
If you have a community, talk about it and tap that source for novel opinions.
She recommends optimizing toward all these new directions Google is going, and she specifically recommended (for my particular campaign, anyway) not allocating as much resources to links and link building.
I definitely disagree.
I currently think the opposite is true.
I think that with a literal flood of mediocre, similar-ish content, links are one of the only good ways left to tell which sources are most reputable.
I’m not sure why they’d nix that, and I’m going to keep investing in link building for our SEO campaigns.
Still, I love the idea of information gain and leveraging experience, so I’m going to be putting those for sure.
How to put this into play:
For your very best / most important content, review competitors and brainstorm ways to add information gain any way you can, but especially from: proprietary data, any kind of documented journey, a novel method, or a strongly held opinion
For your very best / most important content, review competitors and brainstorm ways to add personal experience
Measure the results & repeat if you see a bump
That’s the issue. If you missed the last issue, you can read it here.
Go forth & conquer.
—Perrin
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