@ruthburr

Taking Your Quality from Medium to High

“NOTHING WRONG, BUT NOTHING SPECIAL”

@ruthburr

Keep in Mind

Quality raters are people. Google is a machine. Quality raters don’t have any input into what ranks; they give input on whether or not a given page is a good result for

a query. Most SERPs will never be reviewed by a human.

@ruthburr

Why SEOs Should Look at the QR Guidelines

So why do we care? Because Google is a machine trying to provide quality to humans. By looking at the human-readable signals QRs look for, we can gain insight

into what the algorithm is looking for.

@ruthburr

What, of These Signals, Are Machine-Readable?

Google is telling you how they want the SERP to be for humans, but the machine is running the show. When thinking about the QR guidelines, ask: what are the

machine-readable equivalents of the human-readable information they’re looking at?

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Why Are You Here?

Quality rating is all about whether or not a website “achieves its purpose.” In SEO parlance, that translates to relevancy and query intent. Be honest with yourself about what the purpose of your pages are. Don’t

target an informational query if you really just want to sell stuff – it won’t work.

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Your Money or Your Life (YMYL)

This is especially important for YMYL pages – pages that could impact a user’s health or wealth. Don’t forget: if you have an ecommerce site or any online payment for

your products, you are a YMYL site. YMYL sites are held to higher quality standards.

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The Quality Scale

Page 17

Lowest Medium HighestLow High

Quality raters are instructed to rate pages on a scale from Lowest to Highest. You can also get a score of e.g. “Low+” but for the purposes of our discussion today, it’s

basically a scale from lowest to highest.

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Fix Your Low-Quality Pages

If you have low-quality pages that are deliberately deceptive, overtly spammy, or otherwise terrible, fix your stuff. This is SMX Advanced. Get on my level. I’m not even

going to talk about it.

@ruthburr

Type of Medium Page

Discussion

Nothing wrong, but nothing special

This page achieves its purpose, however, it does not merit a High quality rating, nor is there anything to indicate that a Low quality rating is appropriate.

Mixed, but has some E-A-T

The page or website has some characteristics of both High and Low quality pages, but the low quality characteristics are mild enough that the convincing high quality aspects make it difficult to rate the page Low.

Medium Quality Pages

For a lot of SEOs, the problem lies right here – cranking out a lot of fine-but-not-special pages doesn’t have a chance of succeeding in a competitive SERP. Note that good E-A-T can mitigate a mediocre page, but

isn’t enough to save the day on its own. Your individual pages still have to achieve their purposes to rank.

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High Quality Pages

Fortunately, Google also tells us what makes for a high-quality page, so we can use this information to make our medium-quality pages better.

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High Level of E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Both a website and a page have to have a good level of E-A-T relative to the query at hand to be considered high quality.

How much you need will depend on the query.

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On-Site Improvements

Let’s talk about on-site improvements! These are things that you can actually fully control that can make your pages better. Yay!

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Better Content

You need good content. Are you tired of hearing that you need good content? Then why are you still creating mediocre content? Don’t neglect your product pages just because they’re less interesting than

blog posts. Good doesn’t mean long – it means providing a complete answer to the query’s intent.

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A Satisfying Amount of High Quality MC

Detailed, original product

description

Manufacturer specifications

FAQ and reviews

Customer service info

on-page

Supplementary content

Here’s an example of a page Google says has a satisfying amount of high quality main content. It has everything the user needs to make their purchasing decision, including

customer service info & reviews, without having to leave the page to get it.

@ruthburr

Satisfying Website Information

Who am I?

You also have to have enough information about your business on your website to demonstrate that you are a real company. This includes real contact info and a well-

maintained site. Dust off your neglected About Us page and make it legit.

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Ads

It’s OK to have ads on your page as long as the page isn’t trying to trick people into looking at/clicking on ads. Ad content needs to be clearly marked – including

native/sponsored content. Google and the FCC both care about this.

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Fix Your Shopping Cart

This is an inference, but it makes a lot of sense – a well-maintained, reputable site should have an up-to-date, secure shopping cart. Don’t let your outdated cart drag

your whole site down. If you have one, you’re a YMYL site.

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Customer Service

Customer service info should be very easy to find. Providing great customer service also means that you will start building positive brand signals off of your site, which

leads us to talking about…

@ruthburr

November March

“While a page can merit the High rating with no reputation, the High rating cannot be used for any website that has a convincing negative reputation. A very positive reputation can be a reason for using the High rating for an otherwise Medium page.”

Reputation

“While a page can merit the High rating with no reputation, the High rating cannot be used for any website that has a convincing negative reputation.”

This sentence was omitted from the March updated guidelines. My theory is that it’s because it was causing QRs to rate too many Medium-quality pages as High, NOT

because it’s not true. We’ve all seen examples of this in the wild.

@ruthburr

Reputation

It’s easy for SEOs to see “reputation” and think “links” – but that’s not how users are going to experience your brand’s reputation at all. In the guidelines around reputation, we can see Google’s attempts to use

more sophisticated metrics and inputs for reputation than just links.?

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Reviews

One easy-to-see reputation signal is reviews. There are lots of tools to get/monitor reviews – I like GetFiveStars for review generation, and most of the major local SEO

tools feature review monitoring.

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“Look for information written by a person, not statistics or other machine-compiled information. News articles, Wikipedia articles, blog posts, magazine articles, forum discussions, and ratings from independent organizations can all be sources of reputation information. Look for independent, credible sources of information.”

References

References are the closest the QR guidelines get to talking about links. The emphasis on things like forum posts is a possible indicator that co-occurrence (a mention in connection with the topic, but no

link) may be a signal, something SEOs have long suspected.

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Experts

We usually think about expertise in terms of domain authority, but there are often smaller experts in your topic or niche. Get them to create content for you if you can, but also try to get

them talking about you – it’s a brand signal that’s also machine-readable.

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Ratings

Regardless of your feelings about the Better Business Bureau, Google calls out the BBB and other professional organizations as sources of reputation info – and users

tend to really trust them. Don’t sleep on those ratings and associations.

@ruthburr

Build Your Brand Already

All of this boils down to: take some time to build your brand. The best way to have a positive reputation is to have a positive reputation – especially with things like co-occurrence, metions by experts and

reviews, a strong brand presence will build your online reputation in machine-readable ways.

@ruthburr

2.6.4 How to Search for Reputation Information

Using ibm.com as an example, try one or more of the following searches on Google:

• [ibm –site:ibm.com]: A search for IBM which excludes pages on ibm.com.

• [“ibm.com” –site:ibm.com]: A search for “ibm.com” which excludes pages on ibm.com.

• [ibm reviews –site:ibm.com] A search for reviews of IBM which excludes pages on ibm.com.

• [“ibm.com” reviews –site:ibm.com]: A search for reviews of “ibm.com” which excludes pages on ibm.com.

You Could Do This Right Now

The QR Guidelines include these handy-dandy instructions for a quick reputation audit – check out who’s talking about you online and see where you can make those

signals stronger and more positive.

@ruthburr

Optimism vs. Reality

Ultimately, the items in the QR Guidelines are more about how Google would LIKE the SERPs to be than how they actually are/work. Looking to the future is important

but don’t be surprised if the real world doesn’t always match up.

@ruthburr

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