The US Department of Justice vs Google trial has just wrapped up and there’s some interesting things that came out of the hearing that I thought I’d share in this email.

Maria Haynes is an SEO consultant who’s done a deep-dive on the findings on the findings from the DOJ case. She summed up her findings in a simple paragraph:

Google improves by learning what users interact with. Every page is stored in the index along with signals such as clicks, queries and spam score. While PageRank remains a signal, it is just one of many, and in fact, is nowhere near as important as information stored about the webpage itself. AI Models such as RankEmbed BERT are fine tuned by user preference and quality rater scores. User data also determines how often Google crawls your pages.

You can read more detail about it on her blog here

These findings reiterate many of the recommendations we’ve been giving clients in our SEO Audits for years and reenforces the idea that ranking today is as much about user experience as it is about more traditional SEO tactics like backlinks. Specifically:

Clicks & Click Through Rate (CTR) Are Critical

Clicks and click through rate are super important so you should optimize meta descriptions for CTR and make sure your opengraph images are on point.

I can’t hammer on this point enough. If you can take your click through rate from 2% to 3% with better written meta descriptions thats a 50% increase in traffic from the same rankings AND there’s a feedback loop that will improve rankings over time.

Click here for our short training on writing meta descriptions – writing better meta descriptions is basically free money!

User engagement and user experience » make sure your content doesn’t suck

User engagement is important → most content on the web absolutely sucks. In some ways AI is just making this worse as now low quality content can be produced at scale.

Two or so years ago in an email titled “how to beat our AI content overlords” I shared 3 content tactics we use for clients to help improve user engagement and conversions.

Read more about this here – the early close technique in some cases can dramatically improve conversions

New AI SEO Tool

This tool does a huge amount of stuff – we actually wouldn’t recommend their Otto AI feature for most people but the Google Maps tools are excellent. If Google Maps rankings are important to you its worth checking out.

Three key features we love:

AI generated responses to reviews – this is especially good for businesses with a lot of review volume. We do quite a bit of Franchise SEO work and for these businesses, replying to and managing reviews is a lot of work. Search Atlas now automates a lot of the work here for us.

Ability to fully lock Google Maps listings – this one is an excellent feature and the first tool we’ve ever found that allows you to fully lock listings and protect them from changes. In high competition markets, competitors will often make public edits to Google Maps listings to hurt the rank of the listing. There’s tons of tools that will monitor for changes like this but Search Atlas is the first tool we’ve found that will lock the listing and revert and changes made.

GEOGrid rank tracking – again a ton of tools have this type of geography based rank tracking but we’ve found Search Atlas to be extremely fast and much cheaper for this type of rank tracking.

If you want to take a look there’s a free trial – check it out at SearchAtlas.com

Thats it for this email, any questions, just hit reply – if you’re looking to up your rankings or review your site speed, shoot an email back with your URL and what you’re looking to do and I’ll check it out and come back to you with some recommendations.