Florida, man
That November in 2003, a writer named Blake was planning a search conference in Boca Raton and decided to name Googleâs grisly update âFlorida,â which stuck. Thereafter, Google began naming its own updates, âin the same manner [as] hurricanes,â says Search Engine Journal, which seems fitting. Each landfall is devastating.
After Florida, the updates gathered pace. Big âcoreâ updates now average about two per year with daily minor releasesâthousands per annum.
And today, after more than 6,000 updates, 1.2 million large tests, thousands of human search testers giving continuous feedback, and Googleâs explicit warnings about gaming the system, people I talk to in marketing seem unaware. Or think it does not apply to them. They maintain the belief that with $60 of software and hand-me-down advice from before Facebook existed, they can instruct their writers to outsmart Google.
Oh, my kingdom for that sort of main character energy.
This is akin to wandering into a modern-day mob hangout and trying to win their trust by speaking exclusively in quotes from The Godfather.
Letâs return to our hurricane analogy. If hurricanes are measured in their ferocity on a scale of 1-5, Google is a six. To you and me, its resources are infinite. The days when you could coax secrets from Googleâs head of spam over drinks at a conference are as extinct as the term âwebmaster.â Google has beaten SEOs. That fight is over. Citizen scammers are scattered to the winds, and in fact, we content marketers are part of the product: We work for Google, producing fodder for results, following its site structure advice, and occasionally finding bugs for it to patch.
There is only one loophole left to exploit. And to understand it, you must look at where Google clashes with other even bigger hurricanes it cannot best, and how it hopes to fight them.
Every year, Google pays Apple an $18 billion ransom to remain the default search provider on Apple devices. At any time, Apple could turn this off. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commissionâs head Lina Khan has vowed to break up Google. The European Union is delivering a withering fusillade of multi-billion-dollar fines. And then there are AI tools. OpenAI has singlehandedly resurrected Googleâs only true search rival, Bing, and search aggregators like Perplexity now rob Google of clicks.
All this pressure forces Google to compete in the one area that cannot be denied or regulated awayâuser experience. To maintain dominance, Google must remain the easiest, friendliest, least cognitively taxing way to find answers on the internet.
Since 2014, itâs been experimenting with so-called âzero click content,â where it displays a complete answer at the top of results which saves people from having to click. One in five searches contains such a snippet. Now they also include AI-generated answers.
Pause to consider this. A company that makes $209 billion on people clicking has cut deeply into those clicks. Google is worried.
How else can Google improve its experience? By culling all the untrustworthy, unnatural, unoriginal, uninsightful, and ineffective writing that would break its usersâ trust. They must not grow frustrated. They must love Google.
This has always been Googleâs intent since the Florida update: Help people find unique and useful information to win their trust.
"Google's automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that's primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results." - Google
How can Google tell whether someone found the information unique and useful? Aside from human testers and its inhuman crawler, surprisingly little:
- Did a user click?
- Did they read? (Dwell on the page)
- Did they hit the back button, or click to read more?
Googleâs algorithm is running vast, incessant tests to lift pages out of the depths of search to see how real people interact with them, to assign a rank. Itâs a typhoon of activity to see whether real people value what theyâre reading.
And this is that final vulnerabilityâwhich is no vulnerability at all. Users enjoy useful things clearly written.
The choice is yours:
- Stuff words, buy backlinks, run heists, and pray you outrun the hurricane
- Write for people
To choose the former is to entertain us allâbecause it means behaving like Floridaâs eponymous state hero, Florida Man, committing reckless, ill-advised, self-defeating crimes that subject you to periodic SEO update slaughter.
To choose the latter is to enjoy deep respite. You simply need to write clearly for your audience. It's still work. But, future-proof work.
It's also a lot more fun. And your audience will feel that.
But wait Chris, isnât there a whole $68B SEO industry?
Yes. Some of these agencies and individuals can be helpfulânot in telling you what to write, but in telling you how to make all the things youâve written work better together. Or what I call technical SEO. They can improve your site structure, page speed, and user experience. They can help you experiment. And they can suggest keywordsâbut only to give you ideas.
They are never a replacement for your company having a âbig ideaâ and useful, original, credible information and people willing to tell it. Never let them tell you you need seven uses of a particular term. Weâve worked with dozens. Some I liked. Some offered a necessary alternative perspective. But I have only ever heard one or two talk about âoriginality,â or what our client is actually credible to write aboutâaka things that are actually read and shared. We are always the most successful at SEO when we take that brief and then write to thrill ourselves, and by association, our readers.
(And pull a Donnique and help your experts write things so good they get invited to speak at conferences.)
But also, lots of SEO providers are just a scam. I donât have numbers. Itâs just based on the briefs some of them send this team. Theyâre getting paid thousands per month to run searches in Semrush that offer nothing we didnât already know.
How can said scams exist without being useful? Wouldnât marketers find out? I think of it like indexed mutual funds. When Vanguard released indexed fundsâfunds that merely tracked the market without a managerâit seemed crazy. All other funds had an expensive, Wall Street type in charge. Werenât they necessary? It ends up, funds without a manager beat 92% of funds with one. Managers were actually harmful. Today, few funds have managers.
Just because something exists is not proof it works.
