Unveiling Google’s Search Quality Guidelines Insights: Exclusive Interview with Trust Insights CEO Katie Robbert

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Trust Insights CEO Katie Robbert Shares New Keyword Research Strategy

In this exclusive podcast interview with Trust Insights CEO Katie Robberts, we discuss how Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines impact search engine optimization strategy.

As businesses seek more effective ways to connect with their target audiences, innovative methods for unearthing pertinent keywords are vital. Rather than relying solely on conventional keyword research tools, modern strategies call for a multifaceted approach. One such approach involves tapping the power of subject matter expertise through meticulously audited social media data.

This dynamic approach enables businesses to delve deeper into the psyche of their audience, deciphering the true language and interests that resonate with their buyers. By scrutinizing the conversations, trends, and sentiments prevalent on various social platforms, marketers can pinpoint keywords and topics with genuine relevance.

This approach goes beyond conventional keyword discovery techniques. It uncovers the nuances of audience preferences and establishes a foundation for content that not only ranks well, but also strikes an emotional chord with the hearts and minds of its intended recipients.

In this era of Google’s Search Quality Guidelines, the fusion of expertise and data-driven insights has become the compass leading businesses toward a more meaningful and competitive online presence.

Katie Robbert on SEO for Google Passages

Katie Robbert runs a marketing analytics consulting firm in Boston called Trust Insights. Through her extensive experience in SEO consulting and data analytics, she built and grew multimillion-dollar lines of business in the marketing technology, pharmaceutical, and healthcare industries. Katie Robbert and her team partnered with Talkwalker, a social media analytics and monitoring platform, to develop a white paper on using social media data to power modern SEO.

According to Katie Robbert, many people are just “putting in the bucket of basic SEO research” through keyword planners and tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush. This approach, while effective, limits the user to search terms that their target audience might be using instead of reflecting the actual language and conversations they’re having online.

Using Talkwalker’s social media export capabilities, the team obtained conversational, qualitative data sets from different social media channels to figure out the standard terms and phrases that people were saying – and this got them very different results from what their straight keyword research yielded.

Katie Robbert on Keyword Discovery through Social Media Monitoring

Through a process that relies on artificial intelligence called topic modeling, Katie Robbert and her team processed the conversational data, figuring out commonalities and similar terms people were using for specific topics (for instance, “latte with extra foam” or “espresso” whenever people would talk about coffee). Katie shares that while there’s plenty of open source code for topic modeling, you’d have to do some coding yourself to have a good topic modeling tool – which was what Trust Insights did when they developed their proprietary version.

Ranking for Competitive Keywords

A great example of this approach is processing conversational data from Reddit forums. This is possible through an API, which serves as a tunnel linking the place you want to extract data from to the tool you’re using to extract data. “You can build the API to connect the two systems and say, ‘I want to extract these things,’ explains Katie. 

Katie Robbert on Competitive Keyword Strategy

Competition for particular B2B keywords determines whether it’s a realistic target for your SEO or too challenging to rank for it. “Drawing the line is really sort of a judgment call in terms of how hard you want to fight for that particular keyword,” says Katie. “And in order to fight for it, you need to be creating a lot of content around that keyword, a lot of authoritative content.” 

Katie Robbert’s advice? “Look at the organic keywords versus the branded keywords because you should be ranking for the branded keywords for your own business, but the organic keywords might be things you might not be thinking about.”

Google Passages and Page Quality Guidelines 

In 2020, Google announced a new feature called passage indexing. As Katie Robbert explains: “If you Google for marketing over coffee co-hosts, then you’re going to get a little passage from the Marketing Over Coffee website, which will explain who the co-hosts are.” While this can provide users with immediate, contextually relevant answers to their queries, it can also take traffic away from websites, as users would no longer need to navigate to these pages to find what they’re looking for.

Another important consideration for SEO would be Google’s Page Quality Guidelines for Reviewers, a 175-page manual given to Google’s AI for training data. Humans train the algorithm to look for pages and return results based on scores under specific criteria. “It’s humans who are rating the quality based on the guidelines that Google has given,” says Katie.

To better understand Katie Robbert’s findings, listen to our entire conversation, which also features many suggestions on improving your pages’ quality ratings.

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