Google’s New SEO Reality: Why ‘Non-Commodity’ Content Is Taking Over

Is organic Google search moving towards a new type of content? Last week, there was this search central live event in Toronto. A ton of slides were presented and I'm going to share the select few that stood out and were going viral within the SEO community. The top one was this commodity versus non-commodity content slide. Commodity content, that's what the SEO industry is used to. You have something like seven tips for firsttime home buyers and this general tips on pre-approval location and budgeting non-commodity why we wave the inspection and saved $15,000. A look inside the sewer line and it's a breakdown of a specific bidding war you won last week. We offered 15,000 under list but waved the sewer scope because I personally crawled the line and saw it was PVC, not concrete. So, on this episode of the show, I'm going to make sense of all of this, share the most popular slides from this event, and give a chat GPT prompt that you can use to have non-commodity content while still targeting keywords. Because why we wave the inspection and saved $15,000, a look inside the sewer line, that's not targeting any keywords. It'll work for Google Discover. It'll work for YouTube, but not for traditional Google search. Before I go there, I want to give a shout out to Chris Aught. Chris Aught has a pressure washing company in Spokane, Washington. He got my SEO course, Compact Keywords, as the thing on my shirt. He spent nearly 18 grand in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different local agencies. That did nothing for him. Nothing. Then he took my SEO course, Compact Keywords, which focuses on doing SEO that gets customers, that gets users, that gets warm leads calling you up. He took my course. He says, "We are now outranking the local SEO agency who also runs a pressure washing company and we're getting about 6 to eight calls per day on a good day." This is what he said. Hey, what's up guys? Chris with the Bright Side. Uh owner of a pressure washing company up here in Spokane, Washington. Uh just wanted to do a little video for Edward because uh Compact Keywords has been crucial to the growth of our business. Uh, I hate to say it, but we spent uh nearly $18,000 in the last uh year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally. Um, and that did nothing. Did not get the phone to ring. Nothing happened. Um, banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what I'm actually paying for per per month. Uh, decided to take the leap on uh the compact keyword class. wasn't sure what to expect, but I've been listening to his podcast for uh over 55 days and that's all I listen to in my headphones at work and so decided to do it. Things are great. Uh the best part is uh going through MA and some of the other features that um Edward shows you how to use in the the the the compact keyword class. We are now ranking and outranking uh the local SEO agency who also runs a pressure washing company up here in several high intent uh keyword categories. Um we're getting about six to eight calls per day on a good day. Um which is just unheard of. So this course, if you're on the fence about it, check it out. Uh inepth. I'm not smart. I'm I'm more the type of business owner that goes out there, gets my hands dirty, as you can tell with my shirt and uh the computer thing is not my thing. But man, this course, do it. I I promise you, you'll see results. And if you don't, then you're probably doing something wrong. Thank you again, Chris, for that. So, should you be putting up nebulous non-commodity content to do SEO? why we waved the inspection and saved 15,000 a look inside the sewer line. And the answer is no. If you want to show up for keywords for specific things that people are searching on Google, if you want to influence query fanouts, these are the searches that AI is doing on Google. You need to use the exact search terms. Search is a relevance and authority machine. You want to be relevant, but it's not actually that hard to do that and still have non-commodity content. So the prompt that I want to give you for chat GPT really easy. You just take this slide and I'm going to link to this in the description for this episode. This commodity versus non-commodity content slide. Just take this slide, give it to chat GPT. Say my keyword is and say your keyword like how to reduce shipping costs. Then you say start the title with that and then give me some non-commodity titles. And here are some examples. How to reduce shipping costs. The hidden carrier fee killing your margins. We found it by accident. That's great. How to reduce shipping costs, a breakdown of our most expensive month, and the fix that cut it in half. There's so many good ones, so much inspiration here. What you can also do is if you have the content already written for the keyword, you can give your content and the target keyword to the AI of your choice and then say again, start the title with the keyword and then use the rest of the content to inform the next part of the title so that I have a non-commodity title. And you'll get something great. But you need to have your target search term in your page title, your URL slug, your H1, and the beginning of the first sentence. These non-commodity titles, they work really well for top offunnel content, but not great for bottom offunnel content, but it's the same principle actually as my page title formula for bottom offunnel keywords. My page title formula for bottom of funnel keywords is you have the target keyword then a vertical dividing line then you say the benefit or the searcher's goal. So the benefit that the searcher would get from having their bottom off of funnel search satisfied and then you give another vertical dividing line followed by the brand name. The relevance of the target keyword plus seeing the benefit that the searcher wants. That's what gets them to click and to give more patience to the content because they expect that they are going to be satisfied. This non-commodity content formula for top offunnel content. So this is content where people are really just trying to learn. They're not trying to use something immediately. They don't know what they need to use or make a discovery call. They don't know who to call. They're not trying to do any of that. They're just trying to learn. And that's top offunnel keywords. That's top offunnel content. In this formula, you still start with the target keyword which is relevance and this says this content is for you. And then the next part shows this is a real case study or this is something real that happened. We are sharing this with experience and it's especially beneficial if you can give a result like how to reduce shipping costs, a breakdown of our most expensive month and the fix that cut it in half. And it's this next part that really helps people click on your page, your content versus other people's content. It helps people care. Now, the caveat is you don't want all of your blog posts to look the same. Google really hates patterns when there's crazy obvious pattern in blog content. Sites tend to do a lot worse in SEO. We actually talked about this on the helpful content update episode of the show. That was episode 989. Google's helpful content update destroyed the internet. What actually happened? You don't want to have too much obvious SEO like that. So, you could still differentiate these things. You're not always using a colon. Sometimes you're using a dash. Sometimes the page titles look completely different. Sometimes you're just giving the target keyword and you're not giving that next part after. Sometimes your keyword isn't at the beginning of the title. Maybe it's in the middle. So, you don't want to have these very obvious patterns just one after the other. Cyrus Shepard. Cyrus has also been on this show before and he shared an awesome post about this non-commodity content slide. He said Google prefers the latter. In my opinion, lots of evidence this is spoton not where Google is going in the future but where it already is now. And actually there's another slide about what good non-commodity content is. So this is what it says. Good non-commodity content is unique. It brings a viewpoint, information, or has content that others lack or can't easily replicate. It's specific. It talks about a specific instance, situation, or thing, not general rules, steps, or generic information. It's authentic. It demonstrates firsthand knowledge or experience. You could honestly give this slide with the other slide in your chat prompt as well. There was a slide on using AI to create content. Google does not penalize AI generated content, but well, this is what it says. Generative AI can be used when researching a topic and to add structure to original content. However, using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse. For more, see our Google search guidance on using generative AI content on your website page. We've been talking about this a ton on the show. Don't use AI to scale content. In fact, I got to share this. This was shared on the tech SEO subreddit. Need help? Manual action. I got hit with a major spam problems manual action in Google Search Console for my blog. And honestly, I'm a bit stuck on what to do next. I've already removed my blog section and redirected everything to articles. Now, I'm auditing content, cutting thin/duplicate pages, and improving what's left. For those who fix this, am I on the right track? anything critical I might be missing before I request a review. And the top comment is just out of curiosity, do you think it was deserved? What caused the penalty? And the person who posted said, I lean too much on scaled templated content. Cleaning it up now and focusing on quality. It's a templated content, too. That's another major red flag. Scaled content, templated content. There's a mythbusting slide from this Toronto event. No need to focus on conversational keywords or capture every possible synonym. Conversational keywords, these are more natural sounding keywords. So like instead of best pizza NYC, it's where can I get the best pizza in NYC. Instead of weather tomorrow, it's what's the weather like tomorrow. So this slide says no need to focus on conversational keywords or capture every possible synonym. Don't worry if you don't anticipate every variation of how someone might seek your content. Google's language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how your page relates to many queries even if you don't explicitly use the exact terms in them. My advice on this is pick a target keyword. Try to find a target keyword that will satisfy the intent of a lot of different related keywords. That means comparing SERs with each other. Maybe you have keyword A and keyword B. Their SERs are very similar. Keyword B has more search volume. So then you target keyword B because by targeting keyword B, you're also going to show for keyword A. That's my advice. The next myth that is tackled is JavaScript is okay if Google can access as a human does. Look, the reality is you need server side rendering. If you have a JavaScript heavy site and if you're getting a lot of traffic or a lot of links, Google will do a better job of understanding your JavaScript content. But play it safe and use server side rendering. This was a good mythbusting slide on chunking content. No need to chunk content into pieces just for AI. Organize and write for a good human reading experience. The text is easy to read and it's well organized. Yeah, that one I completely agree with and we've talked about that on the podcast before on how chunking for AI does not help you at all. Then there's another part of this. Use headers H1 H2 in ways to help human readers. Don't worry about it being super precise for AI. And it says the web in general is not valid HTML. So Google search can rarely depend on semantic meaning hitting in the HTML specification. And that's a good point. Personally, I like to just have very clean pages, standard one H1, several H2s, sometimes H3s. But it's really, really important that you have your keyword in the page title, the URL slug, the topmost header, whether or not that's the H1 or not, but I'd recommend using an H1 at the beginning of the first sentence. Your keyword's proximity to the beginning of your content indicates how relevant your content is to that keyword. Anyway, there were a lot of great slides from this event. Shout out to JC Chuinard who shared them all on his site and this will also be linked to in the description for this episode. A lot of people think that SEO is changing rapidly and I would make the argument it's really not. If you had been doing good SEO for the last 10 years, your strategy has probably largely remained the same. If you've been trying to skirt the rules, well, that's a cat and mouse game that is constantly evolving. That's where things are crazy. The overall advice, build authority to your site, have pages that are relevant to your target keywords, do your best to satisfy search intent. And that is everything that I've got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1 of the Edward Show. This is my daily search engine optimization podcast. To get my exact method of doing SEO, again, that is at compactkeywords.com. You're going to love it if you haven't checked it out before. And if you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.