A Refreshing Approach to SEO with Bernard Huang

In This Episode

• [02:33] – Stephan interviews Bernard Huang to share his insights on Google’s evolving algorithms and the future of user engagement in SEO.
• [06:34] – Bernard discusses Google’s adaptations to combat infinity content with topical authority and information gain.
• [11:16] – Bernard finds a strong correlation between entity coverage and redundancy in content for March 2024 core updates.
• [19:55] – Stephan and Bernard explain Google’s declining search quality and the rise of other search alternatives.
• [29:23] – Bernard advises focusing on technical SEO and quality link building to improve rankings.
• [33:03] – Bernard describes ranch-style SEO, which involves disaggregating mega guides into standalone content pieces.
• [41:45]- Bernard elaborates on how Clearscope is evolving to help SEO instead of focusing on providing valuable insights and answering specific parts of a searcher’s journey.
• [50:24] – Bernard reveals where you can find helpful and amazing content he writes.

Jump to Links and Resources

Bernard, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you so much. Stephan, I just learned that you were the author of The Art of SEO.

Well, co-author. It wasn’t just me.

That was one of my main reads back in 2013 or 2014, when I first got my feet, toes, and hands wet with SEO—whatever you want to call it. And by jolly, things have changed quite a bit.

Yes, they have. Which edition were you learning from? Was it the first?

I feel like it was the first edition of The Art of SEO.

Yeah. The second one came out, I think, around 2012. Well, I know it’s made a difference for a lot of people, and I’m happy to have contributed to various awesome people’s careers and trajectories in the SEO world. I’m glad you got some value out of it.

Absolutely, yeah.

So, let’s talk about what’s going on in this crazy SEO world these days because there’s a lot of turbulence, turmoil, uncertainty, and fear about AI, with all these updates and Google’s positioning about content that is AI-generated or utilizes AI to assist. What are your thoughts about all this?

Oh, man, there are so many different directions that I feel like I can go. I’ll just start with the idea that I think Google Search is experiencing its biggest existential threat with generative AI that it’s ever seen. I think with the advent of generative AI, you have two really big problems that search engines like Google have to solve. 

Number one is the fact that anybody can spit out infinite content at fractions of pennies on the dollar. So search engines now, instead of crawling these billions of web pages that they have to do, are entering this era of infinity where people can spin up content farms and spit out bazillions of articles and content pieces. It’s a very complex problem that search engines have to deal with. So, one big threat is the infinite content side. 

Then, I think on the other side, you have large language models, chatbots, or chat experiences that are cannibalizing searches at a bigger clip of cannibalization than we’ve ever seen. I think chatbots are good at first drafts and very contextual-based queries you can feed. Give me a three-day itinerary for Denver that’s family-friendly and indoors. It will do better than an information retrieval system, like a search index would do. 

You set up your content to have all kinds of potential. We live in a personalized search world. Share on X

So, I think you have these two forces at play, and you have Google looking at these two problems, and they’re saying, “Wow, what do we do?” So that’s at least one of my big observations about the. The problems that the space is facing.

So, what are the solutions here? I mean, where do you see this going? How do you see the SEO community adapting to Google?

Yeah, that’s the question. I think Google, what I’ve been building theory around, and what has been popular in the SEO community as of late, are a couple of concepts. Number one, is topical authority. Number two is information gain. I think those are designed to try to circumvent this problem of the infinity of content we are dealing with; topical authority, at least in my definition or book, is just how a website performs for related topics on which it publishes content.

It’s Google’s way of saying that should you do comment, spam or parasite SEO or buy links sponsored links from a publisher, that publisher needs to perform well for the given subtopics, or else the link equity that it passes or the overall authority that it has within the topics that it’s written about is going to be well worth a lot less.

So that kind of counterbalances a website that generates millions of pieces of content, none being original or interesting and none performing well, and people buying or pointing links to it to juice it in the search results. It’s one way that I think Google’s model is adapting to the new paradigm. I think the other dimension that I see playing out is this idea of information gain; I think looking at the patent, it’s really just saying, “Does this set of documents provide additional information to the given topic?” Google looks at all kinds of different documents that could be used, then selects what it believes to be the ones with enough information gain or addition to the topic and puts it into the index. 

On a more concrete level, I think that boils down to Google’s knowledge graph of the topic. Let’s say, for this example, we’ll just use search engine optimization. I think search engine optimization is seeing a lot of information gain related to artificial intelligence, large language models, ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on. So, Google would understand that SEO as a concept is becoming more related to AI LLMs, and it’s going to then surface those documents related to somebody’s search on how to do SEO or where SEO is going.

So, I think that component of the Google algorithm is very important because large language models are primarily consensus models, where they look at ideas and concepts that we all generally agree upon. It’s more of this reductionary, like this is what has worked type model. I think that LLMs struggle with forecasting future paths where a topic is likely to evolve because there’s just not as much training data about where something could go as a large language model has. So, I think it’s those two components that I see Google leveraging to offset and counterbalance this AI infinite content generation mechanism that we see ourselves going into.

Google selects the ones with enough information gain and puts them into the index.

So, what’s a practical application for our listeners of this concept of information gain as Google evolves its algorithms?

The question that I’m actually doing extensive research on, I think on one side you have Cyrus Shepard from Zyppy, who published the study recently, and his findings were more or less alluding to the idea that first-hand experience type stuff, using the words I or me or you had a strong correlation with better rankings and better performance. I think from a qualitative measure, that makes a lot of sense. Also, given that we’ve seen the extreme rise of user-generated content from sites like Reddit and Quora, we could surmise that Google’s algorithm is really trying to look for or understand first-hand experience and personal perspectives and do a better job serving that. I think that an overarching definition of information gained from a subjective and qualitative sense makes a good amount of sense to me.

But from a quantitative sense, I’m still puzzled, and I say puzzled in the sense that just strictly talking about the first-hand experience itself isn’t necessarily going to allow you to perform well in your search, right? Google isn’t foolish; it’s advanced machine learning technology and wants to know whether your content is doing a good job covering the topic. You can’t just say I me you; here’s what I think and then have that magically rank. So there’s gotta be other quantitative factors at play. 

The best hypothesis I’ve been testing has been looking at the winners and losers of the recent March core helpful content updates. What I’m finding is that there is a strong correlation between this idea of entity coverage and entity redundancy for a given topic. To put more concretely, grammar websites and lyric websites have been demolished for the most part by recent updates, helpful content, and March Core, and the initial hypothesis that the SEO community came up with is that those sites often have more affiliate links, more ads, all of the core user experience. But I think the subtle nuance to everything isn’t necessarily the UX or the ads but the fact that the overall answer is redundant from an entity perspective. 

It's not great to create highly consensus-based content, but Google still wants to look for content that is added to where the topic is likely to evolve. Share on X

I think lyric websites are perhaps the best example. If we’re looking at Taylor Swift’s lyrics for one of her newer songs, well, lyric websites A, B, and C will say the same thing because lyrics are simply lyrics. I think you see that with celebrity net worth, you see that with a lot of historical facts. What is the definition right where all of us generally agree that X is X or, you know, the answer to this fact is Y. I think that Google is basically looking at SERPs from a topical entity redundancy perspective. They’re basically drawing correlations to say that, okay, if I’m serving results A, B, C, D, all through ten and pretty much the topical like entity coverage of all of these websites overlaid on top of one another is more or less identical, then why does this as a search engine results page need to exist? Why wouldn’t we just put our search generative experience or whatever they renamed it to on top of the SERP and have that SGE or AI component answer the question for the searcher? So, I’m guessing that Google is using some sort of a topical graph to understand the redundancy of answers for specific query types.

Essentially, we see what I think Mike King from iPullRank talks about, which is threat levels where different query types are going to experience different threat levels of AI based on the redundancy of answers within the topical knowledge graph that Google understands. So, all of that said, I think the more practical an example, the more okay. What should you do about it? I think that you should recognize that search is going to change.

We’re going to see a massive cannibalization of many types of query classes, predominantly the more informational ones, like the what is definition how-tos that more or less everybody agrees upon. That’s because Google wants to put its own AI or SGE on top of the SERPs to answer highly redundant topics that it understands that we’ve all agreed upon. Google then wants to introduce original and engaging content below that artificial intelligence that it will tack onto the LLM that it’s putting on top of SERPs.

 In those content results, it wants to surface unique and interesting content. So, a couple of the other notes about this. Google strikes a partnership with Reddit for $60 million to ingest community data. That’s an advanced way of learning that Google can say, “Okay, topics change and evolve very quickly.” Often, the first place to look at how the topic could evolve is through community discussions.

So, Google reading Reddit data from the source can then build topical knowledge graphs of evolution for any topic that’s being discussed on Reddit and then use those blueprints of how community discussions are informing how a topic could evolve to then blueprint different matches of search results that mirror what first-hand experience could look like. All that said is that I think SEO content is suffering from a packaging problem instead of, like, how to train for a marathon, do email marketing.

We assume that that box is moderate in terms of AI threat, in that AI’s just going to say, “Okay, sign up for a marketing provider, do this, do that.” Instead of how to x, it’s maybe how I x’d and here’s what happened. It could literally almost go through the same thing where you’re like, “Oh, I use MailChimp, and I sent through this, but then it’s all of this like I did this, and here’s what I thought and whatever.” Rather than sign up for an email provider, do this, do that. It’s like how I did this and how I did that. So, I think that’s my best rendition of what we see happening.

Community discussions are often the first place to explore how a topic could evolve.

Interesting. One thing I’ve noticed, and I know other SEOs have noticed, is a lot more searches are happening where the word Reddit is appended to the search query to improve the search results and to surface Reddit queries or Reddit content. Because oftentimes, it’s better to answer the question than just letting Google surface whatever results it wants. Reddit tends to provide a better answer. I think the quality of Google’s search results is really coming into question, even with SGE. What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, I think that, well, there is that very speculative piece that Ed wrote about how the head of Google Ads became the head of Google Search and how that has contributed to a de-emphasis on search quality and a rapid monetization of Google Ads. That is one possible explanation for a bad search experience we’ve found ourselves in. I think there is a craving for people who want content that’s not been SEO’d, right? That’s not just like vacuum cleaner printers were on the verge, but yeah, like the best printers of 2024. And then having that start with what is a printer? I think people are feeling and seeing a lot of fatigue with the content results. Therefore, many people turn to communities, whether they’re doing searches for those products or services within communities or because Reddit’s search is so bad, they just use Google’s indexation and append Reddit to the search.

So overall, it demonstrates, I think, a pretty big lack of trust that searchers currently have with how Google search results are. And I think Google is, well, scrambling to put together a plan to deal with this attrition that they’re seeing from search results, whether people are just searching on TikTok or people are just searching on different ecosystems or not searching at all.

But Google is still Google. I think that based on what we’re seeing with the presence of Reddit and Quora entering the market in terms of search real estate, I think that Google’s trying to say to us as SEO content creators, that we do care about the first-hand experience and different perspectives that people have. So make your content feel and look and read more like what’s happening here, and we will reward it. I think that that’s also what Google propaganda is saying. That’s what they’re trying to say on X. That’s what they’re trying to say when they write their press releases. 

Many people are feeling content fatigue and are increasingly turning to communities.

I think that what I go back to is that, obviously, all this propaganda is here, but in execution and implementation, what is this supposed to look like for the ecosystem? We can’t just say, “I did this, and I did that” and expect to rank. So, from a more concrete evidence, execution-based standpoint, how can we understand what Google is actually looking at? And I think that’s the big question that a lot of people are thinking about these days.

Yeah. Do you think that link building is dead, or is it as important as it used to be? And perhaps some of the tools that assist you with link building are out there. Where do you see that going? And how does that tie into what we’ve been talking about?

Yeah, I’ve developed a mental model of how I think Google search works. It’s really this three-part algorithm where technical SEO is at step zero. I think many people confuse technical SEO with ranking better and all of this stuff. I think most technical SEO’s goal is to just help Google access, understand, serve and index your content. Right? For example, when we do heading tags or all image tags, it’s really to give Google more context about our content.

So, if technical SEO is the way that Google comes to know your content, want to crawl it, want to serve it, then the next step in the ranking process, is authority. I think authority is based on links, existing content performance, and brand. All these things that we will talk about in SEO and the next part of being authority is how you initially rank in the Google search for the queries your content body can rank for. 

So, a good example would be a NerdWallet. There is a strong authority in credit cards and personal finance. We can say that if Nerdwallet published a piece of content around which credit card is best for travel, you can imagine that Google’s going to say, “Okay, it’s Nerdwallet.” Their existing content for credit cards is strong. They have a healthy link profile from relevant sources that points to the site. We’re going to initially rank this at position one or two for best credit cards for travel or whatever. I would say that’s the next part of what I understand to be the Google game.

The final part is what we saw with the antitrust case. However, the fact that user interactions and user engagement are what makes your content piece rank one versus seven. That’s why Google is doing this infinite AV test on its SERPs to say, “Okay, if this is position one, is this better or worse than what I previously had in position one?” I think they measure better or worse. But if I send a legitimate user there, will they return to our search results and perform an additional action? Right. If they do, whether that’s an additional search or an additional click onto another page, then that’s kind of a ding on your piece of content being ranked number one. 

So, back then, there was the question of link building. I see that link building has been deemphasized in how Google approaches rankings. It’s not just how many links and how strong they are pointing to your site; it’s multifaceted. But what about your existing content for that particular topic? What about the content, the origin source of the link, and their performance for that topic? If The New York Times isn’t great at ranking for credit cards, then why should a link that says credit cards to NerdWallet be valued that high?

So, I think it’s kind of this, if user engagement and interactions inform what’s good, that the user selects, then whatever that piece of content links to internally or externally must be good. That’s then very difficult to game from. I want to build links. One link from a top-performing site on a topic you want to rank for is infinite. That’s like, “okay, that’s worth a ton.” So that’s kind of how I think about link building.

Most technical SEO’s goal is to just help Google access, understand, serve, and index your content.

So, are you advising folks not to work on link building anymore these days or to still do it without putting as much emphasis on it? What’s your advice to folks on link-building?

Yeah, I would say know which part of the Google game that you’re playing. So what I mean by that is, if technical SEO helps you get indexed, crawled, and served, then if you’re not indexed, you probably, unless you’ve done something really bad and you’ve gotten manual web spam or whatever, you probably have some kind of technical co-issue. You should think about your site architecture, page load speeds, and UX, that kind of stuff. But then you get indexed and ranked, and then if your ranks, give or take 20 or 30 to 100, you’re playing the authority game. The authority game builds quality, relevant links. It’s refreshing, underperforming existing content. It’s pruning to a degree. And that’s how you get from rank 62 to twelve, right? 

You have to build links. Once you build a link, Google will retry to check your content. They might bump you up to rank 26 for a day, see what happens when you’re there, and then bump you back down. With each additional link and each content piece you refresh, you’re making Google want to take another shot at testing your content in the user engagement game.

But then, if you’re already on the front page or second page of Google, I think your game becomes not as much about link building but more about your ability to serve the searcher’s intent and conclude the search journey as quickly as possible. That said, I think there are a variety of really money queries where you just need a very big brand to do well. Those will be things like the best credit cards or mortgages. You’re just not going to rank for those really big-head topics without a ton of branding and brand awareness behind you. This is why I think Google says, “Okay, well, are you a brand? They ask that because, for many head topics like vacuum, clothing cleaner, mortgage, and credit cards, you have to be American Express, Home Depot, Dyson, or something else. Yeah, you’re not really going to rank anyway. 

So I’ll say that outside of being a very brand-heavy topical search, if you are on the front page or second page of Google, in my opinion, it’s not really about links. It’s about more brand awareness or giving the searcher what they need or want when they land on your page.

Google is experiencing two really big problems with generative AI - the threat of infinite content generation and AI/chatbots cannibalizing searches. Share on X

Yep, I got it. Now, you’ve been pushing a concept I think you call Ranch-style SEO, which has been compared to a pretty popular approach for many years in the SEO community called Skyscraper content or skyscraper SEO. What is Ranch-style? What’s your position on this?

I think Ranch-style is supposed to be a play on skyscrapers, although I think it has been confusing. But if a skyscraper is the ultimate guide to vacuum cleaners, and it is, what is a vacuum cleaner? How to use a vacuum cleaner, how to choose a vacuum cleaner, and the benefits of using a vacuum cleaner. What are the disadvantages of using a vacuum cleaner? Like this whole mega ultimate guide, which is a 14,000-word long thing? Then, Ranch-style calls for the disintermediation or disaggregation of all those sections into standalone pieces of content that match all of the different subtopics a user could care about.

Some people might say, “Well, Bernard, isn’t that just hub and spoke or topic cluster?” And that’s where Ranch-style is supposed to be. One level deeper to say that I think hub and spoke and topic cluster are still too keyword-centric, right? It’s still how to use a vacuum cleaner. Best vacuum cleaners, right? And it’s like, of course, we’re going to have a how-to-use vacuum cleaner. Ranch-style takes how to use a vacuum cleaner.

Make your content feel, look, and read more like what’s happening here, and Google will reward you.

It disintermediates that one step further, right? It says that a vacuum cleaner is perhaps not a great example, but if we say ultimate guide for training for a marathon, right? Then, you have how to train for a marathon. There are at least five different perspectives that a user is going to care about regarding how to train for a marathon. You have things to consider before signing up for your first marathon. You would want to do something before you understood how to do it. Then you would have how I trade for the marathon. You could have something like common mistakes while training for the marathon, which is, again, part of that, how-to. And then you would have reasons why you shouldn’t sign up or should you sign up for a marathon, right?

Kind of like giving people a counter opinion as to, as they’re thinking about how to do it, should they do it. Here’s how to train for it very quickly as a beginner, somebody with no running experience. There are all these different perspectives that somebody is likely to care about, even within how to train for a marathon. 

The idea of Ranch-style is to say that because we’re seeing the shift in the algorithm and people wanting to know more about specific perspectives, you actually need to then take your child page or your spoke page or whatever you want to call it and break that out into five, three, to five different perspectives that the user could care about. So that way, at any point of somebody’s search journey, whether they’re a beginner or an intermediate, whether they need to learn it quickly, or whether they are just thinking about signing up for it, you are hitting every single one of the perspectives that somebody could have for the topic.

As separate articles.

As separate standalone articles because you only have one title tag and one above-the-fold experience. However, Google has been obviously testing and rewriting that and deep linking people to search results or content results.

All right. How does this help with inoculating or future-proofing your site in terms of the helpful content updates and algorithms and what Google wants to see in terms of heat and all that? So, what would be your future-proofing strategy? That would include Ranch-style but probably some other aspects, too.

Yeah, I would say that it’s to take your topic clusters and your topics and break them out into many short forms. I don’t think it has to be long, but many short-form articles that answer the range of what somebody is likely to care about for that given topic. And it’s both that simple and that hard. Because how do you know what the range of what somebody cares about within a given topic is? I went through a marathon idea because I’ve been doing a lot of research on that, but that’s how I know somebody might have to cram for it in under a month or somebody with no experience.

Know which part of the Google game that you’re playing.

I think that in doing that, Google also prescribes that you need to be at least somewhat cognizant or somewhat of a subject matter expert to know that people don’t care about things to consider before buying a vacuum cleaner. Well, they might, right? If they say, ‘Oh, you have pets, or you live in a moldy place, maybe you want a steam cleaner,” But it’s to say that you kind of have to develop a bit more of a perspective on the topic that you’re writing about and pretty much get rid of the idea of keyword, target keyword and monthly search volume from your vocabulary as it relates to SEO. That’s a pretty drastic thing to say.

Yes, it is.

But think about it, if you’re going for a mortgage, what about a mortgage? It’s like, how do you get a mortgage? Well, what about how to get a mortgage and say, “Okay, how to get a mortgage with a low credit score or no credit score” and say, “Okay, that’s a lot closer to answering a specific part of somebody’s searcher journey.” Think about it as the research journey that any given user could care about and design content that hits as many of those components of the search journey. I think you’ve set up your content to have all kinds of potential. 

We live in a personalized search world. Google knows stuff about each of us, and it will say, “yeah, you seem like you’re an intermediate in the running. So here there’s like the intermediate plan in a large language model world that we live in a hybrid world.” I think you’re getting large language model optimization happening through search, right?

A lot of it is trained on search results and search data. The more content you can seed into the search results, the more of a vote you get in helping the language model infer the best answer. I think it sets you up across the board to be in any sort of world that we end up landing with all of the crazy changes that we see happening with search.

By adding links and updating content, you compel Google to reevaluate your content’s engagement potential.

How are you evolving a clear scope based on what is happening, all the changes, and uncertainty? Maybe first explain what Clearscope does, what the platform and technology do, and what need it fills, and then how you are evolving that system based on what you see happening in the SEO world.

So, Clearscope started seven and a half years ago. Helping SEO content creators with content optimization is what the industry ended up calling it. From a technical perspective, we helped users create content that passed Google’s knowledge graph. Check for the topic. 

So, back to the example of how to do SEO. What Google is doing is crawling your content when you publish it on how to do SEO. It uses natural language processing to understand that your content is talking about keyword research, backlinks, technical SEO, content quality, and internal links. It’s saying, “Okay, I know this topic. How to do SEO should talk about backlinks, internal links, and technical SEO.” if your content does not, that is probably not a great piece of content. So we’re going to penalize it by seeding it in the rankings less or not showing it at all. If you talk about how to do SEO and you don’t include backlinks like this piece of content, it is likely to be very garbage. That’s how that whole industry became famous for content optimization.

Fast forward to today, I think you might look at content optimization and say, “Well, aren’t you just encouraging the sameness of content being produced?” I think that that is a very blurry light, right? I think that when we look at what happened with helpful content updates in relation to lyric, grammar, coding, and celebrity net worth websites, Google essentially crushed all of the content because it was redundant or highly consensus. Everything more or less included the same entities and had the same knowledge graph overlap, and then Google’s like, “These are unoriginal, not necessary, and we will crush them all.” Google did.

But that kind of brings up a question of, “okay, but you can’t just add unique, interesting, relevant entities for information gain,” right? If I’m talking about how to do SEO and start talking about blockchain, crypto and the Lamborghinis and God knows what, that might be too far away from Google’s understanding of the topic. So, that breeds the question, “What does creating meaningful content that Google is going to rank you for include?” Anyway, that’s to say, at Clearscope, that’s exactly the question that we are asking. We’re saying that, “Okay, obviously, creating highly consensus content is not great, but Google still wants to look for content that is added to where the topic is likely to evolve.”

Broaden your perspective on the topic and eliminate the focus on keywords and monthly search volume in SEO.

So, how can we get you visibility into where a topic is evolving so that when you produce content, you’re producing content that matches the topical evolution of what Google is expecting? That’s the key part, is that it’s not about. I could surmise that SEO and blockchain eventually connect in some very weird world where blockchains verify the authenticity or legitimacy of what was published, and SEO checks that. But that’s too far away from Google’s understanding of where SEO is at. So, it’s really then about identifying where Google is at in its understanding of the topic and then giving you insights into how to create, produce, and refresh your content so that it’s always feeding Google’s understanding of where the topic can go.

Gotcha. So, does this platform work with whatever content management system or platform you’re using? How does it integrate if you’re running a WordPress-based website, a Shopify-based website, a Wix-based website, a Squarespace-based website, or whatever?

So, we have a direct integration with WordPress in the same way that if you use Yoast, it’s like that, right? You just plug it in and check your content as you’re writing it or updating it. That works fine and dandy. We also have native integrations with writing ecosystems like Google Docs and Microsoft Word. This is primarily designed to help you during your content outlining, drafting phases, and that kind of stuff. 

On the flip side, what we’re doing is doing deep integration work with the Google Search Console, and within the Google Search Console, I think that there is a treasure trove of data that Google gives you from that treasure trove of the queries that your content is performing for all these different things, I think we can start to build topical knowledge graphs of where you’re strong and where you’re weak. We can help you understand where and what content you need to produce to fill the gaps where you have low visibility in terms of searches you’re trying to capture and where you have high visibility. I do think that there’s a lot of stuff there.

So, that’s where a lot of our current R&D is focused on how we build. A lot of it is still in technical terms, but there is no gram word vector analysis of how your website is performing in terms of query matches that you’re looking to uncover. What does that mean in terms of your topical authority or content coverage for a particular topic?

I think that if the past was all about creating high-quality, relevant content, building links, and fixing your technical SEO issues, now that we’ve entered this world of infinite content, it’s really about how do you understand how to maximize the most within the content that you’ve produced? And how do you understand how a topic is evolving in terms of the searcher intents that a user is likely to care about? And how do you then deliver the most meaningful content to match each one of these search journeys and search stages? Because the content production side of things is commoditized, it’s done right. 

But now it’s about content strategy, right? How do you deliver the topics that somebody actually cares about, and how do you write them in the way that is most likely to conclude the search journey?

More content in search results gives you more influence in helping the language model infer the best answer.

Very cool. All right, I know we’re out of time, but I wanted to also call out some of the amazing content that you write on LinkedIn and make sure our listeners who are interested can go check that stuff out. So, is that primarily where you write your thought-provoking, insightful articles on LinkedIn, or do you write somewhere else, too?

I think Twitter (X) has been kind of a weird show since the takeover, so LinkedIn appears to be where the party is. We also host webinars every other week, where we bring in awesome speakers to share their knowledge about what’s going on in SEO. You can find that by subscribing to the Clearscope newsletter. I’d say LinkedIn and the Clearscope newsletter are where you can find a lot of my recent theories or mullings about what we see happening in search.

Awesome. One last real quick question. I’m just curious: Are you a fan of online gaming and that sort of thing? I looked in your bio and history and saw League of Legends, and you had several startups or websites in that space. League of Legends, is that a passion of yours?

I would say electronic sports or esports are my passions. I think back to the day I was a big StarCraft II gamer and nerd, and even before that, it was like online Poker. So, I’ve always had this affinity towards wanting to play games at competitive levels and a deep approach appreciation for those who do. Throughout my startup journey, I have always been dabbling in esports-related things. 

Twitch metrics was a website that my business partner and I started where it scraped Twitch viewership data and graphed the performance of each game from a viewership perspective over time, you could also see the most popular streamers. We sold that to a friend of mine three or four years ago. He’s taken it and tried to, or is turning it into some sort of like business to business selling data to like McKinsey and these kinds of consulting firms that want to see data and overall, I think there is a part of me that’s like, “Oh, it’d be awesome to like own an esports team at some point, like a team liquid, a team solo made.” But I think the unit economics of doing that aren’t great. Have you dabbled in esports or league yourself?

In this era of infinite content, maximizing your produced content is key.

I own a couple of domain portfolios, including a couple of esports domains, but I haven’t done anything with them. Yeah, I don’t have time for online gaming or anything like that. I was just curious.

Yeah, I mean, these days, I don’t either. I just say I’m playing Clearscope, and I’m playing the win, and that’s the biggest game I’ve ever played.

Awesome. Well, you’ve got a great thing going, and you’re really adding value to the SEO community. I’ve been watching your posts on LinkedIn for a while, and I wanted to reach out and get you booked on the show. So, I’m finally glad to check that off the list. It was great to have you on, and thank you so much for sharing your insights.

Well, thank you so much, Stephan.

Thank you, listener. I hope you learned some things you can apply in your business and your life from this episode. So get out there and have a great week. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Focus on creating content that demonstrates topical authority and provides information gain for evolving topics.

Disintermediate and disaggregate my content into standalone pieces that match different user perspectives and search journeys.

Use tools to analyze what entities, concepts, and subtopics Google associates with the main topic currently.

Prioritize user engagement and serve the searcher’s intent to conclude their search journey quickly. Research user questions, pain points, and needs around the topic extensively.

Leverage first-hand experiences and unique perspectives in my content creation. Share authentic stories, case studies, surprising findings, and personal viewpoints.

Monitor community discussions (e.g. Reddit) to understand how topics are evolving. Pull fresh insights and angles from these leading-edge community conversations.

Analyze my website’s performance using Search Console data to identify content gaps and opportunities.

Move away from the outdated mindset of targeting individual keywords and focus on broader topics.

Refresh and update existing content regularly to maintain its relevance. Set a schedule to audit my oldest or most trafficked content pieces.

Visit clearscope.io to learn more about Bernard Huang’s services, webinars, and other resources.

About Bernard Huang

Bernard Huang is the founder of Clearscope, the leading SEO optimization software for high-quality content teams. Before Clearscope, Bernard started an SEO consulting agency, was a growth advisor in residence at 500 Startups, and led growth at a YC startup called 42Floors.