This book by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie Stricchiola was another one that kept popping up whenever I searched for “best SEO book,” especially when I searched on Amazon.
I tend to buy most of my SEO books, but since this one cost $60, I decided to see if I could get it from my library so I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money, only to find out it wasn’t work the paper it was printed on.
The bad news is I had to wait the better part of a year to finally get this book from the library. The other bad part was the fact that this book is 700 pages long, so there was no way I could read the whole thing in three weeks, at which point it was due back at the library.
The good part is that, one of the reasons it took so long for the library to get me this book is that they wanted to make sure I had the most updated version. This book talks about updates to the world of “generative” AI as recently as March of 2023, and they talk about “X formerly known as Twitter.” Those are some pretty significant and recent updates, and I was very impressed that they managed to get them into a 700-page tome.
The other good thing about getting this from the library was that it gave me the chance to see that this book is absolutely worth every penny. I ended up returning the book to the library and buying my own copy because I am sure I will be referring to it over and over and over again.
If you work in SEO, you absolutely must have a copy of this book.
If you’re curious about SEO, but it’s not part of your job description, this book can be overwhelming. I’ll be going over my highlights from the book in this review, at which point you can decide if it’s worth your time, energy, and money to get yourself a copy.
Table of Contents
- Generative AI’s Impact on SEO
- Was Google Running Late or Lying in Wait?
- How You Should Use Generative AI
- Content Reigns Supreme
- Using SEO to Achieve Your Business Goals
- Measuring Your Data
- Everything Else
- Backlinks
Generative AI’s Impact on SEO
Not only does this book include an entire chapter on “generative” AI, but it was so up to date it mentioned Google’s Bard, which was just launched in March of this year.
One of my big concerns with tools like ChatGPT and Bard is the fact that they have a tendency to provide wrong information or just make things up. I’m not against using these tools, but only if you do so strategically. Too many people have it generate some content for them and then they put it up on their website or their social media profiles without even bothering to see if it’s accurate.
The same goes for using it as a search engine. Obviously search engines can give you wrong information, but at least when Google gives you a result from a website, you can check the source. ChatGPT gives you no opportunity to check the source, and if people are relying on it for information, it can (and has) led to a greater proliferation of misinformation than we’ve seen yet, and that’s really saying something in the age of social media.
Part of what I love about this book is, not just that the authors validated my concerns about “generative” AI, but that they did so with science. They tested the content these tools “generated” for them over and over again, and found that it gave them misinformation about 50% of the time.
That’s a lot of times to give a wrong answer! If you gave wrong answers to half the questions on any test you were given in school, you failed that test.
Was Google Running Late or Lying in Wait?
One of my favorite lines from the musical, Hamilton, is in Aaron Burr’s aria, Wait For It, when he says, “I’m not standing still, I am lying in wait.”
Because ChatGPT came out months before Bard, a lot of people assume Google was falling behind the competition and scrambling to catch up, but the authors of this book have a different hypothesis.
Their theory is that Google was intentionally holding back because it saw some of the dangers of jumping into AI without fully realizing all the potential consequences this new technology could bring.
This book was published before Sam Altman was fired (and then rehired) as OpenAI’s CEO, but it’s interesting that he was fired because members of the board were concerned he was too focused on scaling and not spending enough time or energy on managing the risks of AI.
How You Should Use Generative AI
Like me, the authors of this book advocate using tools like ChatGPT for analyzing and organizing information, not necessarily using it for content creation — at least not without a human checking its work.
Even when letting it play around with data, you should still check its work. For example, they let ChatGPT organize a list of keywords by search intent: informational, navigational, or commercial. A few keywords ended up in the wrong group, but on the whole the tool was able to organize a list of words and phrases much faster than a human could, which is undoubtedly pretty cool.
Just don’t forget to check its work.
Also keep in mind that some keywords might have multiple search intents. That’s the kind of thing robots aren’t great at understanding, so keep that in mind when checking the lists it gives you. You might want to keep a search term in the section where ChatGPT categorized it, but also add it to a different category.
Content Reigns Supreme
Yes, there are times when this book gets pretty technical. It covers things like the different coding languages you can use to develop and update your website (apparently Google doesn’t play very nice with JavaScript, although there are some reasons you might choose to use it anyway.)
It also covers things like creating a sitemap of your website to be uploaded via Google’s Search Console so Google can see all the pages on your website, and which metatags to use on which types of files, etc.
While those things do matter, they stress multiple times that relevant content is still at the heart of SEO.
I emphasize “relevant” because the content on your website has to be relevant to the services you provide. There’s a reason I almost never dedicate an entire blog post to social media marketing: because I don’t provide that service. People who come to my blog looking for help with their social media marketing will be disappointed if they read a great article on it, only to find that I can’t help them with that. The one blog post I did devote to social media focused on the interplay between social media and SEO.
The same goes for Google. If they find content on your website that is all over the place, it’s going to wonder if you really know anything about any of those topics.
But if you have dozens of articles covering different aspects of a topic, you’re in a much better position to convince Google (and readers) that you really are an expert in your industry.
Google’s own John Mueller has said much the same thing. Yes, the technical aspects matter, but not as much as relevant content.
It’s no wonder the longest chapter in this book focused on content. Not including the chapter on generative AI.
Using SEO to Achieve Your Business Goals
Making sure your content is relevant is not just good SEO, it’s also good business. After all, the only reason to improve your SEO is to drive more high-quality leads for your business.
Some people get so focused on improving their rankings, they forget about the fact that it’s not the end goal, just the means to an end.
More than making sure your SEO strategy improves your rankings is a great start, but it is just the start. You also need to make sure your SEO strategy aligns with the goals you have for your business. If you don’t, what’s the point?
I was happy to see the authors of this book stress that fact as well. So, before you start thinking about optimizing your website for search engines, make sure you have a clear vision of your end goal first.
Measuring Your Data
I was surprised this book didn’t focus more on how to measure and analyze your website data so you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
It had just one, brief chapter towards the end covering your options, such as Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, but it didn’t dive deep into how you can use these tools to determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaign and how it can be improved.
Tracking and analyzing your metrics is such an integral part of SEO, I would have expected it to get much more attention in this book. Especially since the authors took the time at the very end to point out that the only way to get better at SEO is to stay on top of recent developments and do the work of SEO. See what works and what doesn’t, rinse and repeat.
How can you do that effectively if you don’t know how to track and manage your metrics?
Everything Else
Surprisingly, this book spent more time on things like social media, videos, and public relations than it did on metrics.
That’s not to say the book spent a lot of time on these topics, but it did cover each of them in what I would call moderate depth. Not a ton of information, but enough for you to use to create an action plan for promoting your content on social media, connecting with influencers in your industry and adjacent industries, and getting those clicks.
Videos
When it comes to videos, it talked about the fact that there’s more to videos than YouTube, but that if you do want to use YouTube to host your videos, you can embed them on your website. It provides tips and tricks for doing so, including uploading the video straight to Google if you so desire. Not sure why you would do that, since publishing it on YouTube is basically the same as uploading it onto Google, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find there’s a reason for doing so.
It also talked about the importance of captions and the different ways you can include captions on your video. I loved it, because I’m all for accessibility, and while I had seen YouTube videos with captions, I had never thought to investigate how to get them for my own videos.
Turns out, not only can you upload a transcript, but you can do so in a way that breaks up the video into sections. That way, if someone is looking for something specific, Google can show them the section of the video that answers their question instead of showing them the whole video.
Again, this is something I’ve taken advantage of as a user, but had never even thought to consider how to do it for myself. Looks like I have some playing around to do over the holidays!
Images
As for images, I was also surprised that the book encouraged using backlinks in your image’s alt text and caption to make it more searchable.
As I understand it, Google said a while ago that the alt text for images helps the images get found in Google Image Search, but they do nothing for the overall rankings of your website. I guess even the professionals can’t keep up with all the SEO updates.
Backlinks
Last year I read a whole book on backlinks, and I recently led an entire webinar on the importance of backlinks, as well as how to get more high-quality backlinks to your website.
Then I found out Google recently announced backlinks are not one of the top three ranking factors.
This book still puts backlinks right after content, which makes me wonder if they didn’t research that as fully as they could have, or if they don’t believe Google’s announcement. There are certainly reasons to take what Google says with a grain of salt, but I’m also skeptical that the authors of this book may have gotten this one wrong.
This book may not have covered everything I wanted to know about SEO, but it came pretty close. It certainly covered way more in 700 pages than I could possibly discuss in one blog post, so if I’ve done anything to pique your interest in this book, I highly recommend you buy yourself a copy.
If you’re not interested in reading 700 pages on SEO, but you do want to improve your online visibility, we can help with that.
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