The days of cheating the system are waning, and that’s a good thing. No more marketing cheats.

Google Search has gotten better at weeding out garbage, and therefore more high-quality content is rising to the top. The algorithm is always improving, but lately the jumps have been dramatic. In April Google search had a major core update. Google wants to reward website content that’s valuable to your audience. I think that this might mean that, for example, travel bloggers shouldn’t veer off topic to write about home restoration. Google says that (as always) you should watch your site’s organic traffic and keyword rankings to identify weak content.

Have you ever noticed how a peculiar amount of authors are “best-selling” on Amazon? Well, that’s because they used to be able to enter a book into TEN categories. If a book hit the top ten in an obscure category, boom…it’s a “best seller.” Amazon just announced that they’ll limit categories to three. Now their algorithm won’t favor category-fishing.

Instagram hashtags used to be THE thing. Which is why you would see a mind-numbing thirty hashtags on some posts. Reader: there’s no way that any one post is highly relevant to thirty hashtags. Which just annoys people. If you search for #sculpture and get a post about gouache, that’s going to be unhelpful and irritating. Instagram is now looking at content more and hashtags less. Also, if a word is in your caption, it doesn’t also need to be in your hashtags. No more “The best cookies in NYC! #cookies”.

YouTube is now able to index your videos on what you actually say in your video, using AI speech recognition.

Basically: we need strong content for the algorithm updates to work in our favor. Marketing and SEO tricks don’t go as far as they once did. If we want to be recommended on the various marketing platforms and search engines, we need to provide something interesting, entertaining, or useful to the viewer.

PS: Surprisingly, Google’s search engine doesn’t care if that content is from a human or AI bot. Probably because readers don’t care. We want to laugh or learn, and the author isn’t really important. I suspect we’ll see more changes in the future that continue to emphasize content over SEO tricks, but we’re not there yet…keep using meta titles and meta descriptions! And remember, if you want to rank highly for a certain topic like “business coach”, you MUST use that keyword phrase in your content. Writing about business, branding, hiring, diversity, supply chain, performance, psychology, and mentoring will not help you rank for “business coaching” unless you use the phrase “business coaching.”

So, dig deep to figure out what only you can provide to your audience. What’s your special knowledge, skill set, or gift? Get that message out there. Good luck!