People-First SEO: Getting More Visibility on Google Search Through Less Focus on SEO Tactics and More on Your Users

By Ethan Lazuk

“Create content for your users, not search engines.”

I bet you’ve heard that before, and I imagine it can seem like frustrating and opaque advice, especially if you’ve lost visibility after a recent Google ranking system update.

When I first wrote this blog post about “people-first SEO” last year, this was my original introductory sentence:

“I’m convinced that one of the best ways to have SEO success in 2024 and beyond is to not think about SEO.”

I didn’t mean stop doing SEO — far from it — but rather make your SEO decisions subservient to satisfying your users’ interests.

In other words, optimize for users, not search engines.

That was my opinion after the third helpful content update last September.

And now that we’ve seen the direction of Google’s March 2024 core update (still in progress) and spam update, I still have the same opinion.

It’s not just the impression I’ve gotten from seeing sites that lost visibility after Google’s latest ranking system updates.

It’s also based on the language from Google’s representatives.

Google Search’s history of telling SEOs to optimize for people and not search engines goes back to 2002, more than two decades ago.

Here’s a brief video summary covering it from Panda (2011) till the third HCU (2023):

However, we’ve continued to get more evidence that Google’s people-first claims are being put into action by its machine learning-driven ranking systems.

Consequently, Google’s people-first statements seem to be getting louder and more direct and emphatic.

Here’s a headline from a recent Search Engine Roundtable article on this topic:

As I pointed out in a longer version of that video above, SEO is still the guiding principle in a people-first era, only we’re also putting our user’s needs at the forefront of every tactical decision.

In other words, use SEO to your users’ benefit, but don’t overthink it.

A real changing point in my thinking about this topic was in the summer of 2023 during a podcast episode where Danny Sullivan joined John Mueller and Martin Splitt.

This particular episode of Google’s Search Off the Record was about ranking updates, and it aired the same day a core update began rolling out in August 2023.

I’ve written about this podcast episode on articles regarding E-E-A-T, ranking systems, unique content, SERP volatility, and helpful content.

But the big takeaway is simply to not think about SEO as individual factors but rather a collective user experience.

That podcast episode was replete with “optimize for users” motifs, and advice like “put yourself in the user’s shoes.”

I know that some people find that language frustrating, which is why in this refreshed article, I’ll explain what I think Google means when they tell us to focus on users and not search engines.

But I also need to clarify something.

Not every website owner cares about their users, in reality.

Some follow monetization models built on maximizing organic search visibility for its own sake.

That’s not who we’re talking about here.

This guidance is for websites that exist to achieve a business goal contingent on long-term user satisfaction — promote a service, sell a product, earn brand awareness, etc.

It’s for those websites who have an incentive to please their users that I’ll now be explaining what it looks like to optimize for people instead of search engines.

Or what I call “people-first SEO.”

Examples of people-first SEO (and why that heading?)

The best way to understand people-first SEO is to see examples.

But first, as its own example, let’s talk about why this section is called “examples” and not “what is people-first SEO.”

In that last sentence above, I explained what people-first SEO is, so I chose to call this section “examples.” No need to repeat information with a “what is” section.

If we’re thinking about users first, we wouldn’t be thinking, “Google like’s question headings, so let’s have one.”

Then again, we know Google can use chunking or candidate passages for SGE synopsis or featured snippets, and it might be helpful for people to have a detailed definition to find there as well as on the page.

That’s an example of user-first SEO considerations when building an outline for a blog post and creating its sections.

Now just pretend like we didn’t have this discussion. 😉

But first, here’s a full definition:

People-first SEO means fixing technical issues and creating helpful content that impacts your users, either their experience on the site or their ability to find it in search results and achieve their goals. It’s a modern SEO approach that focuses on meeting user expectations first and naturally aligns with how Google Search’s ranking systems evaluate websites and content secondly. That’s why people-first SEO can achieve better organic search visibility than traditional approaches that try to manipulate search rankings.

Let’s keep in mind that users depend on SEO in a lot of ways.

Here are some examples:

• Core web vitals aren’t there for you to hit a green score or get a rankings boost, for example. They’re there to tell you when your site’s performance is bad, so you can fix it for the benefit of users.
• HTTPS isn’t in place because search engines require it now (de facto), but because it keeps users safer, which in turn builds trust.
• Author bylines and bio pages shouldn’t exist based on an E-E-A-T focus, but because when reading about critical information, like how to survive a snake bite, users want to know if the information they’re reading is from a trusted source.
• Speaking of which, a good Page Experience isn’t something to achieve from treating Google’s guidelines like a checklist, but because when someone needs a quick answer, like maybe they’re snake bitten and on a mobile phone in the hills, they don’t have time to load and clickthrough intrusive ads or scroll past sections of text on the history of snake bites.

Here’s a true story: I once optimized a blog post about, “How many times per day should you brush your teeth,” where the article started out, “We’ll tell you how many times to brush your teeth, but first, let’s talk about the history of teeth brushing.”

Dead serious.

And just to keep it real, that history was interesting! It was very detailed, well researched, and high quality content from an expert.

The problem is no user cared, at least in that context. They just wanted the number of times to brush, and maybe a 1-2 sentence explanation.

Helpful “people-first” content isn’t good SEO content if it’s not what those people searching want or need to read in the moment to satisfy their intent.

If I’m shopping for hiking boots, for example, what’s more helpful:

• Your story of how you hiked 12 miles in them, an explanation of the type of rubber soles they use, with a backstory on the brand.
• A score out of 5, a reason why I should trust that score from you, then a button to purchase them.
• A collective score out of 5 from anonymous yet verified purchasers.
• 20 comments where three talk about the quality of the boots while 17 discuss jokes about how they’re ugly or attractive.

In truth, it depends.

Personally, I’d rather have the users’ score, then yours with the price, then the story, and then the comments.

The trick is finding out what your audience wants, their order of preferences, and then giving them the most of it that you can.

By focusing on optimizations users care about, and not doing SEO for its own sake, we engage in user-centric SEO practices that can succeed for achieving sustainable visibility with Google Search today, not to mention other organic surfaces, like Google Discover, generative AI responses (ChatGPT or Gemini), or RAG summaries (SGE, Perplexity, Copilot with Bing).

Why should you listen to me on this topic?

I didn’t become an SEO to battle competitors for SERP real estate or try and game Google’s ranking systems.

I started out as a content specialist around 9 years ago who wanted to create entertaining words to solve real people’s problems.

Before I was a content specialist, I studied social sciences, largely to understand individual cultures and the universal human hierarchy of needs.

There are people who see optimizations and their benefits through lenses of data and revenue alone. I’ve worked with them.

I’m not one of those people, though.

For me, it’s about the bigger human picture.

If you search on Google for “creating helpful, reliable, and people-first content,” you’ll probably see my other article:

It’s a topic I’ve studied in depth, but also practiced for myself and clients.

If you searched on Google for “people first SEO” or “user first SEO” (before I updated this!), you might have seen the earlier version of this article, particularly in SGE snapshots (now AI Overviews):

Are those difficult queries to rank for? Probably not, comparatively.

But my point is different.

I have first-party data in my GSC on how often these topics get searched for.

And it ain’t that often.

Until we change the paradigm of what we think SEO exists to do …

We’ll continue to have Google Search updates where sites that optimize for SEO first — however much, and whether they know it or not — will be impacted.

Why Google is at the center of this topic

The origins of “people-first SEO” stem from Google’s terminology around creating successful content, referring to Google Search Central’s “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” documentation.

As mentioned above, I’ve created an accompanying guide on what helpful, people-first content means for SEO. I define “helpful, reliable, and people-first content” as Google’s terminology for content that comes from a place of demonstrable expertise or experience and satisfies a particular audience’s search intent better than what’s currently available on Search. Thus it has long-term SEO value.

The idea of people-first SEO — which we could also call “user-centric SEO” or “customer-focused SEO” — thus comes directly from Google’s “people-first content” terminology.

Google Search doesn’t just reference “people” in the context of creating content, though.

The word “people” is central in many different aspects of Search:

• People also ask
• People also search for
• People also view
• People in this page

Back in my pre-SEO days of working in the non-profit sector, I also recall a concept of person-first language. “People” is an inclusive phrasing, and it can also be a philosophical underpinning for how we approach SEO today.

SEO is also bigger than just Google Search, of course. (In a mini ecommerce case study, for example, I found sales per session of organic traffic from other search engines were more lucrative.)

That said, thanks to its rolling reviews system, hidden gems improvements to its core ranking systems (which now include the old helpful content system), and other aspects of how its ranking systems work overall, Google Search offers the best opportunity for the people-first SEO approach described here.

It’s also not a bad thing to focus on Google Search for SEO purposes, considering it makes up nearly 92% of the worldwide search engine market share, according to StatCounter data from February 2024:

But content isn’t the only place where people-first SEO matters.

User-centric tactics can apply to technical SEO, like ensuring your page is crawlable and indexable or enriched with structured data.

They can apply to local SEO, like Google Business Profile optimization, review generation, or listings management.

And they can apply to off-page SEO, including passive link building for brand awareness, referral traffic, and external authority signals.

Let’s explore these areas in more detail with real-world examples.

People-first technical SEO

People-first technical SEO means you’re not making your website technically sound for Google’s crawlers or ranking systems, but for your users to use the site and benefit from those systems accessing it correctly.

If you’re adding hreflang elements, for example, it’s not just so that Google will show the correct language or country version of your content to the most relevant audience; it’s so that your most relevant audience can find the most localized version of your content on Google Search.

Ok, that sounds a bit chicken and egg.

But here are some better examples:

If you run a technical site crawl with Screaming Frog or the audit tools in Semrush or Ahrefs, you’ll be presented with errors, warnings, and opportunities.

In Semrush or Ahrefs, you’ll even be given a health score for your website.

Does hitting a 100% health score matter to your users?

Likely not, because achieving that perfect score in a tool probably means you’re fixing technical audit findings that don’t impact actual website users.

For example, here’s an error Semrush pointed out on my website for duplicate content a few months back:

It refers to category pages on my blog, which aren’t in fact duplicates, as each page links to different articles.

So to fix that duplicate content error would be to take an action no user cares about.

Here’s another warning I got for low text-to-HTML ratio:

The text-to-HTML ratio has no impact on a user.

While improving page load speed is never a bad thing, it should be prioritized for the user’s benefit, not to fix a low text-to-HTML ratio warning — John Mueller has also said such a warning “makes absolutely no sense at all for SEO.”

As mentioned earlier, the same can be said of Core Web Vitals.

Do you want all green scores across CLS, LCP, and INP because you want a “rankings boost” from Google, or are you trying to ensure your website is fast and high-performing across all screen types so your users can enjoy it no matter where they are or which device they’re on?

People-first technical SEO isn’t about scores in tools but rather fixing technical issues that impact your users’ experience or ability to find the site in search results.

As another example, Screaming Frog flagged 70 of my website’s page titles for being over 60 characters:

It calls this an opportunity, rather than an error or warning.

That makes sense, because Google rewrites title links frequently.

It also has no official character limit for title tags, and longer titles can still show in Search (some mobile title links are 3+ lines) and even help users find your page easier by indicating its relevance for related keywords or entities.

Following the guidelines of people-first SEO, we wouldn’t optimize title tags for an arbitrary character limit or even just to improve CTR.

However, we would optimize titles to help users more easily find the page in search results — or elsewhere such titles are displayed, like in social media platforms — and recognize the page is relevant for their search intent.

The scenarios go on and on.

Google won’t crawl your XML sitemap?

Your structured data doesn’t verify?

When those issues impact the visibility of your site on Search, and thus your users’ ability to find it or get the full context of its contents, they fall under people-first SEO.

Even when it comes to site architecture considerations, including URL structures, organizing similar types of content into the same file path, or using human-readable URL slugs, not to mention having crawlable links in menus or breadcrumbs on pages, those impact your user’s ability to understand the site (just like for crawlers) or ensure it’s accessible on search.

Adding noindex tags to filtered pages with parameters or internal search results pages, or canonicalizing duplicate content, those types of technical SEO measures also benefit users by ensuring they can find the most relevant versions of content in search results while also preventing unhelpful or thin content.

Fundamentally, people-first technical SEO means optimizing for users’ needs, not metrics in audit tool or Lighthouse scores.

Arguably, doing technical SEO is inherently people-first then, because it helps all site users by extension.

However, not all technical fixes impact users, and the ones that do don’t necessarily impact search results. In that sense, people-first technical SEO can also mean going above and beyond SEO considerations.

Website accessibility is a good example of this.

I personally think the SEO value of alt text is underrated. We know from John Mueller’s words about alt text in an SEO sense that it’s primarily beneficial for Google Image Search but can also contribute to a page’s overall context.

To that latter point, I’ve seen examples where alt text was used in SERP presentations, like for title link or snippet text.

Images are also prominent throughout the user journey on Search, appearing in normal search results, SGE answers, as well as Discover and SGE while browsing.

More fundamentally, alt text gives context to images for people who use screen readers. Therefore, images should all have descriptive alt text because it’s the right thing to do to create the best experience for all people who use your site.

People-first local SEO

Certain factors influence a Google Business Profile’s visibility in Google’s local pack (map pack), such as the business name, primary category, or reviews. Recently, we even learned open hours can matter.

But are you choosing a category because it’ll improve your local rankings or to most accurately reflect your business to your customers?

Are you encouraging past customers to leave reviews rich in semantically related keywords with images or videos and then replying to those reviews because you want to achieve better rankings and justifications in local packs, or do you want the reviews to showcase your services to educate and convert future customers?

As for your website, if you have a local service-based business and your main page content mentions the city where you’re located, are you creating additional location pages for “(service) in (nearby city)” keywords to rank for more markets, or are you trying to help more customers find your brand, services, and contact information?

If you’re concerned with doing local SEO for the sake of your customers, then you’re doing people-first SEO.

People-first off-page SEO

There are two main ways to build a website’s backlink profile. One is by creating and distributing content that passively earns links. The other is by actively trying to get links, such as through a skyscraper technique, guest posting, or reciprocal exchanges.

Before we begin this conversation, let me say that I don’t offer active link building as a consultant. Even when I was agency side, I found it was often a drain on resources. Google also has pretty clear spam guidelines against most link building techniques.

However, let’s say you’re doing white-hat link building that falls within Google’s guidelines, such as a digital PR campaign or creating linkable assets, the next question becomes why?

Are you pursuing backlinks to build up your website’s “domain authority” score (which should never be an SEO KPI) and pass PageRank from other sites to yours for ranking purposes?

Or are you trying to build brand awareness and earn referral traffic from sites that serve audiences similar to yours?

I said in a job interview once how I didn’t think backlinks that didn’t earn referral traffic were worthwhile. The person interviewing me, who was a link builder, never called me back …

But in real terms, does a backlink that never gets clicked by your target audience have value?

Not when we’re talking about people-first SEO.

People-first on-page SEO and content

When it comes to SEO content strategies, we want to choose topics that are along the audience’s buyer’s journey.

There are plenty of keywords most businesses can target that would likely earn web traffic, but would those be qualified clicks from their target audience?

That’s also why broadening your sources of content ideation and criteria beyond keyword research goes more fully into the realm of people-first content.

If you’re creating content for topics that won’t result in qualified clicks, conversions, and revenue simply to inflate the number of keywords ranking or organic traffic for a site, that’s an SEO-first mentality.

Meanwhile, when it comes to how a page of content is constructed, consider the page experience for the user, particularly making the main content easy for them to find.

If you’re adding fluffy content sections or superfluous headings based on word counts or related long-tail keywords or entities, just to inflate the relevance of your content, those are search engine-first tactics, as well.

Meanwhile, if you’re adding internal links that no user will likely click on — think about the reasonable surfer concept — just to pass PageRank or “build topic clusters,” if you’re incorporating keywords into link anchor text just to influence the rankings of destination pages, and especially if you’re adding nofollow to links to try to sculpt PageRank (a super dated concept anyway), then you’re doing the opposite of people-first SEO.

To practice on-page people-first SEO would be to put internal links in places where it makes sense for a user to find related content, use descriptive words in anchor text and keep them relatively consistent for the sake of letting your users know what the destination page is about, and pass PageRank to external links, if you endorse them as trusted sources, because those are steps that make sense for your users.

Adding a nofollow to links for website you don’t endorse or qualifying any incentivized outbound links as sponsored or UGC is also a user-first SEO practice that shows transparency and prevents websites from achieving unmerited visibility in Search.

How to measure the success of people-first SEO efforts

Whether you’re optimizing a site’s technical SEO or local presence, building its backlink profile, or optimizing content, if you’re focusing on users over search engines, you’re doing people-first SEO.

Here’s an easy test — every time you ask yourself, “Is this good for SEO?” just instead consider, “Is this is good for my users?”

If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track. 😉

The question is, how to measure the impact of these efforts.

One way to gauge visibility improvements for content in Google Search is by measuring rankings for queries in Google Search Console, specifically looking at the average position and clicks of relevant queries to valuable pages in the performance report.

However, today’s organic search landscape presents so many opportunities for visibility beyond keyword rankings, that it becomes more worthwhile to focus on cumulative organic visibility for brands and assisted conversions throughout buyer’s journeys, and to educate clients or stakeholders on those realities.

For example, we have SERP features, like People also ask, Google Explore (on mobile), or knowledge panels powered by Google’s knowledge graph or shopping graph.

We have query refinements and other in-SERP features or carousels, like Perspectives and Discussions and forums, Images, or other forms of social media.

We also have surfaces outside of Search, like Google Discover and People also view (in AI tools while browsing).

There’s also AI Overviews in normal search results, which soon may change our lingo from SERPs to CHERPs (chat engine results pages).

We also don’t yet have click data for generative AI features in Search. (Bing Webmaster tools has the most data yet conflates web and chat clicks together, with no keyword or page data available for chats.)

More accurate for business goals than total organic traffic is to quantify SEO progress in terms of “qualified clicks” (a term that came from Bing’s Fabrice Canel regarding AI chat results).

Keyword rankings are becoming an obsolete SEO KPI because they shows an incomplete picture of a dynamic (and increasingly volatile) organic search landscape.

Instead, we should focus on the cumulative organic visibility of content across the Search landscape. Though it’s harder to measure, the concept of visibility more accurately encompasses what impressions and traffic from Google Search look like today.

We can’t report on the performance of a blog article, for example, without describing its impressions and clicks from Google Discover, Google Explore, or People also view.

We can’t say if a product page is ranking well without considering its visibility in product knowledge panels, organic shopping listing grids, or Google SGE (AI Overview) answers and follow-ups for transactional-intent queries.

And speaking of AI Overviews, its generative AI answers may be eligible on 84% of all queries, and that’s not yet mentioning brand mentions or even web links from other Gemini-powered products, though it does seem that AI summaries may be showing less lately.

We’d also be remiss not to consider web result citations appearing in generative AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro GPT-4 model that browses with Bing, or even brand mentions from historical training data in other LLM experiences, like Anthropic’s Claude AI, or web results in RAG models like Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity AI.

One thing is clear, the more user questions get answered in the context of AI, the more information that provides to site owners about how to serve their users. Therein lies the future SEO opportunity, not by focusing on rankings and clicks of yesteryear.

People-first SEO in action, an example while putting my money where my mouth is

[Aside: The example below is from the original version of this article. I plan to add an updated one after the March core update concludes.]

By definition, people-first SEO involves taking a user-centric approach to strategic website decisions.

When it comes to SEO content, the goal is to create something that satisfies a particular audience’s search intent better than what’s available on Search today.

Even if that means outdoing yourself.

Traditional SEO logic says this page should have a target keyword, representing the search intent of its intended audience.

That target keyword is what we’d want this article to rank for, and its success would largely be measured against that KPI.

In this case, that keyword could be [people first seo].

Here we see my article on helpful, people-first content is ranking number one on Google Search with a featured snippet for that [people first seo] query:

That article is also the first citation in the SGE answer (now AI Overviews), as well as represented in the carousel of sources on the right side:

Then, if we look at the section of text highlighted from that featured snippet, we can see it’s a definition of helpful, reliable, people-first content that’s just above another section describing it as “people-first SEO”:

Even more interesting, the candidate passage (or chunk of text) that Google SGE chose for its answer is partly the same section, only including that next reference to people-first SEO:

So yes, creating helpful, reliable, people-first content is the process of creating SEO content using a people-first approach.

But people-first SEO is broader than just content, and that’s what I wanted to explain in detail in this new article.

Traditional SEO logic, as I’ll call it here, might also suggest that you don’t want to create multiple pieces of content targeting the same search query.

Why? Because that could result in keyword cannibalization.

After all, if you have content that already ranks well for a query, why create another content asset targeting that same query?

I think that argument has some sense to it — but only if you’re a brand working with limited resources.

If that’s your case, you may want to deploy SEO resources toward creating different varieties of content to satisfy your audience’s other search intents, as a way to grow your reach and brand awareness along their user journey.

Lucky for me, this is my personal website, and I’ve got all the time and resources in the world to add to it. 😉

But that’s not the full story of why I don’t care about keyword cannibalization.

As I see it, if two pieces of content offer unique value to the user, however slight, and merging those content pieces wouldn’t make sense, then they can’t cannibalize each other, even if they technically target (or rank for) the same main query.

As mentioned, I believe keyword rankings are becoming archaic, and what matters is cumulative organic search visibility along your audience’s user journey. To accomplish that, sometimes you need content topics that overlap in the search results they’re eligible to appear in.

Allow me to go into more detail with a specific example …

Here’s my rationale for creating a second article that targets a query I already rank number one for

First, I believe I can satisfy the particular audience’s search intent implied by that [people first seo] query even better by creating a new article.

While I’m highly proud of my other article for currently having that featured snippet, that article is actually a deep dive into creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.

While the article describes that process as “people-first SEO,” the majority of the article focuses on Google’s definition of helpful content and how SEOs can create it to be successful in 2024 and beyond.

In this new article, I want to talk about people-first SEO specifically by presenting a broader approach and philosophy to user-centric optimizations for organic search visibility.

I believe the information I’ve incorporated in this article is a better resource for someone who wants to learn about people-first SEO (or user-centric SEO) than what’s currently ranking on Search, even if what’s currently ranking is my other article. 🙂

Second, we have that word again – “ranking.”

Remember how I was talking about visibility being more relevant today than rankings? Well, even if my previous article continues to “outrank” this new one for the query [people-first seo], this new article can still surface before my intended audience throughout their user journey on Search in other ways.

For example, this new article could appear in Google Discover, People also ask, or People also view tied to a related web result. Also, who’s to say SGE wouldn’t show one article as a citation in a main response or follow-up while Search shows another, or maybe it includes them both?

That also eliminates any objections over keyword cannibalization, because it’s not wasteful to have either article ranking for the query [people first seo] if both articles can still achieve Search visibility with my intended audience in other ways, and each article serves a specific purpose — i.e., offers original information and unique value.

Looks like it worked, so far

As we see, soon after publishing an updated version of this new article, it started appearing in Google SGE for [people first seo]:

It also ranks number one in traditional Google Search results for that query now, holding the featured snippet instead of the previous article:

It’s interesting to see the similarities between the SGE summary and the featured snippet, as both texts focus on people-first SEO as being a user-first or user-centric approach.

The SGE answer actually referenced the article twice, and both times highlighted this candidate passage from just above the video about Google’s people-first guidance history:

Meanwhile, the featured snippet linked to this section of the text, combining two paragraphs into one passage:

As mentioned, if Google Search can pull different candidate passages for its SGE answer and featured snippet, maybe it can pull separate articles?

Looks like that hypothesis is confirmed as well, in two different ways.

First, in addition to this new article holding the featured snippet for [people first seo], we also see my helpful, people-first content guide ranking lower down for that query around position 5 in the normal search results (this was using a different browser without Google Labs):

So there we see that both articles are ranking on page one of Google for the same query. That eliminates the concern over keyword cannibalization.

But it doesn’t stop there.

We can also find both articles appearing as citations in the same Google SGE answer for the query [what is user first seo]. Here we see SGE pulling in the helpful, people-first content article for the first citation:

And just below that is this new article as a citation for the second section:

It’s interesting to note the two search intents represented in that SGE answer, which may hint as to why both articles are appearing — the first is a definition of user-first SEO (quick answer), while the second is about ways to implement the approach (more detailed answer). It’s a nuanced difference, but it speaks to how an audience’s needs may change and progress through the user journey.

It’s also an example of how two articles can cover the same topic but each offers unique value. In other words, they’re not cannibalizing each other’s keyword rankings; they’re complimenting each other to the user’s benefit.

It’s also interesting to look at the People also view results for this article in SGE while browsing, as it includes two other articles from my blog, as well as a Search Engine Land article that I shared a link to (along with a link to this article) in a social post on X.

I think these examples are so far pretty thought-provoking — they show us what it can mean to implement a people-first SEO approach, where we’re:

• Putting our audience’s search intent and satisfaction at the forefront of every SEO decision.
• Using our expertise or experience to create original content that’s better than what’s currently available on Search.
• Measuring that content’s success by its cumulative organic visibility along our audience’s buyer’s journey (and the brand trust, conversions, and revenue that result).

As opposed to (over)analyzing Google Search’s ranking systems or (over)thinking about keyword rankings, which no longer tell the whole story.

In other words, people-first SEO is about taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture — rather than optimizing for Google, we’re using SEO best practices ultimately to help people. 😉

Compelling, high-quality content that solves a particular audience’s search intent not only can rank for relevant queries in Google’s search results, but it can also surface organically along different touchpoints on your audience’s buyer’s journey, such as in Discover or People also view.

The cumulative impacts of that organic visibility can lead to greater brand awareness and qualified clicks, while the content itself can increase trust in your brand and lead to conversions (and revenue) either directly or down the line in sessions from organic search or other channels.

Other perspectives

I gather weekly SEO insights in my Hamsterdam recaps. Here are tweets or other content shared by members of the SEO or search community that speak to user-first principles. (I’ll add to this over time.)

What does it mean to be a user-focused SEO? It means doing things that benefit customers even if it doesn't have an impact on SEO.

Why should we focus on users? Because your website may pass the Google test and rank well, but will it pass the customer test and earn their trust?

— Christina LeVasseur (Brodzky) (@cbrodzky) September 6, 2023

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed the updated version of this article about user-first SEO. I have more updates planned, so stay tuned!

Until then, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂