First Principles Thinking for Higher Search Engine Rankings
By Clifford P
First principles thinking is really just critical thinking. I’m not the world’s best detective when it comes to TV shows, but when it comes to SEO, I really enjoy trying to figure out effective, maintainable strategies for long-term results. I don’t, however, enjoy chasing the latest fads, even though others find success that way.
You might be wondering, “Why does (or doesn’t) Google like this page?” Let’s think about it from first principles, which basically means to think for yourself instead of holding true different analogies you’ve heard used to explain something. A classic example is Elon Musk’s impressive innovation:
Google’s search results are continually being experimented with and the algorithm gets major and minor changes regularly so we like to focus on the principles more than short-term hacks.
Besides changing the algorithm, we also know that Google misleads, lies, or changes its own directions. This is why you have to do experiments and focus on what makes sense in principle to win the long-term rankings battle.
The Challenges of SEO Experimentation
Doing experiments is resource-intensive and never a 100% perfectly scientific experiment because you cannot know or control Google’s changes during your testing.
For example, if you want to experiment with all of your site’s 500 pages having more descriptive, longer titles, you could implement that and let it run for 1-6 weeks and see how it goes, then change all pages to have more compelling titles aimed to garner clicks (not quite clickbait) and let that run for the same time period.
But what if there was an algorithm update during the testing period, or maybe the seasonality or economic or political landscape affected user behavior only during a portion of the experimentation periods.
Another challenge is that you first need a site with meaningful traffic in order to attempt an experiment. If your site isn’t getting at least a thousand unique visitors during each half of the experiment, your findings might not be reliable enough for you to state them publicly and expect others to experience the same.
Consider A/B Testing Instead of SEO Experiments
A/B testing is where you change one thing and measure its impact. For example, you change the initial headline of a landing page from “Get Your Free eBook Now” (the “A” variant) to “Your eBook is Free, Today Only” (the “B” variant). You don’t also change the pictures, you don’t change the button color, etc. If you did, that would be multivariate testing, like A/B/C testing and not just A/B testing.
A/B testing allows you to get meaningful feedback with lesser traffic, but it’s only useful for measuring visitor behavior, not Google’s behavior and the changes in your site’s search engine ranking position (SERP). However, it’s still a way to run beneficial experiments in a much less resource-intensive manner and in a way that is more statistically meaningful.
Don’t Just Follow Google’s Advice
More than once, Google said a specific thing (e.g. AI-generated content) was bad (i.e. penalized in some manner) but later said it was not bad (even if not rewarded). Of course, informed adults are decently good at distinguishing quality output from poor quality content, whether or not generated by AI. The point is that Google’s customer is the searcher, not the site owner, so your content should satisfy the searcher, whether or not the content was fully AI or assisted by AI, whether short or long in length, or whether or not there’s a video.
Yes, you could follow every up and down of the algo roller coaster and see some benefits; question is if it’s worth the additional effort to continually be optimizing, which is going to be a different answer for each site and site owner. But if you focus on first principles thinking for SEO, you can maximize your efficiency while enjoying long-term effectiveness. That said, you need to have good awareness of the moving pieces (i.e. ranking factors) so you can build your internal strategy and content checklists.
One problem with simply creating content, hitting publish, and never optimizing is that you have your own individual preferences, areas of expertise, knowledge gaps, and disabilities or lack thereof. So your opinion of whether or not the write-up should be shorter or longer or include a voiceover video or not is not the preference or best way for every possible searcher that visits your page. Combine that with the fact that Google can make sense of many things but not necessarily understand them and you can see why Google rewards breadth of coverage on a topic (many pages about it, videos about it, available in multiple languages, etc.), which is called “topical authority” and goes along with Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT).
Some First Principles of Google Search
SEO tips and tricks are secondary to content creation. Make content that you would enjoy and your ideal persona(s) will probably also enjoy it.
But also think of your previous, less-informed self; add some helpers like relevant links, definitions with examples, and tools (e.g. conversion chart or calculator). After you do your best, then go through a checklist to help make your content more appealing to search engines. As Google says, create for humans first, not their algorithm.
You might write an opinion piece or heavily-researched article and feel like “finally, it’s done.” And that’s where SEO optimization can really produce huge benefits. For example, if Google rewards embedding a YouTube video, add that to your checklist and go find a relevant one to embed. It takes less than 5 minutes and, when you think about your site visitors, you realize it probably would be helpful. In fact, it might make you want to tweak the thesis of your article, which might make it more shareable, which might make it get more non-SERP traffic, which might make it get more SERP traffic.
For each ranking factor, I like to think of Google sitting on a fence and wondering if they would lean more toward my article or the alternative. If Google leans my way on 7 out of 10 of these little factors, I’ve got a very good chance to eventually rank higher than the competition, even if I don’t see the improved SERP immediately (within 1-30 days).
There may be factors not related to this single page of content that I cannot immediately control. Examples include domain authority, backlink profile, EEAT signals, or how often Google crawls my site (possibly less often than the one in first position). There are longer-term efforts that can be applied to overcome these limitations of our site.
Quotes to Inspire Thinking for Yourself
I like these quotes from the world of creativity, which I think are relevant for applying first principles thinking to the art and science of search engine optimization (SEO):
Design is the beauty of turning constraints into advantages.
Aza Raskin
One of My Favorite Tactics
In light of our limitations, here’s one of my favorite tactics because it’s straight-forward, anyone can do it, and there are tools that can help make it more efficient:
Identify your article’s target keyword (and maybe 1-3 variations)
Visit the top result (first result from the SERP)
Compare and contrast yours vs. theirs. Ask yourself what theirs has that yours doesn’t (video, TOC, CTA, headlines and formatting usage, internal and external links, etc.)
If you identified multiple keyword variations, identify what the #1 position for each have in common. If 1 out of 3 has a TOC but all 3 have a video, a video is probably higher priority to add than a TOC.
This is a somewhat scientific way to determine how to improve your article, whether it’s still just a draft or was published years ago and you’re refreshing it. It’s effective because you’re comparing against other sites in your same industry and you are looking at what is actually atop the rankings instead of following some general guidelines from Google that might be outdated or difficult to understand.
This is only an on-page optimization tactic, but it can go a long way toward tipping the Google scales in your favor for a specific keyword. It can also give you clues toward the importance of off-page optimizations like domain or topical authority, backlinks, and other signals.
On-Demand SEO Competitor Analysis Made Easy with A.I.
Here’s a ChatGPT prompt to help perform the analysis described above for an existing piece of content:
[copythis]I need you to perform a competitor analysis for SEO purposes.
My target keyword is:
My own page targeting this keyword is:
Find the top-ranking organic SERP competitor pages for my target keyword and list them for me.
Analyze each page according to SEO best practices, including but not limited to:
- Keywords in the URL
- Presence of videos and other media
- Table of Contents (TOC)
- Call to Action (CTA)
- Number or type of headlines and formatting
- Internal links
- External links
- Keyword type vs SERP result, such as informational, buyer-intent, et. al.
After analyzing these elements, identify the things they have in common that mine does not. Keep it easy to understand by only telling me the actionable recommendations and reasons why for each with a justification from your analysis, such as citing all 3 have it or "the first and third ranking competitors share this in common but the second does not". Maximum 5 recommendations in descending order of likely importance. For each recommendation, tell me an exact possible solution, such as the wording for a CTA button if one is recommended, or a suggested topic or title for a video if that's recommended, or the exact anchor text for any recommended internal or external links to add.
No yapping, no fluff, limit prose. Take your time to get the most accurate results.[/copythis]
First Principles Thinking for Higher Search Engine Rankings
First principles thinking is really just critical thinking. I’m not the world’s best detective when it comes to TV shows, but when it comes to SEO, I really enjoy trying to figure out effective, maintainable strategies for long-term results. I don’t, however, enjoy chasing the latest fads, even though others find success that way.
You might be wondering, “Why does (or doesn’t) Google like this page?” Let’s think about it from first principles, which basically means to think for yourself instead of holding true different analogies you’ve heard used to explain something. A classic example is Elon Musk’s impressive innovation:
Table of Contents
First Principles Thinking for SEO
Google’s search results are continually being experimented with and the algorithm gets major and minor changes regularly so we like to focus on the principles more than short-term hacks.
Besides changing the algorithm, we also know that Google misleads, lies, or changes its own directions. This is why you have to do experiments and focus on what makes sense in principle to win the long-term rankings battle.
The Challenges of SEO Experimentation
Doing experiments is resource-intensive and never a 100% perfectly scientific experiment because you cannot know or control Google’s changes during your testing.
For example, if you want to experiment with all of your site’s 500 pages having more descriptive, longer titles, you could implement that and let it run for 1-6 weeks and see how it goes, then change all pages to have more compelling titles aimed to garner clicks (not quite clickbait) and let that run for the same time period.
But what if there was an algorithm update during the testing period, or maybe the seasonality or economic or political landscape affected user behavior only during a portion of the experimentation periods.
Another challenge is that you first need a site with meaningful traffic in order to attempt an experiment. If your site isn’t getting at least a thousand unique visitors during each half of the experiment, your findings might not be reliable enough for you to state them publicly and expect others to experience the same.
Consider A/B Testing Instead of SEO Experiments
A/B testing is where you change one thing and measure its impact. For example, you change the initial headline of a landing page from “Get Your Free eBook Now” (the “A” variant) to “Your eBook is Free, Today Only” (the “B” variant). You don’t also change the pictures, you don’t change the button color, etc. If you did, that would be multivariate testing, like A/B/C testing and not just A/B testing.
A/B testing allows you to get meaningful feedback with lesser traffic, but it’s only useful for measuring visitor behavior, not Google’s behavior and the changes in your site’s search engine ranking position (SERP). However, it’s still a way to run beneficial experiments in a much less resource-intensive manner and in a way that is more statistically meaningful.
Don’t Just Follow Google’s Advice
More than once, Google said a specific thing (e.g. AI-generated content) was bad (i.e. penalized in some manner) but later said it was not bad (even if not rewarded). Of course, informed adults are decently good at distinguishing quality output from poor quality content, whether or not generated by AI. The point is that Google’s customer is the searcher, not the site owner, so your content should satisfy the searcher, whether or not the content was fully AI or assisted by AI, whether short or long in length, or whether or not there’s a video.
Yes, you could follow every up and down of the algo roller coaster and see some benefits; question is if it’s worth the additional effort to continually be optimizing, which is going to be a different answer for each site and site owner. But if you focus on first principles thinking for SEO, you can maximize your efficiency while enjoying long-term effectiveness. That said, you need to have good awareness of the moving pieces (i.e. ranking factors) so you can build your internal strategy and content checklists.
One problem with simply creating content, hitting publish, and never optimizing is that you have your own individual preferences, areas of expertise, knowledge gaps, and disabilities or lack thereof. So your opinion of whether or not the write-up should be shorter or longer or include a voiceover video or not is not the preference or best way for every possible searcher that visits your page. Combine that with the fact that Google can make sense of many things but not necessarily understand them and you can see why Google rewards breadth of coverage on a topic (many pages about it, videos about it, available in multiple languages, etc.), which is called “topical authority” and goes along with Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT).
Some First Principles of Google Search
SEO tips and tricks are secondary to content creation. Make content that you would enjoy and your ideal persona(s) will probably also enjoy it.
But also think of your previous, less-informed self; add some helpers like relevant links, definitions with examples, and tools (e.g. conversion chart or calculator). After you do your best, then go through a checklist to help make your content more appealing to search engines. As Google says, create for humans first, not their algorithm.
You might write an opinion piece or heavily-researched article and feel like “finally, it’s done.” And that’s where SEO optimization can really produce huge benefits. For example, if Google rewards embedding a YouTube video, add that to your checklist and go find a relevant one to embed. It takes less than 5 minutes and, when you think about your site visitors, you realize it probably would be helpful. In fact, it might make you want to tweak the thesis of your article, which might make it more shareable, which might make it get more non-SERP traffic, which might make it get more SERP traffic.
For each ranking factor, I like to think of Google sitting on a fence and wondering if they would lean more toward my article or the alternative. If Google leans my way on 7 out of 10 of these little factors, I’ve got a very good chance to eventually rank higher than the competition, even if I don’t see the improved SERP immediately (within 1-30 days).
There may be factors not related to this single page of content that I cannot immediately control. Examples include domain authority, backlink profile, EEAT signals, or how often Google crawls my site (possibly less often than the one in first position). There are longer-term efforts that can be applied to overcome these limitations of our site.
Quotes to Inspire Thinking for Yourself
I like these quotes from the world of creativity, which I think are relevant for applying first principles thinking to the art and science of search engine optimization (SEO):
One of My Favorite Tactics
In light of our limitations, here’s one of my favorite tactics because it’s straight-forward, anyone can do it, and there are tools that can help make it more efficient:
This is a somewhat scientific way to determine how to improve your article, whether it’s still just a draft or was published years ago and you’re refreshing it. It’s effective because you’re comparing against other sites in your same industry and you are looking at what is actually atop the rankings instead of following some general guidelines from Google that might be outdated or difficult to understand.
This is only an on-page optimization tactic, but it can go a long way toward tipping the Google scales in your favor for a specific keyword. It can also give you clues toward the importance of off-page optimizations like domain or topical authority, backlinks, and other signals.
On-Demand SEO Competitor Analysis Made Easy with A.I.
Here’s a ChatGPT prompt to help perform the analysis described above for an existing piece of content:
Here’s an example result from the above prompt in regards to my Best Totally Free Privacy Policy Generators article: