Last Tuesday, I was at the first-ever Canadian edition of Google Search Central Live.

It was a full house, and I was told not all people got in, so I am very grateful that I was invited there. Hopefully they'll do more events like this in Toronto.

I could tell you that everything the Googlers shared was very new. But it's wouldn't be true.

Most of the things they were talking about are what you're already doing at your daily SEO job.

Ok, now on to the insights!

1. Technical SEO can't fix bad content

Before Google can rank a page, that page goes through different stages, including: Discovery, Crawling, Indexing. The job of a technical SEO is to make sure that a page can successfully pass all these stages.

But sometimes, even if the technical SEO side is solid, the page might not be ranking anyway. That can be a sign that the content is not good enough.

It can look great to someone who wrote it, but if compared to other pages covering the same topic, it might just not be there yet.

This ties back beautifully to the next point👇🏻

2. Create Non-Commodity Content

Aka quality and experience-based content that readers benefit from - the type we've always were supposed to create anyway.

Every day, I see people on X claiming that they "cracked the code of creating content at scale". And then, they talk about some magic prompt or Claude workflow that will build hundreds of relevant pages for your website in 2 minutes 😅

This is a great example of commodity content: recycled information that exists just for the sake of existing. Don't do it.

3. Query Groups for your keywords in Google Search Console

Query groups have been out for a few months now. So if you haven't checked them out yet, now is high time:

Query groups make it easier to quickly see what the website is about and how Google categorizes content on it.

You can click on any query group, and it will automatically direct you to a performance report with specific filters applied using custom RegEx:

You can edit the custom RegEx right here. But note that it will not be saved in the Query Group report, you can only see the updates in your current Performance view.

Some things are still unclear

One thing that many SEOs, including myself, are looking forward to is having any way to see reports on the AI performance of our content. AI overviews, Gemini, mansions, and citations.

As of now, it is unclear if it's coming to Google Search Console or not. Let's hope because the Google team has made so many great changes in Google Search Console. Maybe they will ask AI data at some point too.

Thanks for staying till the end, my friend!

In the next email, I will share with you a story of one life changed.