The “CURE” for SEO

After decades of working with multiple Product, Design and Engineering teams, all the SEO recommendations I provide always seem to fall into the same 4 buckets. From those buckets, I have developed what I call the “CURE SEO Framework” as way to describe and categorize important SEO initiatives within a project. At a high level, they are:

• Crawlable – Can search engines FIND your content?
• Understandable – Can search engines figure out what is on the page and what the page is about?
• Relevance – Trust factors, and the content itself, define whether your site/page is “Relevant” to the conversation
• Experience – Is the page going to be a great experience for a user landing there?

If your efforts aren’t impacting one of the four pillars of CURE, it’s probably not an SEO-related effort.

If you can’t articulate which one it impacts, it probably isn’t a priority.

Each one of these pillars is equally important, but not necessarily equal levels of effort. For example, you could spend many more hours on Relevancy (linking, building trust factors).  I figure the best way to describe each one is to provide examples of some questions teams should be asking, and then provide some examples of the solutions. The Questions and Examples are just some of the ways project teams can think about and incorporate SEO practices into their design and development principles. There are certainly more, but I bet they fall under one of the CURE buckets. Let’s dive in! 

C – CRAWLABILITY

If a page is created in a forest but Google can’t find it, does it make a sound? (sorry, I tried) But if Google can’t find it, it isn’t going to drive much traffic.

Key Questions:

• • How is Google going to find this content?
  • Do we even want Google to find it?

Solution Examples:

• • Let’s put it in an XML sitemap
  • Let’s make sure the content can be found by just crawling the site
  • When possible, use the APIs search engines provide to tell them about the content directly (ex: job postings via the indexing API)
  • Let’s make sure we’re using the right status codes and sending the right signals when content is temporary or transient.

U – Understandable

Use every tool at your disposal to tell Google what kind of content this is and what it’s about

Key Questions:

• • Can this content benefit from Schema mark-up?
  • Do I have unique Title/Description tags?
  • Am I utilizing heading tags and other semantic tags appropriately

Solution Examples:

• • Implement Schema mark-up when appropriate.
  • Make proper use of all the HTML tags at your disposal.
  • Use internal linking and site architecture so that content can potentially be seen as being “part” of a larger concept.

R – Relevance

This is a doozy. In order to be “relevant” to the conversation your content/site needs to be trustworthy, and answer a searcher’s need for information in the best way possible. We all know developing those trust signals takes time and effort, and that’s why they’re so valuable. 

Key Questions:

• • Is your content unique?
  • Does your content answer “the question?”
  • What “trust signals” are available to boost this content’s authority/relevance?

Solution Examples:

• • Link-building…of course
  • Decide when content needs to be updated, consolidated or pruned, or when new content needs to be created.
  • Internal “editorial” links tell search engines that this content is important. (“Editorial” = in-content, as opposed to nav links)
  • Relevant, useful, descriptive heading HTML tags help define what content is on the page…which helps Google understand if the content matches up with the query.

E – Experience

Search engines want to do their best to send their users to sites and content that are going to provide great user experiences. Google has even tried to quantify this by giving us the Core Web Vitals report. So you can guess where this is headed…

Key Questions:

• • Is the site/page fast?
  • Does content on the page move around as other elements are loaded around it (layout shift)?
  • Is there obtrusive CTAs and advertising?

Solution Examples:

• • Always adhere to Core Web Vitals to judge speed and layout shift. Use the tools Google has given us.
  • It’s OK to think about the User more than the Search Engines sometimes!
  • 9/10 times what’s good for the user is going to be good for Google.
  • Don’t build content like recipe pages where a user has to wade through your entire life story just to get to the information they want/need. 

So that’s a hopefully easy way to for teams to remember some core principles of SEO. I feel like if you’re doing positive things in any of these four categories, you’re at least headed in the right direction. Like I said, there are many more examples that can fit under each bucket. Maybe in a future series we can look deeper at each one. Until then…enjoy!