Stop Saying “Best Practice” And Start Bringing Proof
SEO stops sounding like black magic when you can point to the exact Google doc that backs it up.
Let’s get real. SEO advice often sounds completely made up. There, I said it!
A lot of recommendations sound ridiculous to people who do not live in search every single day. “Change this canonical.” “Don’t block that resource.” “We need this content exposed in the rendered HTML.”
This is exactly why SEO still gets labeled as black magic in many organizations.
I’ve been an advocate for “un-nerding SEO” for years, but that’s a different story. Today, we’re talking about something much more practical: using Google’s own documentation to win approval, build trust, and prioritize tasks for action.
Not because Google tells us everything. Not because every sentence should be treated as gospel. But because hard-documented resources are hard to blow off.
When you need buy-in, sometimes the best argument is not “trust me.”
It’s “Google already documented how we should approach this.”
Thank you to Scrunch for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch
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The Buy-In Problem Is Usually Not The Recommendation Itself
Most SEO recommendations do not die because they are wrong. They die because they have to compete with everything else happening inside the business.
Dev sprints, product timelines, CMS limitations, legal concerns, brand standards, executive assumptions, and the ever-popular… (close your eyes!) “we’ve always done it this way”, it all has a seat at the table. SEO is rarely the only priority in the room, even when the recommendation is technically correct.
That is why “best practice says” or “from an SEO perspective” is simply not enough to close the deal. It sounds optional, especially to teams already managing risk, deadlines, and competing requests.
But “Google has official documentation to guide us” lands differently.
It may not automatically win the argument, and it definitely does not mean the recommendation gets prioritized tomorrow. But it does change the conversation from “the SEO gal told us…” to “Suzzie provided us official Google documentation explaining why this matters.”
Google Documentation Is Not Gospel
I know what some of you are thinking.
“Nick, are we really pretending Google tells us the full truth about how search works?”
Fuck No. I mean… absolutely not.
Google’s documentation is not the complete truth of search. It has omissions. It simplifies complicated systems. Sometimes it explains how Google wants site owners to behave, not necessarily every nerdy factor that goes into organic visibility.
Google also writes documentation for a very broad audience. That means nuance gets sanded down, edge cases get skipped, and the answer is often technically true without being the entire story. (Want proof? Log in to X, and you’ll read SEOs with too much time on their hands, complaining and “calling out” Google for this)
So no, I am not suggesting we treat every Google statement as if it were carved into stone tablets and carried down from Mountain View.
But that does not make the documentation useless.
It makes it a starting point. A receipt. An official reference point.
It moves the conversation away from “Nick thinks this matters” and toward “Google has explicitly documented why this matters.” That distinction matters a lot when you’re trying to get someone else to approve (and prioritize) the work.
Documentation Is Especially Useful With Developers
This is probably where Google documentation earns its keep the fastest. SEOs need developers, and the fastest way to lose their support is to treat every recommendation as a command rather than a requirement.
but… just in case this works…
google.exe /disable-ai-overviews /please
Bummer, no dice.
Developers are not wrong just because they disagree with an SEO recommendation. Most of the time, they are optimizing for completely different (but valid) things, such as performance, code quality, technical debt, security, and let’s not forget, simply not being the person who takes the entire website down with one wrong push to production.
But sometimes they are wrong about how Google discovers, crawls, renders, indexes, or interprets content.
And telling a developer “you’re wrong” is a great way to make sure your ticket never sees the light of day.
This is where Google documentation helps. It removes subjectivity on the purpose/value. It aligns the conversation on how best to implement within your own ecosystem, rather than the recommendation being “right vs wrong”
The point is never “SEO wins and dev loses.”
The point is that you now have an external source of truth to discuss. That is a much better conversation than two teams arguing from preference.
Documentation Is Also A Client Management Tool
For client-facing SEOs, documentation helps separate serious recommendations from “trust me, bro, I have a contact at Google” consulting.
This is especially useful when a client has been burned by bad SEO advice before.
Instead of saying:
“We need to change this because it’s better for SEO.”
You can say:
“Here’s what Google documents. Here’s where your current setup conflicts with that. Here’s the risk. Here’s the recommendation. Here is the estimated reward.”
That framing builds trust because it shows the recommendation is not reliant on 100% blind faith.
It also makes the SEO look less like a magician and more like an interpreter.
That is the real role of an SEO: translating Google’s needs from a website (confirmed via documentation) into business and technical decisions.
Less Black Magic, More Receipts
SEO has a reputation problem, and some of it is earned.
Too much of our work is still explained in vague terminology with low confidence. We say things like “Google likes this” or “this needs to exist for the bots” when we should be saying, “Google documents this behavior here, and here’s how it applies to our situation.”
That does not mean documentation alone creates buy-in.
Dropping a Google link into a ticket or Slack thread is not a strategy. You still have to translate what it means, explain the risk, connect it to business outcomes, and help the team understand why the recommendation deserves attention.
Google documentation will never replace experience, testing, or judgment. It will not tell us everything, and it should not be treated like the final answer to every SEO debate.
But it can make SEO easier to defend, easier to prioritize, and much harder for divisional leaders to dismiss.
The best SEOs are not just the ones who know what to recommend. They are the ones who can prove why the recommendation deserves to be taken seriously.
Less black magic. More receipts. More results.
Google documentation may not be the whole truth, but it sure beats showing up to a buy-in conversation with “my buddy from Google told me….” Suuuure they did.
~Nick
Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch
PR Hack: The “SEO” Job Title?
Brought to you by Jolly.
We sent 11,238 journalist pitches in 6 months, landed 393 placements, and reached 1,450,000,000 monthly readers. Then we split the results by job title:
Founders drove the most total reach (598M).
CEOs came second (384M).
But what about SEOs? 22 placements averaged 12.9M monthly readers EACH.
TL;DR: The “SEO” job title pulled in roughly 4x what the average Founder or CEO placement landed.
Your credential punches way above its pay grade. Worth knowing before your next pitch, or your next salary negotiation: