Every SEO professional has a version of the same story. You invest months optimizing for a specific ranking factor. It works. Traffic climbs. Then a core update lands, the factor is reweighted or deprecated, and the traffic you built evaporates while you scramble to figure out what changed and whether your entire strategy needs rethinking. Steven Coufal spent over a decade inside that cycle at Gartner Digital Markets before concluding that the cycle itself was the problem. In a conversation with Thibaut de Lataillade, he explained how working with SEO consultant Glenn Gabe helped shift his perspective from algorithm-chasing to user-first thinking – and why that shift is the only strategy that survives in a world where Google is no longer the only search engine that matters.
The Disenfranchised Catholic Problem
Coufal’s wife has a description for his relationship with Google that deserves to be quoted directly: he has the relationship of “a disenfranchised Catholic with God.” The devotion was once total. The disappointment accumulated. The faith remains, but it is complicated, and there is a distinct undertone of resentment.
Early in his career, Coufal tracked every algorithm change with the intensity of someone whose livelihood depended on it – because it did. When Google announced page speed as a ranking factor, you optimized for page speed. When HTTPS became a signal, you migrated to HTTPS. When mobile-first indexing arrived, you rebuilt for mobile. Each of these changes required preparation and execution, and staying ahead of them was a genuine competitive advantage.
But the accumulation of updates, the occasional contradictions between successive changes, and the growing realization that Google’s interests and his interests were not always aligned gradually eroded the faith. He watched link-building strategies that worked for years suddenly stop working – or rather, work differently, in ways that nobody could quite pin down. He watched content strategies that aligned perfectly with stated best practices underperform against competitors who seemed to be doing nothing particularly clever.
“Sometimes the ball kind of shifts in one direction and then it shifts in another and it’s easy to feel like, oh, I invested all of this in links and now links don’t matter – they matter differently.”
The professional depression that Coufal describes candidly – the years of feeling like his team was showing up to get beaten by the Harlem Globetrotters – was not caused by a lack of skill or effort. It was caused by optimizing for a platform that kept moving the goalposts and then pretending the goalposts had never been there in the first place.
What Glenn Gabe Changed
The shift came from working with Glenn Gabe , an SEO consultant whose influence on Coufal’s thinking is evident in how frequently he returns to the lesson. The insight was not technical. It was philosophical. You can track every update, chase every signal, react to every fluctuation – or you can step back and ask what all of this is ultimately trying to approximate.
Google, for all its algorithmic complexity, is trying to surface the best result for the user’s query. The specific signals it uses to determine “best” change constantly. Page speed matters until core web vitals replace it. Links matter until they matter less. E-E-A-T emerges as a framework. AI overviews reshape the SERP layout entirely. But the underlying intent – find what the user actually wants and put it in front of them – remains constant.
Gabe’s argument, as Coufal absorbed it, was that the most durable SEO strategy is the one that aligns with that intent directly rather than with the signals that approximate it. Build pages that genuinely help users. Structure content around what real people actually want to know. Make the experience fast, clear, and useful – not because Google’s algorithm rewards those things (though it does) but because users reward those things, and Google is trying to follow where users lead.
The User Research Starting Point
The practical application of this philosophy is straightforward but requires a different starting point than most SEO workflows assume. Instead of beginning with keyword research and building content backward from search volume, Coufal advocates starting with the user.
Get in front of people who are likely customers. Ask them what information they need. Ask them how they want it arranged – how much on one page versus spread across multiple pages. Ask them what questions they have that existing content does not answer. Then build the experience around those answers, and layer technical SEO best practices on top of that foundation.
This is not the same as ignoring SEO. Coufal is explicit about this. There are still technical best practices that matter – site speed, crawlability, structured data, internal linking. These are the engineering layer that makes good content findable. But they are the layer on top, not the foundation. The foundation is the user’s need, and if the content does not address that need in a way that the user finds genuinely useful, no amount of technical optimization will save it.
The evidence for this approach came when Coufal moved into a product role at Software Advice. For the first time, he had control over the full stack – content, SEO, product design, user experience. The team started with SERP analysis to establish what “good enough” looked like, then used user research to identify what “better than the competition” looked like, and built experiences that combined both. Traffic numbers turned around. Conversion numbers improved. Top-three keyword positions recovered. Revenue beat forecast.
“Don’t get lost in the sauce with every little update. Think broadly and systemically. How can I create awesome pages, awesome websites, awesome experiences for my users.”
Why This Matters More in a Fracturing Search Landscape
The argument for user-first strategy becomes stronger as the search landscape fragments. Google is no longer the only discovery channel. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini – the number of surfaces where a user might encounter your content is multiplying, and each one has different mechanics for deciding what to surface.
A strategy optimized purely for Google rankings is a strategy with a single point of failure. If Google changes its algorithm, your traffic changes. If Google adds an AI overview that answers the query directly, your click-through rate changes. If users migrate to an AI-native search tool, your entire channel strategy changes.
A strategy built around genuinely useful content and experiences, by contrast, tends to work across all of these surfaces. Google wants to surface useful content. LLMs want to cite authoritative, comprehensive sources. Users who land on your page from any channel want to find what they need quickly and clearly. The content that satisfies all three of these constituencies is the same content: stuff that is genuinely good, genuinely comprehensive, and genuinely built for the human at the other end of the query.
Coufal also connects this to channel diversification. If your content is genuinely useful, building owned channels – email lists, YouTube presence, social media communities – becomes easier because people want to come back. You are not entirely dependent on any single discovery channel, because the content itself has enough gravity to attract and retain an audience directly. The algorithm becomes one distribution channel among many, rather than the only lifeline keeping the business alive.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Steven Coufal.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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