Helpful content & EEAT is not just for Google, it’s necessary for all channels to cut through the noise and get the attention of your vistor. The question is: how do you connect all the channels into one strategy? Chantal explains a very efficient way of creating the best content for you client in her book ‘The Content Cannon’ (Het Contentkanon).
It’s a number 1 book in the category ‘Marketing’ on the largest Dutch online management book store.
Chantal is an author, podcaster, speaker and trainer in SEO. She works as a freelance SEO and content strategist that works in the field of SEO since 2010. She worked on both agency and client side for years.
In 2022 she published her first book (Dutch only) about creating better content to rank in search engines, not content created around keywords but for your ideal customer. This was way before Google released the Helpful Content Update.
She called her approach Horizontal SEO: not ranking as high as possible but as widely as possible.
In 2025 she published her second book, “Het Contentkanon” (The Content Cannon) which ended up #1 book in ‘Marketing’ on the Dutch website managementbook.nl
Chantal was a speaker at BrightonSEO 2016, BrightonSEO 2023, the SEO Benelux Conference in 2024 and Friends of Search 2025 among speakers like Lily Ray and Rand Fishkin.
Chantal Smink is the author of Het Contentkanon (The Content Cannon), a groundbreaking book that challenges the outdated idea that content’s only purpose is SEO-driven traffic. Instead, she pleads for proactive marketing and she offers a bold framework for building expert-led, zero-click, multi-platform content strategies that actually resonate.
QPAFFCGMIM is a diagnostic model Chantal developed to help brands understand what their audience is really thinking. It stands for Questions, Problems, Anxieties, Frustrations, Fears, Concerns, Goals, Myths, Insecurities, and Misconceptions. It’s a tool to move beyond keywords and speak directly to human intent. It’s become a go-to framework for marketers looking to create content with real impact.
Chantal coined the term “apple pie content” to call out a common trap in content marketing and SEO: marketers doing online research, rewriting what’s already out there, and thinking they’ve created something unique. But just like every apple pie recipe looks the same, so does this type of content: predictable, interchangeable, and utterly forgettable. It’s a critique of faux-originality in the age of AI and SEO.
In october 2024 Aleydas Solís recommended to read my article about ‘Creating content for SEO in a zero-click world’ on both LinkedIn and her SEOFOMO newsletter.
In the SEO Benelux newsletter from week 28 van 2022 my podcast is names as a must listen podcast in the field of SEO.
