With the implementation of Google’s helpful content update in August, 2022, the search giant is once again demonstrating its commitment towards improving the user experience and providing valuable, accurate information to users.
Let’s dive into the details!
What is Google’s helpful content update?
The helpful content update is designed to prioritize content that is deemed “people-first” by Google’s search algorithms. This update is all about rewarding the content that are created with the sole motive to help the users and demoting the content that are created to please search engines over users.
In the same update Google reiterates that writing content that is helpful for the users and following standard SEO best practices will be enough for performing well on search engines.
What’s new in the Helpful Content update?
It introduces a ‘new sitewide signal,’ indicating the update will not be applied to individual web pages but to the entire website.
Therefore, if your website is considered to have an overall large amount of unhelpful content or does not meet user experience standards, your website can be flagged by this update— impacting your overall performance in search.
Why is this Helpful Content update so important?
Because, irrespective of whether you have some helpful content in your website, your website will still be penalized if Google’s algorithm finds that your website has a high amount of unhelpful content. By setting this standard, Google expects to offer better quality search results to its users.
But how do content creators know whether they have people-first or search engine-first content? Google has mentioned a series of questions that will help you validate whether you primarily create content for people or search engines. The questions are as follows:
- Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or website that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
- Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service or visiting a place)?
- Does your website have a primary purpose or focus?
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
- Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?
You must continuously evaluate your website to make sure the new Google update doesn’t negatively impact your business. But, if it does, you must take immediate action to improve or remove unhelpful content.
So how do you create Helpful content?
There are a few key things to keep in mind:
- Focus on creating high-quality, informative content: Google wants to rank content that is genuinely helpful to users, so it’s important to create content that is well-researched, accurately written, and provides value to the reader.
- Make your content easy to read and navigate: Google also values content that is easy for users to read and navigate. This means using clear headings, bullet points, and other formatting techniques to make your content more readable and easier to understand.
- Use clear, descriptive titles and descriptions: The title and description of your content are important factors in how it is ranked by Google. Use clear, descriptive language that accurately reflects the content of your page to help it rank well in search results.
- Use appropriate keywords: Keywords are still an important factor in how Google ranks content. Make sure to use relevant keywords in your content and meta tags to help Google understand what your content is about.
By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your content is optimized for the Google helpful content update and ranks well in search results.
Final Thoughts
While there may be some challenges and limitations with this update, the benefits are likely to outweigh any potential drawbacks. As always, only time will tell how effective the helpful content update will be, but it is certainly a step in the right direction. Irrespective of this, our only goal should be to create well-researched, genuine, and helpful content for our readers. Update or no update, this strategy will surely yield better results every single time.
