Google helpful content update explained

Some Google SERP’s for keyword searches don’t actually give you the best results. Companies with big budgets tend to write over optimised SEO content at the expense of readability and user experience, making the search results frustrating for some searchers. Well Google has been aware of this and is now trying to diversify the search results with a new Helpful Content Update.

So what is actually going on?

SEO content has been published by marketers over the years, whether it is to spam the search results with good or bad content, just describing the same stuff over and over to please the search engine and not so much for the searchers.

When it comes to optimising your content, it is not a bad thing but there’s a difference between optimised and over-optimised. There are people who spend large amounts of money to release mediocre content at scale, just to try and game the system. Now, with the rise of AI writing tools, it is getting even easier to do this.

Investing in the future

Google has been looking into ways to make SERPs better and more relevant to users with new and fresh content. They’ve been testing out patents for proposed improvements to their algorithms, like the information gain patent that looks at what documents have in common to find something that stands out from the commonness.

Google has also invested in its understanding of languages and the use of AI such as language models MUM and BERT, Google has excellent tools to uncover and understand the content that otherwise would be left by the side of the road. It should distinguish better between content written to manipulate the search results and high-quality, unique content written to please searchers.

Google now has combined their insights and launched a new addition to their algorithms with the ‘Helpful Content Update’. Combined with the recent Product Review updates, this aims to bring expert content to the forefront. This update has the potential to really shake things up.

What is the Helpful Content Update?

Well, the Helpful Content Update is a significant project at Google that is aimed at getting more diversity in the SERPs. Google mentions that it uncovers more original, helpful content for their users, written by people. A spokesman from Google says that their testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.

The search giant aims to reward content that gives readers a satisfying experience and demotes content written only to please the search engines. For this, Google not only looks at the quality of a particular piece of content on your site to determine its value but also at what you do on the rest of your site.

Now what does this mean for you?

This all depends on what kind of content you are producing and uploading. You could be in trouble if you have been uploading low-quality content to get high rankings. We always advise to write high-quality, unique content that makes a difference for searchers and not just for search engines. Bear in mind that it will not be good enough if you’ve been writing what everybody else has been writing.

The Helpful Content Update is site-wide. What this means is that even if you have a perfectly written article for your main topic, low-quality content on other parts of your website may keep it from ranking highly. This might make it necessary to improve the rest of your site by upping the quality of your content or by removing low-quality stuff.

Below are a few things that Google shared so that you can help yourself to validate your strategy:

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site 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 site 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?

How can you check and improve your content for this update?

So what can you do to improve your content or make a balanced decision on deleting unnecessary things? Well Google has shared a helpful list of questions that you can ask yourself when looking at your content. So if you are answering yes to any of these questions then it should be a red flag.

• Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines rather than made for humans?
• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
• Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
• Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
• Are you writing about things simply because they seem to trend and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
• Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
• Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
• Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?

If you need help with your SEO content then you can contact Digital Carrera for all your SEO needs as we are happy to help.