How To Make The Google Helpful Content Update Love Your Content

October 2023 update: Google has made an update to the system which is now automated by artificial intelligence. According to Google, “Google Search’s helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content created for people in search results…[and] aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience. … The system automatically identifies content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to people.” If this latest update has affected your website ranking, you can take several actions. Remove any content that might be considered unhelpful. Ask Google to refrain from indexing any third-party content on your website that you do not control, which is not considered helpful, or does not directly support your goals and purpose. Continue to monitor your website over time as helpful content rankings do change.

Did your website ranking slip with Google’s Helpful Content Update? Do you want to make sure the search engine giant likes your content when it applies this algorithm in the future? Tate Design can help.

First, let us clarify this change. In the past, keywords and phrases were strategically added to websites and blogs primarily to achieve a higher ranking with search engines. This SEO helped search engines match user queries with online content. Some of that material was helpful for online visitors and some was full of fluff, with no real value. Now content for people comes first and search engines come second. As Google explains “The helpful content update aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”

Here is what you can do to make your content more appealing to website visitors and Google’s Helpful Content Update algorithm. Think “people first” and

Focus on your area of expertise
• Concentrate on the needs of your target market
• Share in-depth knowledge based on your years of experience and your expertise
• Write or record what you know
• Show your expertise, authority, and trust as we explained in “E-A-T For Today—A Visibility Strategy”

Create high-quality content with people, not search engines, as your target audience
• Use natural language and include keywords, where appropriate, to make searching easier for website and blog visitors
• Imagine you are talking with a potential client and create content that would satisfy her/him
• Provide enough information that your viewer does not have to click to another site for answers
• Avoid misleading titles and content that fails to fulfill an implied promise in the title

Provide value in your “people-first” content
• Answer questions your target audience asks like “What is web design?”
• Offer solutions to specific problems facing your customers and prospects
• Guide users through a difficult or confusing process like understanding analytics 
• Share industry tips and news

Publish fresh, new, appealing content on a regular basis
• Create a variety of content relevant to your industry
• Include evergreen content that solves problems or meets needs and will remain helpful to your target market for years
• Educate, engage, entertain, inform, inspire, and share

Update older material
• Refresh statistics
• Follow up on news reports
• Show how trends have evolved
• Help your website visitors understand how to apply what they are reading

Tate Design has the expertise to go beyond web design and SEO so your content includes these components. Call us at 610.725.0702 or e-mail [email protected] to make your content more appealing to website visitors and the Google Helpful Content Update.

 

 

References
What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update