Google Helpful Content Update

Google is changing how it evaluates content, relying on machine learning to determine whether the content is “helpful” to a user.

This analysis will incorporate a new site-wide signal into Google’s overall ranking process. It is not considered a manual or spam action so no alerts will be displayed in Google Search Console.

That means you will need to keep tabs on your rankings because they will be your first (and only) indication that Google has an issue with your content.

This update only affects English language searches but will be rolled out for other languages soon.

How will Google decide if the content is helpful?

The primary goal of this update is to ensure that content that people find helpful is rewarded, while content created solely for search results is not. It means that many familiar black hat SEO strategies will be penalised, such as answering a question that cannot be answered, creating content irrelevant to your website, creating content created through spinners, or badly written and AI-written content.

Essentially, if you create unique, relevant content for your target audience, which we can help you do at Re:View Creative, you should be fine!

How to make sure your content is helpful

Look at your user persona.

You should already have some user personas for your target audience to help with your online marketing strategy. If you do not have any, we recommend that you make some!

These user personas will be extremely useful for auditing your content and comparing the usefulness of your content to what your target audience would be interested in.

Analyse your existing content.

Google has provided a list of warning signs, which include:

• Would this content be helpful to your target audience?
• Does the content demonstrate first-hand expertise or breadth of knowledge?
• Does your content adequately respond to any questions it poses?
• Would someone who reads the content consider it a satisfying experience?

Hopefully, “yes” should be the answer to all the above! If that is the case, these pages should be fine. However, there are some things to be aware of, such as:

• Was AI used to create most of the content?
• Is it primarily a summary of other articles?
• Was the article’s topic chosen for its popularity rather than its relevance?
• Are you attempting to write to a specific word count for the benefit of Google?
• Do you promise to respond to a question that has no answer?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it is a red flag that the page requires some work to be considered helpful content.

Creating good, high-quality content should already be part of your SEO strategy.  However, this latest update is now more critical than ever.

The following principles can help you write content that hits the mark every time: