The latest Google Search ranking update list has one new addition in August – ‘Helpful Content Update’.
Google notified us of its release on 18th August and finally released the update on 25th August 2022. The update finished rolling out on 9th September 2022.
Since, the news of its launch and even after its release, digital marketers, content creators, and SEO experts are trying to find out what impact this new algorithm will have on a website’s SEO. Understanding this update and its effect on websites will help a digital marketing agencyto create appropriate people-first content with healthy SEO practices. Hence, to address all your doubts, this blog will discuss the critical aspects that creators must know about Google Helpful Content Update.
What is Google Helpful Content Update?
Google Search focuses on improving ways to help connect people to relevant information. For this purpose, they have launched ‘Helpful Content Update’ to ensure searchers find original, relevant, and valuable content written by people for people on Google SERPs.
Creating and publishing SEO content is critical to improving rankings on search engines. However, apart from SEO technicalities, you need to focus on the content’s relevance, value and quality. Otherwise, even if your SEO efforts help drive audiences successfully to your website but cannot provide them with the solution they are looking for, it will increase your website’s bounce rate.
This SEO algorithm will mainly target websites that publish the content solely to rank well on SERPs. As a result, while the content is optimized for search engines, it may be unhelpful and uninformative to audiences. Helpful Content Update focuses on connecting audiences to high-quality, informative, and helpful content that they are looking for. Simply put, this algorithm allows Google to acknowledge and promote websites that consistently publish quality and valuable content while downgrading websites with unhelpful content. Besides, this algorithm affects every page of your website instead of a specific page.
Types of content this update will likely affect
This algorithm will not target any specific niche; however, Google stated that the following types of content would likely be affected more than other areas.
- Online educational material
- Shopping
- Arts and Entertainment
- Tech-related
What do creators need to remember?
Now that you know about Helpful Content Update and how they will impact websites with unhelpful content, creators need to keep the following things in mind while creating content.
Create people-first content
Helpful Content Update promotes websites with informative, valuable content. Hence, you should create content for audiences and not only for SEO purposes. Ensure that your content is original, relevant, valuable, and follows best SEO practices. Besides, if your website contains content with the following features, then Google Helpful Content Update will not affect them.
- When visiting your website, your existing and target audiences will find your content valuable.
- Your content includes deep knowledge and expertise in specific topics your audience is searching for.
- Your website has a specific focus.
- Your content will provide your audience with the answers they are looking for.
- Your content will offer your audiences a satisfying experience.
Avoid creating content for search engines first
While it is critical to create people-first content; however, you cannot ignore proper SEO practices. SEO is essential for driving traffic, generating leads and converting them into businesses. However, content that primarily focuses on boosting ranking and traffic might be considered unsatisfactory. If your content has the following features, it might be search-engine-centric. In such a condition, you need to re-evaluate your content marketing approach.
- You are creating content only to boost search results.
- Your content summarizes other content without adding value.
- You are creating content on a trending topic but not because it will help your users.
- Your audience feels that your content lacks information, and therefore, they need to search further for better answers.
Takeaway
Google is not just looking for SEO-optimised content to rank on SERPs; instead, something more. Hence, creating quality content will continue to be one of the significant Google ranking factors. Therefore, take the help of an SEO agency Singapore to create relevant and valuable content that benefits your audiences and search engines.
In this regard, you need to remember that this update help identify sites with unhelpful content and removing them can help improve your website’s search ranking for other helpful content. You might wonder about the time it will take for a site to perform better after removing unhelpful content. Sites that this update has identified for unhelpful content might experience low rank for a few months. However, if Google determines that unhelpful content is no longer available, this update will no longer affect them.
This classifier process is automated that uses a machine-learning model. It is one of the signals Google uses to rank content. As a result, some people-first content classified as unhelpful might still rank well if other signals identify them as people-first content relevant to a search query. Besides, websites with more unhelpful content will likely be affected the most. Hence, you need to follow Google’s SEO guidelines and remove unhelpful content, to ensure that your website ranks well on Google SERP.
Elevan August Media is an SEO expert Singapore that helps create relevant, helpful, and SEO-optimised content for both audiences and search engines. To help create content that satisfies audiences and search engines, feel free to consult the SEO experts of this digital marketing agency.
