[How-To Guide] Create Helpful Content for Google

The Google Helpful Content update may be throwing your website through the ringer. Here are tips to help you work with Google’s newest update.

If you’re plugged into the latest marketing and SEO trends you’ve likely heard about the Google Helpful Content Update that was implemented in 2023.

Being aware of it is one thing, understanding how it affects your website and what to do about it is completely different.

We’re here to break down what exactly this update is, and how to create “helpful content” to increase search visibility for your website – so you can keep generating new leads!

What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

As with most of Google’s updates, the helpful content update is a shift in Google’s algorithm that aims to do one thing: better reward high-quality content.

Google’s update aims to increase rankings for content that visitors feel provides a satisfying experience and is exactly what they were searching for.

In contrast, the update works to identify content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations or is written with the sole goal of ranking, and ensuring it won’t perform as well.

This update introduces a new site-wide signal that aids in the ranking of web pages. Google’s systems automatically identify content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to those doing searches.

Any content on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in a search (assuming there is other content elsewhere on the web that’s of higher quality).

For this reason, our first recommendation is to identify and remove any unhelpful content to help the rankings of your other content and improve the credibility and visibility of your site.

How To Determine If Your Content Is Helpful (or Not)

In order to determine if your content is considered helpful, Google recommends asking yourself the following questions:

• Is the content you’ve written primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
• Are you writing about things simply because they are “trending” and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience or are knowledgeable on the subjects?
• Did you decide to write content about a niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, we recommend rethinking your current content to reflect your brand’s area of expertise more and prioritize the human experience.

How To Align Your Content With The Helpful Content Update

If you’re beginning to second guess any of the content you currently have on your website, don’t panic! These tips will help ensure you are working with the Google Helpful Content Update, instead of against it.

1. Don’t stray too far from the main content or topic of your writing and avoid combining multiple topics into one piece of content.
2. Demonstrate first-hand experience and expertise on the subject you are writing about.
3. Identify and preface your background or knowledge that enables you to speak on the topic at hand to create credibility for your readers.
4. Provide sufficient answers to questions the average reader may have.
5. Don’t neglect the overall reader experience.
6. Be mindful of SEO and keywords without making them the main focus or purpose of your content.

In general, if you can confidently say ‘yes’ to the below questions then likely your content is valuable!

1. Would YOU read the content (all the way to the end)?
2. Did you learn something while creating the content? Or did someone on your team learn something when reviewing it?
3. Are you writing with your reader in mind?

Let Radiant Marketing Help You Create Helpful Content

Don’t navigate the world of Google and ranking content alone! At Radiant Marketing, we have years of experience helping brands generate high-quality leads and drive traffic to their sites by creating helpful, original content tailored to their audience.

Schedule a Discovery Call with us today to learn how we can help you achieve all of your marketing goals.

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