What Digital Marketers Should Know about Google’s Helpful Content Update

On Thursday, August 18, Google announced a new update that concerns online marketers and digital creators. Called the “helpful content update”, it aims to reduce the amount of so-called unhelpful content and reward valuable items instead. Read this GBC Time article to know how the upgrade is going to affect the website rankings and how to make your content more helpful.

What is in the update?

As mentioned above, the main goal of this update is to better content that provides a helpful and satisfying experience for a reader. Google will launch a new signal to better distinguish useful and unhelpful content. The classifier is fully automated and works on the base of a machine-learning model. The algorithm will automatically determine which publications do not have value or low-added value.

The update will affect not only a particular page but sites overall. At the same time, while it certainly will urge creators to produce more useful content, the signal is just one of many in Google’s ranking system. So, even if your content has been deemed unhelpful, it can still rank well if it matches other guidelines (like people-first or relevance).

The sites with a greater number of unhelpful pages will be affected the most. In this case, the site overall (even pages with high-quality content) can experience a significant drop in ranking. So, it is advised to remove this kind of content from your page and follow Google’s recommendation.

Google will start launching this update next week. The rollout is estimated to take up to half a month. The upgrade will affect content in the English language globally and in the coming months, Google will also expand it to other languages. In the near future, the mechanism behind the classifier will also be updated.

Tips to create more relevant content and rank better on Google

So, we have established what the latest update is all about. Now, let us take a look at some helpful tips that will help your benefit from this upgrade and improve your rating.

Create content for people first and foremost

First of all, Google advises creating people-focused content, which is aimed at satisfying viewers first. Creators, however, still have to pay attention to SEO practices to improve the value of the content.

Here are some valuable tips to do so:

Make sure that your content is useful for the audience you have or aim to obtain;
Content should show first-hand experience (e.g., you have actually used the product you are reviewing or visited a place you are writing about);
Publications should demonstrate expertise in the subject;
Do not make a website on too many different topics, focus on one purpose instead;
Make sure that after reading your content, viewers have earned enough about the topic and feel satisfied at the same time.

Follow best SEO practices from Google but avoid making content just for search ranking algorithms

SEO practices and guidelines help achieve the best results when they are applied to the content created for people. Google found out that searchers are typically not satisfied with the publications made just for the search rankings. Make sure to follow these tips in order to avoid this mistake:

Do not use too much automation;
Create content that would attract real humans;
Add a personal value to the content;
Do not exploit trending topics, in which you have no expertise or your audience is not interested;
Make sure that your content answers all questions you have promised to resolve;
Do not pay attention to a particular word count;
Make sure that after reading your content, a viewer wants to know more about the topic.

Some other helpful tips are: