“Just Google it” – understanding the Helpful Content Update

If ever you’re looking for the answer to a question, the lyrics to a song, a new solution or service provider, or are researching an unknown topic – the chances are you’ll “just Google it”. The search engine platform – like the Hoover and the escalator – has undergone genericization and become an essential part of our day to day lives.

That’s why when it comes to content creation, it’s important to understand the latest tweaks and quirks and how this will impact the content you host online. As a B2B marketer you’ll need to know how best to word your content to align with their ever-changing algorithm – which at times can be a challenge.

The latest update Google has released is called the “Google Helpful Content Update”. It sprang to life on 22nd August but will take a few weeks to fully roll out. The main purpose of this update is to help humanise content. Google has made vast progress over the years to ensure that content creators aren’t just cramming in keywords to rank at the top of the world’s most popular search engine, and this update is the next stage in making this happen.

Aimed at any business that is producing content – which any marketer will know should be all businesses – the update centres around making the life of the consumer easier. Content needs to be easy to read, digest and understand rather than filled with jargon; so Google will reward content that is easy to understand for the reader and penalise content that is purely written to please search engines.

So, when it comes to Google’s new update, here are a few top tips we recommend following to get the most out of your content:

1. It’s all about humanising content. Whatever you produce should be focused on providing value to the reader, not on how high you can make it rank by stuffing in loads of fancy keywords, or hitting a certain word count because that's what you've heard Google likes.
2. Just because we shouldn’t be keyword cramming doesn’t invalidate SEO and including keywords in your content. You can still be true to your carefully curated keywords, as long as they are wholly relevant to your audience and to the content you are creating and not just squeezed in to try and increase traffic at any cost. It’s all about helping eliminate content primarily created for Search Engine Traffic.
3. This update is not just based upon one piece of content on your website, your whole website will be under scrutiny. If a few pages are not offering helpful content then your whole website could be affected and struggle to rank highly on Google (and it will take months to recover!)
4. Review your existing content and decide if it is helpful or unhelpful. Any content you believe would be considered unhelpful, remove immediately. You can always rework it further down the line. Not sure what 'unhelpful' means? Try considering these questions:
   
   • Are you mainly summarising what others have to say without adding much value?
   • Are you writing about things simply because they seem to be trending?
   • Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?

To find out more about Google’s Helpful Content Update, be sure to check out their post about how your business can get the most out of it. Or if you’re looking for help in optimising your content, reworking old assets to provide more value, or understand how your business can enhance its SEO strategy, simply get in touch.