Google’s helpful content update was announced in late August and finished rolling out on 9 September. The purpose of this is to ensure ‘people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results’. Essentially, Google is rewarding content that is written for people, rather than search engine bots that scan the code.
By creating content written for engagement with website visitors, customer satisfaction will be higher. Subsequently, content written with the primary focus of informing your visitors, rather than targeting and spamming keywords, will be rewarded more.
Focusing Your Content for Engagement
It’s important to remember, when visitors click through to your website, they’re looking for relevant content to what they’ve searched for. Whether you’re creating the content to be informative, for social media or to target high search volume keywords, it should always have a primary focus that is relevant to what your audience is wanting.
By creating content about topics you have real expertise in and can provide new and informative insight for, you increase the chance of high customer satisfaction. Furthermore, keeping yourself on topic and not deviating to other subjects ensures readers are learning about what they searched for. Just because there are other keywords and topics to utilise, doesn’t mean it’s relevant to your content.
Creating multiple articles and separating content can be much more beneficial to target the right audience, rather than cramming all your keywords into one.
Keep Your Content Factual
Creating content that isn’t factual or fails to answer questions people have searched for will only lead to a higher bounce rate. If your content ranks well, but then has a high bounce rate and visitors decide to use another article to answer their question, it will negatively affect your search rankings.
When writing articles, it’s important to include questions relevant to the readers’ interests. However, try not to add questions if you don’t know the answer, or if the answer simply isn’t available yet. This update is all about the satisfaction of your reader, so produce content which answers questions, instead of trying to increase clicks through enticing headings that aren’t relevant.
Write with Purpose
Ultimately, you should look to create content which is focused and specific keywords and topics relevant to your business. Creating content for the sake of it may not deliver the outcomes you expect. Instead, choose to create content when it is right for your business and identify keywords which all fit together. Doing this ensures the best experience for your readers and ensures the content you create is helpful for visitors.
Additionally, going out of your way to write content for topics that aren’t relevant to your business and are created purely for the intent of increasing organic search traffic, works against the idea of creating content written by people, for people. Sticking to content that is more relevant to your business does not only make your content easier to write but also increases the likelihood of your organic traffic leading to conversions and leads.
How Organic Search is Impacted
With the update finishing on 9 September, your organic search rankings may have already been impacted. Search Engine Journal reported there was not a large shakeup in organic rankings. Despite this, it’s important to be wary that your content could be impacted, both positively and negatively.
If you notice a drop in organic positions and a loss of clicks, updating your content to be written with a people-first mindset could improve your organic search performance. Whether this is changing existing content or starting from scratch, you can rectify any issues in-line with the helpful content update.
Contact us for SEO consultancy and strategy to improve your organic search performance.
