Get to know the most relevant points of Google's recent "helpful content update" and learn how to adapt to the changes to keep your SEO strategy current and improve your website's positioning.
In the SEO and search engine universe, updates are constant. For this reason, it's important to stay informed about the latest developments and understand how they impact your brand or business's SEO and content strategy.
In this article, we explain the helpful content update from Google, launched in August 2022, how it affects search results, and how it can impact your website's traffic.
Our SEO experts, Blas Giffuni and Camilo Ramírez, will tell you all about this recent update, how it can affect your business, and practical tips for creating content that takes these changes into account and allows you to have a good web positioning.
What is Google's helpful content update?
According to Google, the "helpful content update" promotes showing users more original and useful content in search engines. That is, content created by people and for people.
The goal of the update is to better reward content that offers a satisfactory experience for users and, at the same time, employs recommended SEO practices to provide added value. Meanwhile, content that does not meet visitors' expectations will not perform well.
To effectively create people-centered content, Google recommends avoiding an approach focused on search engines and shares a list of questions to help you analyze whether you should reconsider how to create content on your website.
At SEO Bites, we love this update because, in previous articles, we emphasized the importance of having a web content strategy focused on users and providing information that is truly useful and valuable to people, not just search engines.
How can the helpful content update affect your brand or business?
In general terms, this Google update impacts both small and large businesses.
Therefore, in the face of these changes, you should ask yourself whether your website was created with users, potential buyers, and visitors in mind, or if it was simply created to generate quick traffic and "please the search engine."
If your answer to the previous question corresponds to the second case, with this recent Google update, you will need to carry out a significant adjustment and update of your website's content, as well as reconsider your digital content and SEO strategy, as your website traffic may be affected.
In this situation, small businesses may have a competitive advantage because, due to their size and characteristics, they can be more flexible and agile in adopting changes and rethinking their strategies.
Meanwhile, larger companies may have more difficulty making these changes at the necessary speed.
Tips to adapt to the helpful content update today
Share original and useful content on your website:
Ensure that your brand's website is not one of those that replicate content or summarize the ideas of others. With Google's recent update, websites with original content will have better positioning.
Therefore, we recommend that when creating content for your website, you think about topics that truly interest your audience, express your own points of view, provide a new vision and perspective on the topic, and, above all, add value to those who read you with truly useful and unique content.
Discuss topics on which you are an authority and that are consistent with your brand's activity:
Imagine a company in the automotive sector sharing content about health. Health is unrelated to the automotive sector, so it would not add any value to the end user, and they are not an authority on the topic.
Likewise, it is crucial that you talk about topics you know about and those that make sense for your business to participate in, disseminate, and teach.
In summary, the content you generate for your brand must have a connection and coherence with what is offered and done.
Know your audience very well and analyze how your product or service facilitates their lives, solves their problems, and meets their needs:
Take the time to get to know your target audience, discover who they are, and what their needs and desires are. In this aspect, data analytics is your best ally.
Then, develop a content strategy based on that knowledge to communicate to your website visitors how your product or service makes their lives easier, solves their problems, and meets their needs.
At this point, it is necessary to identify what your unique value proposition is and what sets you apart from the competition, so you can clearly communicate it to your audience.
Forget about keywords and focus more on search intent and thematic axes:
With Google's helpful content update, SEO strategies based solely on keyword analysis are becoming increasingly outdated.
For some time now, Google has been reinforcing concepts such as search intent, entities, clusters, and thematic axes, precisely because by approaching content from this perspective, the user is placed at the center.
On the contrary, keywords are based on a type of content oriented towards search engines, something that Google seeks to discourage.
To start orienting the content strategy taking into account this new update, you should move away from traditional SEO tools.
With Google's helpful content update, are core web vitals and user experience (UX) still relevant?
Yes, within this update, elements such as core web vitals and User Experience (UX) remain relevant for the positioning of a website.
Firstly, SEO and UX (user experience) are closely related. Because if your website offers a good experience to its visitors, then the chances of improving your positioning increase.
In this way, core web vitals are metrics that you still need to take care of and improve because by accounting for aspects such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, they will help you analyze the user experience on your website and identify the points of improvement you need to work on.
Consequently, although quality content is a fundamental part of SEO, it also consists of many technical aspects that cannot be neglected and continue to be relevant with this recent Google update.
How can you know if the helpful content update affected you or not?
Our main recommendation is to monitor the performance of your website with tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
If you experience drastic decreases in your website's traffic that are not explainable or attributable to other factors, then it can be assumed that Google, when analyzing the content, did not determine it as useful or valuable to users.
Conclusions:
Google's helpful content update aims to promote the generation of valuable content for users. This represents a great opportunity for brands and businesses to rethink their strategy and avoid falling into industrialized SEO, that is, focused on addressing a search engine.
We leave you with the main conclusions of our article:
Write for people, not machines.
Always think first about your customers or potential buyers, put them at the center of your strategy, and create humanized, conversational, and natural content focused on meeting needs, fulfilling latent desires, solving problems, and making your audience's lives easier.
With your brand's content, always aim to teach, contribute, and help without copying others.
Do not neglect technical topics related to user experience such as: loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
Finally, stay tuned to your Google Analytics and Search Console metrics to identify if the update has affected your website's performance and positioning.
We invite you to keep reading our blog to learn more about search engine positioning.
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