Googles Helpful Content Update and AI

What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Google’s Helpful Content Update is not a major algorithm update, but it affects how Google decides what content to rank higher or lower in search results. The update is meant to improve the quality of search results and make it easier for people to find useful and relevant information. 

The update may impact websites that rely heavily on organic search traffic, this makes it important for sites to make sure they have useful optimised content for this update.

What has changed?

The update has affected sites that have duplicate content, especially if they don’t list other websites in their “About” sections or “Contact” pages. While duplicate content is common, Google doesn’t reward it and could penalise it.

Review Your Content to Make Sure It’s Written For People

If you have content that is not written for people and is actually written to rank well in searches, it’s time to review it and make any necessary changes. Your website needs to be written for people, not search engines, to rank well in the future.

Tips to Ensure Your Content is Helpful and Unique

We recommend these tools to help you determine what content is unhelpful, and consider removing it from your website.

Google Keyword Planner
This tool allows you to create keyword lists and find out what search terms you are competing for on Google. This is a great way to identify your ideal audience and learn more about your ideal customers.

Keyword Explorer
This tool allows you to type in specific keywords and see what results you get. You can find out what your competitors are competing for, and learn about your ideal customers.

Google Trends
This tool allows you to see what search terms are trending on Google. You can identify your ideal customer and find out what kind of content you should create.

Google Analytics
This tool allows you to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website. You can identify your ideal audience and learn what content you should create.

What Google Considers As “High-Quality Content”

Google’s helpful content update is making it harder for websites to rank high in the search engine results pages (SERPs) by creating a new “Content Quality” category. The new category is designed to be a more user-focused result that places less emphasis on content written for search engines. Google’s definition of high-quality content is the following:

“Content that answers a user’s questions accurately and clearly, and provides useful information, such as tips, answers, reviews, and videos.”

On the other hand, low-quality content includes the following:

“Content that is written for the sole purpose of ranking in search.”

For example, if you’ve written an article titled “The Best Pizza in Town”, you’ve likely written primarily for Google. This content could be penalized with the helpful content update.

Will Google Punish AI-Written Content

In recent times, AI writing has become a common and efficient practice. However, with Google’s new algorithm, bulk content optimised for search engines will not longer have the same effectiveness.

You still can utilise AI content services, but researching key information before generating the AI copy and humanising the results is more important than ever.

Some AI Copywriting tools include:

• Jasper
• CopyAI
• Anyword
  

How does this impact SEO?

The update is being referred to as a ‘re-ranking’, and the algorithm itself has changed. This means that old, bad, or irrelevant content won’t rank as highly as new, fresh, and relevant content. For example, if you have 5000 inbound links from sources that are irrelevant to your page, or they are established domains with poor trust signals, then it’s likely that they will be devalued. This also means that your site’s authority score will likely drop, so it’s time to make sure that your content and backlinks are up to scratch.

How can we write helpful content?

The best way to ensure that your site is helping people, rather than frustrating them, is to make sure that your content is informative, engaging and easy to read.

Check out blogs, social media and faqs to see what information people are looking for, then answer the questions that are relevant to your business or service.