What Does Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ Update Mean for Content?

Search optimization is changing. Recently, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, announced that Google’s Helpful Content update is a big one, and it aims to weed out content that was written with the intention of ranking, and not passing across the information.

Now, that’s weird. Isn’t that why we rank our content? To make it all visible. Well, Google’s backend developers and analysts think otherwise. On August 25, 2022, Google released the August 2022 helpful content update, and the rollout was completed on September 9, 2022. So, it’s a relatively new season.

So, what is Google Helpful Content About?

Google’s Helpful Content is an algorithmic update from Google that will analyze content and shadow-ban the ones riddled with keywords and SEO-influenced text that do not contain meaningful/relevant information. Simply put, it is an algorithm by Google that would crawl (search) content to see if the (possible) pages from a search contain information that a user seeks when they perform a search query.

It is no news that content creation has become a game –a game of planning, strategizing, and forming alliances for visibility. This is especially the case for business owners who just want to get in front of their target audience to get traffic -with the hope of converting traffic to sales.

Google’s update intends to help blogs and sites, whose main aim is to give out information, improve the value of their content. Hence, this system’s update targets a user-oriented experience for enquirers and not for business purposes (we will talk about the advertisement aspect of Google shortly).

The next few days are gon’ be pretty rough for content marketing departments at the office.

To many users, helpful content is a new development, since we only recently became aware of the system and its launch. However, to Google, it isn’t new. The team has been working for months before the announcement in August 2022.

Google Translate and other Languages

For now, this would only be available for English content. The outcome would function as data for improvement and subsequently be adapted for other languages supported by Google. Of course, this is an automated process, nothing manual. It’s still going to be the functions of crawlers and indices. While some pages would be successfully indexed, many others won’t.

What does this mean for Content creators and content-based businesses?

While this update would bring about disruption, it is not an entirely unprecedented event, especially as regards the concept of a search engine in the first place.

A search engine allows users to search for queries, and Google pairs them with the sources that carry the best results. So, you see, the ‘helpful content update’ is only to help users achieve that goal. So, this is not about content creators/writers; it is about those seeking information.

Now, content creators have to panel-beat their content to meet their audience’s queries and to provide information. So, this is a situation where the first thing to consider before generating your content is what does the audience want?

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when generating content for your audience

Who is my audience? (Have you identified an audience yet?)
- Is this content detailed, practicable, and from first-hand experience cum expertise?
- Does content tally with your primary site (content on subdomains would be indexed based on subdomains, but several other factors are included)?
- Do you have a feedback column?

In short, abandon "Google ranking" first; think "my audience."

Be more focused on offering useful information. This means keywords would still be in vogue, but there would be much more ‘policing’ of how they’re used. Hence, there should be a reasonable proportioning in keyword density (the number of times a keyword or string of keywords) appears in a post. Ideally, a keyword should appear About 2-3 times in a 500-word article, and up to 4-5 times in a 1000-word post. Content should not just be filled with loose words, but relevant jargon, yet, simple enough for an audience coming to learn to know. That is, if you use technical terminologies, be kind enough to break them down for your audience.

Who would be favored?

According to Google, content must "demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge". Hence, we can expect detailed content to make the safe list. Long posts have an advantage, too. Informative subheadings. Subheadings are not just to be optimized for SEO but also contain relevant information that your client wants to find. That makes it easy for them to jump to the sections with pertinent information. Proper formatting is also an advantage. Ensure you have headings and subheadings, and ultimately, ensure to incorporate an informative piece with your primary keyword in your snippet (meta description).

This is not some huge change

Danny Sullivan says to not be too enraged or too carried away, as this is not some "huge" change, but we can be sure it would favor those who run with helpful content. What’s the fate of Google Ads? One thing you can be assured of is that Google Ads is not going anywhere. It is the whole point of Google marketing. So, while some changes may occur to how content and ads are classified, there would still be criteria that would favor Google Ads. Google is never going to pass up the system that helped it generate 209.49 billion U.S. dollars in 2021.

What are the possible issues with the recent Google helpful content update?

As said before, all we can do is see how the update performs in the first few months of its completion. While longer content would be more helpful, the Attention span of readers is still too short. For an audience seeking quick answers; then you may want to include

Outlines
Subheadings
Font styling & variation
Bullets and numbering
Infographics
Summary

…to aid the visual experience of your audience.

What it means for other content platforms

Google continues to hasten its pace above contemporary competition by having more inclusive and search-oriented results rank well on SERPs.