What is Google's helpful content update?

What Happened:

The helpful content update is a signal Google is incorporating in its algorithm. It is not a manual update or penalty. This means if the educational content of your site has the signal applied to it, you will just need to improve your content and the signal will be removed. This signal will be running continuously and utilize machine learning to review sites at a total site level vs page level. The review at a site level means there will be a certain threshold for a site to have what the algorithm will deem as “unhelpful”. This update first rolled out on August 25, 2022 and will continue for the next couple of weeks.

• Information on the update, provided directly from Google, can be found here.

Our POV:

At iQuanti, we always focus on creating content by analyzing search intent, relevancy of the brand and its content, live SERP landscape review, and incorporating ALPS data. As a result, our content creation and SEO optimization strategies are user-focused and tailored specifically for your audiences. We do think that given how much buzz there has been around this update, it will be an impactful one.

However, our core methodologies and SEO initiatives will not change, as we follow the best practices laid out in Google’s guidelines. Since our approach is directly in line with Google’s guidelines, we are on the right track with content updates and production recommendations provided. Older content will need to now be evaluated deeper to see if it still adds value to the site or if it should be redirected, repurposed, or refreshed. We also do not expect any changes to the weightages of the 3 ranking factors (technical, authority, and content).

Our Definition of Helpful Content:

Helpful content is unique, high-quality, and authoritative content that a reader can understand, easily access, and ultimately, have their questions or need answered without going to other sites or having to do more research. Helpful content that meets these requirements should be built on sites that have clear expertise in the topic areas they cover.

Next Steps:

We will be closely monitoring website performance throughout the time of the rollout and beyond to determine impact. If we see any impact to your site, we are prepared to action on the update in the following ways:

• Helpful Content Audit:

• Goal: Understand how this latest update impacted your site based on your existing content inventory

• Output: An excel sheet with the list of resource content on your site.

• Focus: Using a prioritization methodology, we’d first audit content based on the following criteria:

• Priority keywords – business priorities, search volumes, and brands’ ability and relevancy to rank

• Top performing LPs – capture existing equity and traffic and ensure our important pages are set up for success

• Priority content themes – related to the priority keywords, we will identify what topics have been top performing for you as well as what is important your brand goals.

• Identification of any weak or irrelevant content that should be optimized
  

• Review of New Topics:

• Goal: Identify new opportunities that will meet the latest guidance from inception

• Output: An analysis of content theming deliverables, keyword research files, etc.

• Focus: Using Google’s guidelines, we will review if the proposed topics fit the user-first criteria.
  

• Training Sessions:

• Goal: Help teams think about SEO strategy from a user-first standpoint and streamline impactful recommendations

• Output: The SEO SMEs will run workshops with our content teams, engagement teams, account management teams, and SEO analysts to inform on best practices.

• Focus: We will cover the following topics:

• Keyword Utilization

• Authority Building

• Authoritative Content Creation

• Content Structure

• Review of Google’s Criteria of Search-Engine and User-First Content

Potential Client FAQs:

• How much can this signal impact our overall site performance?

• This is a sitewide signal however, it is likely there will be a certain number of pages with unhelpful content that a site needs to have to see an impact.
  

• Can this impact the site based on LOBs, subfolders, etc.?

• Yes, since this is applied to the total site, there is a potential that all LOBs can see an impact. It will be important to think of content at a domain level.
  

• Can we no longer write about specific topics?

• No, we will just want to go through an audit process of using Google’s guidelines when reviewing the topics, we want to create content around.
  

• Will this impact international sites?

• No, this is only for English sites right now. However, Google said it will roll out to other languages later.