Google’s “helpful content update” aims to reward people-first content. It is about giving a satisfying experience to the users and catering to the search intent. This update is sitewide and targets content deemed ‘unhelpful’ to users.
One of our new clients had their site negatively affected after Google’s August algo update rolled out. Their newly launched website (finance niche) saw a drop in clicks and impressions right after.
What we did?
- Layer the content to ensure that it was sufficiently informational and the intended audience did not need to look for additional sources of knowledge.
- Adding more expert opinions to make the content more authoritative.
- Enriching the content with audience queries to make it more valuable to the readers.
- On-page optimisation for important pages (again, keeping it relevant to intent and not just search engines)
Results?
Google’s classifier for this algo update runs continuously to monitor new and existing sites. Once a site has put in the efforts to remove (or update) the unhelpful content, the algorithms stop applying the classification for them.
Results started showing for our site after a month of making changes to the content. The site regained its lost impressions and clicks.
To summarise, Google’s helpful content update does not invalidate SEO best practices. However, it enforces the principle of creating content that searchers find satisfying. It rewards content made by humans for humans (rather than just search engines).
For our client’s website, we shall continue to reevaluate their existing content and layer it with information that caters to their audience’s needs and queries.
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