Google released an algorithm update that adds a new site-wide signal to guarantee that users see more unique, valuable material created by people, for people, as opposed to information produced primarily for search engine traffic.
Content Refresh and Updating Strategy: Maintaining SEO Performance with Evergreen ContentAccording to Google Search Central Blog, the helpful content update aims to reward better content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience. In contrast, content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.
How can you be sure that the material you create will be effective with Google’s recent update?
People-first content creators put their audience’s needs first while using SEO best practices to provide additional value to searchers. Google created a guide on what you should follow and what to avoid to meet your visitor’s expectations.
What you should keep in mind while creating new content:
- Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the valuable content if they came directly to you?
- Does your content demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise from having used a product or service or visiting a place)?
- Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
- Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and product reviews?
This content update of Google Algorithm favors the ones who create valuable copies. We do optimize articles and pages for search engines, as we are primarily an SEO agency, but we always keep in mind to offer good content to the readers. This is one of our goals disregard of any update, as the longer we keep the readers on the pages, the higher the chances of telling Google that page is valuable.
Anamaria Lupu, Content creator at TUYA Digital – SEO & Digital Marketing
What you should avoid:
SEO is a valuable activity when used on content that puts readers’ needs first. The content searchers find unsatisfying is closely connected with content produced with search engine traffic in mind.
- Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines rather than made for humans?
- Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
- Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
- Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
- Are you writing about things simply because they seem to trend and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
- Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
- Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
- Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without real expertise, but mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
- Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?
We should pay more attention to pages which perform low in terms of duration, of time spent by readers. Google Analytics is, again, one of the tools to show you which pages and articles are of interest to your readers and which aren’t. A higher time spent on those pages means the readers are genuinely interested and find that content valuable, as opposed to those pages where the time spent is low.
This means that you should carefully identify all those pages with a high bounce rate or a low duration and improve them, by adding valuable content, or remove them. This is what will make you have a valubale website altogether and this is what will help you improve your metrics even after this update completely rolls out.
Anne Marie Maita – SEO specialist at TUYA Digital – SEO & Digital Marketing
The update is to be distributed during the last week of August. Google will publish the page with the ranking revisions when they start and when they are finished, which might take up to two weeks. With this upgrade, a new site-wide signal is added to the long list of signs Google takes into account when deciding how to rank web pages. Content that appears to have little value, little added value, or is otherwise not very useful to persons conducting searches is automatically identified by Google systems.