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Millions of words hit the internet every minute, and a lot of them are published through online blogs and other websites looking for their audience. To find them, every online business should try to satisfy Google’s search algorithms and hit the top of the results page. That’s why SEO exists, to make sites more appealing to Google’s ever-changing policies. For entrepreneurs online, understanding what makes helpful content is a great way to make an online business stand out.
The Helpful Content Update
Helpful content is a specific term used internally by Google. It’s also the namesake of several landmark updates that changed how their ranking algorithms worked, the first of which dropped in the summer of 2022. Helpful content is human-first, written to please people surfing the web, over cynical tactics meant to game the system without providing much value to readers.
To better judge written content, Google differentiates between pages that offer news or blog posts, and pages that offer other services. For example, an e-commerce storefront or an iGaming page won’t get punished for falling short of helpful content standards designed for blog posts. Those pages provide retail options or, in the case of iGaming, services like online roulette where a casino game is live streamed to viewers online. In those cases, helpful content doesn’t matter so much because it’s there to support why viewers are really there – the product/service.
What is Helpful Content?
So when do helpful content guidelines apply? In Google’s words, it’s intended for content made to “help or inform people.” That means blog posts, news articles, tutorials, recipes, and any other written content whose sole aim is to spread information. For tutorials and recipes, Google also expanded their E-E-A-T rules in 2022, around the same time they introduced helpful content guidelines.
In the past, SEO experts have tried to claim keywords by writing content that isn’t that helpful for readers. Seeing this, Google introduced helpful content and tweaked other systems like E-E-A-T to sort through helpful and unhelpful content. Good content doesn’t just meet Google’s algorithmic standards, it also provides value, insight, and new information to users, while avoiding spelling and grammatical errors.
Writing helpful content will help sites rank higher on search results pages and can even earn them a place at position zero. At Google I/O 2024, the company unveiled ‘search in the Gemini’ era showcasing how generative AI will collate and display helpful content at the top of search results pages in the future.
How to Write Helpful Content
When writing helpful content, businesses should have basic SEO requirements covered first. That means effective keyword research that’s up-to-date and garners interest from web surfers. At every step of the process, it helps to imagine what the readers’ intent will be when searching, clicking on, and reading the article.
As for the content itself, it should be original, accurate, and informative within the scope of its title. Experience and expertise should be shown in several ways, such as:
- Including an author bio for first-hand accounts.
- Including images or video proving first-hand experience.
- Citing/interviewing thought leaders.
- Running polls and other data-gathering exercises.
- Stating unique opinions and perspectives.
When content is written with all of these in tandem, or as many that apply, then Google is much more likely to give its stamp of approval. While helpful content has received several updates, it has served the tech giant well in the last few years and will remain the standard for quality content in the future.
