Google Helpful Content Update: A Complete Guide with Experts Opinion

Google keeps updating its algorithms frequently to provide a better search experience to its users. The most recent core algorithm update was announced on 18th August 2022 — the helpful content update. 

And since then, it has become a raging discussion in the digital marketing and SEO community. 

Not sure what this algorithm update means for your site? 

Read this detailed guide on Google’s helpful content update. It includes actionable insights from industry experts who’re hands-on with many such major algorithm changes & their aftereffects and led their organisations to perform better in Google Search. 

Let’s begin.

What is Google Helpful Content Update?

Google’s helpful content update is an algorithm update that focuses on helping people access more accurate and helpful information on Google Search. This update aims to rank content that meets searchers’ expectations and provides a good user experience. 

On the other hand, content that fails to meet users’ requirements won’t perform well after this update. Google started the helpful content update roll-out on 25th August 2022 and it was completed in the next two weeks.  

This update is a reiteration of what Google has been insisting on over the past few years—to prioritise people over search engines. 

Google's helpful content update isn't anything new or shocking. It's a rebranding of what good SEOs already know – that good content is optimised for humans, not search engines.

Rachel Ferguson, Associate Director of Marketing at OakNorth Bank

How does Google Helpful Content Update 2022 Work?

As mentioned earlier, the helpful content system would reward the content that satisfies users’ requirements and demote the unhelpful content. 

This system generates a site-wide signal that the Google algorithm considers in addition to other ranking signals. And the system would separate the valuable content from unhelpful or low-value content. 

So if a website has a large amount of low-value content, it would also adversely affect the ranking of other quality content on the same site. This classifying process is entirely automated and is based on a machine-learning model.  

What Niches are Impacted?

Although the helpful content update does not target a specific niche, Google hinted that some of the niches may see more impact as compared to others. These niches include: 

• Online educational materials
• Arts and entertainment
• eCommerce, online shopping
• Tech-related

It’s mainly because there are more historic occurrences of search-engine first content in the above niches. 

What does Google Helpful Content Update Mean for your Site?

As long as you’re creating content that provides value to your target audience and answers their queries satisfactorily, you don’t have to worry much about the helpful content update. 

But if the sole purpose of your content creation has revolved around search engine rankings, you’d need to rework the content strategy for your website. 

I think SEOs and content marketers who have been creating content for people first won't need to refine their strategies too much! Those who have been focusing on pleasing the robots first will need to start thinking differently.

Karli Jaenike, SEO & Content Marketer, and Founder at Wild Idea

That said, below are the main areas to focus on if you want your content to perform well after the Google helpful content update 2022.

People-first Content

Reputable SEOs, content marketers, and agencies have long been complying with Google’s content guidelines to create reliable, helpful, and people-first content. 

Google recommends testing your content on the following grounds: 

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually 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 for product reviews?

Let’s hear it from Christoph Trappe, Director of Content Strategy at Voxpopme, about his approach to people-first content.

Google is looking for clear-cut ways that you demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge. So you can’t just say you are an expert. You have to show it. And the easiest way to do that is by giving examples, sharing details, and being specific.

For example, you’re running an affiliate marketing blog on SaaS products. In this case, you can write better, in-depth, and honest reviews, if you first try and experiment with the software. 

Avoid Creating Content only for Search Engines

Producing people-first content and avoiding search engines-first content doesn’t indicate that you don’t have to optimise for search engines. 

What it means is: Create content for humans first and optimise it later for search engines by following Google’s optimisation guidelines. 

Here’s a list of questions from Google that can help you avoid creating search engine-focused content:

• 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 trending 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 any real expertise, but instead 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?

If your answer is “yes” to the above questions, you must consider changing your approach to content creation. 

Google themselves have been making progressively more signals as to what is important to them with regards to the content. We always push our clients to not produce the type of content that would be impacted by this kind of update.

Tom Bestwick, Content Marketing & PR Consultant at Hallam

Let us help you understand it with an example: 

Say, you’re a plumbing business based out of Darwin. Now, if you’re creating real estate content just to rank for those keywords and drive traffic to your site, most likely it’s going to lack expertise and first-hand knowledge. 

Based on the above questions, it’s going to be unhelpful and search engine-first content, according to Google. 

How To Know If You’ve Been Hit

If you’re wondering whether the Google content update August 2022 has impacted your website, consider looking for these signs. 

Drop in Rankings

First, check the movement in your site’s rankings in SERPs for your niche keywords. By tracking the changes in the rankings, you’d be able to determine whether the core update has impacted your site negatively or positively. 

If your site has limited content and isn’t ranking for many keywords, you can simply check your rankings in Google search. Conversely, if you have a well-established site that ranks for a large number of niche keywords, you can use professional SEO and marketing tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. 

Reduced Traffic

Needless to say, your organic traffic is largely dependent on your organic rankings. If you’re observing a drop in ranking, you’d experience a decline in your organic traffic too. 

You can monitor your website traffic in Google Analytics and compare the trends in organic visits before and after a few months from the helpful content update launch date. This way, you’d get to know if the core update has impacted your site’s performance in Google Search. 

And once you’re sure that your site is affected, you can take the necessary steps to audit and update your content. 

How to Perform a Content Audit for the Helpful Content Update

Whether your site is impacted by an algorithm update or not, it’s important to audit your content inventory at regular intervals. It helps you improve your site’s content quality, UX, and overall SEO health. 

However, for the core update like the helpful content update that is specifically addressing content quality aspects, you should consider a thorough content audit. 

It’s advisable to review the entire site and evaluate it at the page level, then in sections, types, and intent classifications to determine where the low quality may be hiding. No page type is exempt. You have to break the silos.

Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse

With that in mind, here’s how you can conduct a thorough content audit for the Google content update.

Plan your Audit

Content audit is a time-consuming process and requires detailed planning to achieve its objectives. Here’s how you can plan your audit:

• Set audit goals: To conduct a successful content audit, you need to define clear objectives as to what you want to achieve from the audit. In the context of helpful content update, your primary audit goal can be as simple as identifying the unhelpful or low-quality content on your site. And your secondary goals can be improving audience engagement and SEO performance.
• Take inventory of your content assets: Before you begin your audit, you need to know what type of content assets you want to review. For example, you can plan a separate content audit for your internal content resources such as landing pages, blog, other educational materials, etc. and external content assets like YouTube, social media accounts, and forums. 

Analyse your Content

Next, you need to create a list of the content pieces that you’re going to analyse. You can use a simple spreadsheet for the same. 

Here you want to check each of the content pieces against the self-reflective questions from Google that we shared in the earlier section — “What does Google Helpful Content Update Mean for your Site?”. 

The goal is to get a “yes” for each question in the “People-first Content” section and “no” for every question in the “Avoid Creating Content only for Search Engines” section. 

Then you can classify the content assets as: 

• Helpful: Ones that comply with the above requirements, and
• Unhelpful: Ones that don’t meet the requirements

Fortunately, our website is not impacted by the helpful content update. It’s mainly because we’ve kept the focus on our target audience for a long time now. And that’s what we always advise our clients — be customer-centric

Hardy at Supple Digital

Update your Content

Once you’ve evaluated all the content assets and categorised them as helpful and unhelpful, you can plan to update these resources. 

To prioritize the older posts, think of 2x2 matrix with topic search volume potential on one axis and business impact on the other:

• High potential/high impact: Refresh first (Example: high-intent, high-traffic keyword)
• High potential/low impact: Refresh next (Example: high-traffic, TOFU keyword)
• Low potential/high impact: Unindex (Example: product update)
• Low potential/low impact: Prune and redirect (Example: irrelevant or low-traffic TOFU keyword)

Ryan Baum Content Lead - Gorgias

Here’s how you can go about it: 

• Edit/rewrite: You don’t have to update every unhelpful content piece. Just update or rewrite the ones that have high traffic potential and business relevance. 
• No-index: Unindex the pages that don’t have much traffic potential but have some business relevance. 
• Remove: Delete or redirect the pages that don’t have traffic as well as business potential. 

How to Produce People-First Content and Avoid Writing for Search Engines

Although you don’t need an algorithm update to make you prioritise humans over search engines, the helpful content update has fueled the urgency for people-first content.  

We have three basic areas of advice to keep your content high in the SERPs with the new Helpful Content Update: 

• Stay in your lane: Write about topics that pertain to your business, that you’re an expert on, and are for your audience.
• Answer the searcher’s question: Provide an expert and unique perspective along with answers to likely follow-up questions.
• Don’t hack the algorithm: Aim for content lengths that satisfy the reader’s query.

Tom Bestwick, Content Marketing & PR Consultant at Hallam

Here are some more tips to help you serve your audience better with people-first content and avoid creating search engine-focused content. 

Focus on your User Personas

People-first content essentially means writing content keeping your target audience in mind at all times. Savvy SEOs and content creators already know this and have been implementing it in their content strategy. 

For instance, Rachel Ferguson, Associate Director of Marketing at OakNorth Bank, mentioned: 

We have weekly sessions with different parts of the business to find out what is impacting our customers so we can adapt to their needs and serve them the most useful content in the current climate.

Thus, if you know your audience thoroughly, you can create content on topics that appeal to them and attempt to answer their questions comprehensively. The idea is to leave your readers satisfied and better equipped to handle the query or problem they searched for. 

These are some of the ways you can find out what your customers are interested in: 

• Engage with them on social platforms
• Leverage Google Analytics to understand how visitors engage with your website
• Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to conduct thorough keyword research
• Talk to your customers, sales team, and customer support team, etc. 

Satisfy User’s Search Intent

Search intent is the primary objective—or simply the “why”—behind the user's search query. And the simplest way to stay relevant and helpful to users is by satisfying their search intent through your content. 

Take a look at these two questions from the self-assessment questions listed in Google's helpful content update announcement: 

• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?

If your content correctly and comprehensively answers users’ questions, they won’t have to search for more information. So make sure you pack your content with valuable, in-depth, and actionable information that users can act on and solve their problems. 

Create Expert-led Content

The Internet is filled with an overwhelming amount of repeated and rehashed content. 

For instance, it’s a common practice among content creators to pick some of the top-ranking pages on a topic and create a similar or marginally improved piece of content carrying the same angle and takeaways. 

However, Google doesn’t want to serve the same information over and over to its users. 

Google is looking for something with a unique perspective, proprietary data, or a different angle. If you have an expert (or can involve an expert) to interview and include quotes from, that will help you provide unique information that nobody else can. That's how you win in today's SERPs!

Karli Jaenike, SEO & Content Marketer, and Founder at Wild Idea

Thus, experts’ insights can help you make your content unique and provide different angles to your audience. Besides, it also gives you an opportunity to help your audience with expert, actionable solutions from industry leaders. 

Tips to Recover from the Helpful Content Update Hit

Now let’s take a look at some quick tips to recover if your site is impacted by Google's helpful content update. 

Remove Existing Unhelpful Content

As mentioned earlier, the first thing you want to do is audit your existing content and update or remove the unhelpful content from your website. 

Consider going through older content and weighing it against the best practices. Delete what’s outdated and not helpful. Valuable pieces could also be used in other content assets as well.

Christoph Trappe, Director of Content Strategy at Voxpopme

So consider getting rid of: 

• AI-generated content: If you’ve been publishing content that is entirely created by AI tools or software, consider removing such pieces.  
• Recycled Content: If you’ve published content that is merely a recycled version of other top results on SERPs, you should get rid of it. 
• Spun Pages: If you’ve created content with article spinners (software that rewrites other articles to make them unique) and published it on your site, you must remove them. Google identifies it as a black-hat SEO tactic and may penalise your site. 

Improve Your User Experience

Your website’s user experience (UX) has a direct impact on your overall SEO and Google has repeatedly emphasised its importance. An effective UX design not only results in a delightful experience for your visitors but also boosts your engagement and conversion rates. 

For instance, 38% of users will stop interacting with an app or site that has poor UX. At the same time, a good UX design can increase a website’s conversions by up to 200%. 

Here are some quick tips to improve your site’s UX: 

• Optimise page loading speed
• Use optimum white space on your webpages
• Break down your content into bite-sized chunks with subheadings and bullet points
• Maintain design consistency in your pages
• Leverage appealing calls to action 
• Create hyperlink differentiation by using different colour text, etc. 

Keep Your Content Aligned To Your Niche

You may think that producing content on a wide range of topics can help you attract more traffic to your site. However, Google considers content to be helpful when you’re sharing your own experiences and expertise. 

Now, you can’t have first-hand experience with multiple niches. So it’s better to stick to your own industry and share valuable experiences in detail to educate your readers. 

This would not only keep your visitors coming back to you repeatedly but also signal Google that you’re an authority in your niche. This way, you can start building a topical authority in your industry on search engines. 

Additionally, when you produce a range of content pieces in your niche, you can easily create a robust internal linking structure for your website. This helps search engines crawl & understand your site better and leads readers to different pages on your site. 

Demonstrate First-hand Experience

Google has recently added an additional E (for Experience) in its search rater guidelines that are based on the concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust). So, now it’s E-E-A-T framework. 

By including Experience in this framework, Google also wants to check whether the content comes from the creator's first-hand experience. For example, if the person has used the product or visited a place and writes about it. 

I think the biggest change most companies will have to make is the introduction of subject matter expert interviews, to provide specific, actionable advice that’s actually correct. They should already be doing this from a quality standpoint, but it’s even more important now to satisfy the new “experience” element of Google’s E-E-A-T framework.

Ryan Baum Content Lead - Gorgias

That’s why it makes more sense to create content in your industry or area of expertise. This way, you can produce original content from your own experience and provide value to users. 

Avoid Obviously Scaled Content Strategies

Content creators have always focused on scaling up content creation in order to have more indexable assets in Google Search’s database. It comes from the thought that a higher number of indexed pages may result in more traffic and conversion opportunities. 

As a result, many websites started scaling up content creation with the help of AI content tools and software like article spinners. 

However, the said traffic and conversions would only come if your pages manage to rank high on SERPs. And Google has repeatedly shown its stand against auto-generated and scaled content. 

Hence, such AI-generated content may struggle to rank on Google and drive traffic from there. With the helpful content update, Google has clearly advised to avoid these scaled content strategies. 

Final Remarks

With every algorithm update, Google focuses on creating a better search experience for its users. Not to forget, these Google users also include your target audience. 

So, if you just focus on serving your audience with original, in-depth, trustworthy, and actionable content, you’d automatically be in Google’s good books. You won’t have to over-optimise your content for search engines. 

Just follow what Google says “Create content for humans, not for search engines” and your site will be in a much better position on SERPs. 

Want our experts to help you with a content audit and creating people-first content? Feel free to reach out to us.