Have you ever wondered how Google decides who gets listed first on its results pages?
If not, you should do!
Your website’s position on that list determines how many potential clients click through to your website and this impacts how many leads your website generates. The higher you rank, the more clicks you get. Afterall, how often do you look at page 2 or 3 of the results when you search for the products and services you use?
Google determines who gets the top spot using a complicated computer algorithm. Every so often, it alters the algorithm as a response to trends they see developing in the digital marketing world.
Recently, Google has released a new update called its Helpful Content Update and we at Twogether Digital are excited to see the result. Because if the effect is as significant as they claim, business owners like you should hopefully feel the benefit. The update could have a big impact on companies that are trying to generate leads through their websites by creating authoritative, user-focused content.
What is included in the update?
The new update is mainly focusing on improving how Google judges the quality of the content on your site. In the world of digital marketing, the term “content” is used to describe the articles, videos, files and images that populate your site. Producing content to draw traffic or leads on to your site is known as content marketing. Google’s Helpful Content Update is designed to penalise sites that produce poorly written content and extensive amounts of content written by Artificial Intelligence. It also promises to penalise websites that are producing content that is not directly relevant to their website’s industry or focus.
How will this help users?
It might seem strange that websites are creating and adding content that has no relevance to their industry. Why would anyone bother writing about topics that aren’t related to their company or the services that they sell?
But many websites have taken advantage of a loophole in Google’s algorithm and realised that so long as they get plenty of visitors, it doesn’t matter who those visitors are. So, they create articles about topics that lots of people are searching for in order to have them land on their site. The high volume of traffic is registered as a positive signal to Google, which then helps the website to rank higher on their search engine results pages.
As a consequence, you can technically have websites that are owned by companies who sell motorbikes containing content about how homebakers can convert grams to ounces! The two topics are completely different; someone baking a cake has no interest in business insurance when they search for the answer to their question “how many grams are in an ounce?”, but because the content is ranking well, they land on the site owned by the motorbike manufacturer. The motorbike company does very well out of this well-won website traffic, but the local baker who writes about the same thing and whose blog has been outranked has lost potential website visitors who may turn into customers if they develop a rapport with the braker’s brand.
Sometimes too these sites are monetised (e.g. they have lots of adverts), and the users post masses of content to ensure plenty of users travel to the site to see the adverts. Their main aim isn’t to ensure the information is correct, informative or useful. Google wants to stop these kinds of sites from making it to the top ten of the results page.
The Helpful Content Update is designed to tackle this tactic so that those who are writing about topics that have no relevance to their industry’s target audience are penalised.
What are the potential benefits of the update?
So, now that we know what this update is and what it’s aiming to address, how might a business owner of an SME benefit from the Helpful Content Update? We think that there are at least 3 tangible benefits.
- More work for content creators
AI written content is a relative newcomer to the digital marketing world. Used well and edited thoroughly, it can really support content writers to deliver accurate, relevant content. But used prolifically, and without human editing, it can add very little value to the end-user. With the Helpful Content Update penalising sites that don’t bother using human editors, there should be a knock-on effect for those working in the industry, with marketing agencies spending more of their budget on employing good quality content writers. This is good news for those whose jobs are in the content marketing and copywriting fields. - More impact for modest budgets
Many of the companies producing content on topics not connected with their niche have enormous marketing budgets. SMEs really struggle to compete with this level of investment, and as such can struggle to see a real impact from their more modest content marketing campaigns.The Helpful Content Update should work to level the playing field somewhat. Although companies with bigger budgets will still end up spending lots of money on marketing, smaller businesses that may have a lot more expertise in a niche will have the chance to get their authoritative, well-written content ranked in the search results. This will only result in more traffic (and hopefully more leads) for smaller businesses. - More visibility for industry experts online
Google always wants users to get the best quality information it can when it clicks on a search result. Therefore, with this new Update rolled out, those who demonstrate their authoritative, industry specific knowledge in their website content should, in theory, find they rank higher for and get more traffic. This will only be good for those who are experts in their field; any regular people will benefit from their knowledge and expertise too.
Will the update work?
Google’s update is designed to help the end user. If people find the information they are getting through the search results are wrong, they will stop using the search engine behemoth. It’s not necessarily to make sure that small companies get more visibility online (although that should be one of the end results for some).
But it remains to be seen whether the update will really have the impact that it claims. The update is slowly being rolled out over the course of several weeks, and as with everything to do with SEO, there can be a lagtime between cause and effect. How well can Google really weed out all the websites who are producing poor quality content? How well will they be able to judge whether an article topic is outside of a website’s niche? Will nefarious content writers find ways to circumvent the update in the long-run? Only time will tell.
