Have a website? This google SEO update is important

If you have a website or blog, this is important!

Google will be implementing a new SEO update which will change the way it ranks websites. In this article, I will run through the update, how to know if you will be harmed or helped and how to get ahead of the competition and make this work to your advantage.

From google’s introductory sentence to the update, you can see what the new SEO system will be looking for.

So, it wants content which is:

• original
• helpful
• satisfying
• meets people’s expectations
• written by people (not AI)

If you hit those criteria, this update may actually benefit you.

In the article, they emphasise the phrase 'people-first content'. Specifying that the first focus is to create satisfying content and that SEO best practices brings searchers additional value.

There is a list of questions to assess your content against:

1. do you have an existing audience or a clear target audience?
2. does your content clearly demonstrate in-depth knowledge or first-hand expertise?
3. do you have a niche or primary purpose?
4. can a person leave your content feeling what they came there for was answered/satisified?
5. Are you keeping in with Google’s guidance for core updates and product reviews?

If you answer yes to most of these, you may be safe!

However, answering yes to any of the below might suggest that you are taking a search engine-first approach and therefore, may be harmed by the new google SEO update.

Here is the list:

And finally, how the update will work?

• It is already being rolled out as of this video and could take up to two weeks.
• The system will introduce a new site-wide signal for ranking web pages.
• Their systems will automatically identify content that seems to have little value, low-value-added or is otherwise not helpful to those doing searches.
• Sites which seem to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall are less likely to perform well in search.
• This update impacts English searches globally, to begin with, and then, there are plans to expand into other languages.
• There will be a period of refinement to make sure the classifier works correctly.

What to do now?

Google actually recommends removing unhelpful content so it doesn’t damage the rankings of your other content. They’ve said, even if the site has been flagged as one with unhelpful content, if you remove that content and replace it with better quality, helpful content, after a period of months, the classification will no longer apply.

This is also a great opportunity to get ahead. You know this information now but your competitors may not, or maybe they do but they don’t think they need to do anything about it.

Here is what you need to do to get ahead of your competition before they all catch up:

• Fine-tune and refine your site
• Add more helpful content
• Make sure you are following all of google’s guidelines
• Create more posts answering frequently asked questions in your niche
• Create some helpful videos to embed

The best news is that in addition to this, Google will launch further efforts to better reward people-first content.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update*