Understanding Google’s Helpful Content Update
It’s essential to have a well-defined and well-researched keyword portfolio related to your website’s purpose and to properly optimize your website so that your target keywords are highlighted for Google and other search engine crawlers.
That said, Google’s Helpful Content Update has search engine crawlers that analyze your content’s quality and relevance. It’s not enough to choose a keyword with many monthly searches that you think would be great only to lead search users to find content that isn’t useful or relevant.
You need content that helps the search user find the information they seek.
Simply put, to capture top Google Search rankings, you must provide helpful content for people using Google to search for information.
Here are some tips to help you continue to rank for keywords and prevent your online visibility from reducing or completely vanishing:
Tip #1: Keyword Relevance
Ensure that the keywords you’re trying to rank for are related to your business directly, not just keywords with a lot of traffic that you can loosely justify.
Tip #2: On-site Linking Strategy
Ensure that your internal linking strategy (how you link pages within your website) leads the user to relevant, valuable information from one page to another.
Ensure your external linking strategy (how you link to other websites) leads users to websites that provide valuable and relevant information.
Do not mislead the search user for your gain.
Tip #3: Content structure
Ensure your content is well structured, using headings and paragraph content properly so the article flows logically and cohesively.
Your content should be easy to scan.
Tip #4: Writing Quality
Ensure your content readability, grammar, and spelling are on point.
Double-check your content for any semantic or grammar issues, and try to write at the appropriate readability level for your audience.
Generally speaking, your content’s readability should be around a 12th-grade level.
Tip #5: Content Relevance
Ensure your writing relates to the keywords you’re using and optimizing for. If you cover peripheral topics, you’re better off creating a content cluster of content pages by breaking the ideas into separate pages.
Only combine a few ideas into one article; ensure it’s valuable and related to that search user’s intent.
Think about the person searching for this keyword and what they might be looking for – make sure to provide relevant and focused information for the user’s search.
Tip #6: Proper Optimization
All this talk about quality content is focused on the human reader, ensuring applicable content is served to people searching the web. This is increasingly important with Google’s Latest Update, but we still need to remember that your target keywords are well-researched and optimized.
Alongside providing quality content, you must adequately optimize your website for search engine crawlers to ensure you rank your high-quality content. Additionally, you must ensure that you don’t overstuff keywords and that they naturally fit into your high-quality content.
