‘Helpful content’ has been a cornerstone of Google’s ranking systems for many years. It aims to better rank those websites that provide “helpful, reliable, people-first content”. In other words, it’s about putting your customers first, rather than optimising for machines and crawlers.
Here we take a look at the development of Google’s focus on helpful content and the best practices for ensuring your website is human-first and therefore more likely to rank higher in search.
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What is Helpful Content?
Helpful content is content created to aid the human reading or viewing it. If you’re developing content with the primary aim of ranking on search engines and in AI, then your site may be unhelpful to real people and your rankings are unlikely to improve.
Real people use search engines and AI to find answers to questions: How do I make this meal? What’s the best car on the market? What are some ideas for birthday gifts? Where can I buy this product? Helpful content addresses these questions and answers them fully and accurately, even anticipating follow-up questions.
Websites with helpful content leave the user feeling satisfied because they’ve been able to easily find the information they need. Helpful content helps build trust, move users towards making a purchase, and improves business reputation.
The History of Helpful Content
In the early (and not-so-early) days of search, Google and other search engines were much less sophisticated. They were less able to understand and replicate how humans approach content, and so a simple way to rank well in search was to optimise for the bots, crawlers, and machines that assessed your website.
But this caused frustrations for real-life users who struggled to find the relevant information that they wanted. They would have to bounce between several top-ranking sites until they found what they really needed.
Gradually, Google and other search engines became more sophisticated and then, in 2022, Google launched the Helpful Content Update. The aim was to remove “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people”.
With the growth of AI, other techniques have evolved that aim to serve AI crawlers rather than people. The implementation of features such as AI markdown and hyper sectioning of content means that websites, once again, can be more frustrating for people to experience. Google continues to develop and release updates to restrict the success of such content.
How to Create Helpful Content
In its helpful content guide, Google sets out a number of questions to ask yourself to help decide whether your content is useful. However, this doesn’t necessarily paint the whole picture and it’s important to look at the subject from a broader SEO perspective too.
Consider Audience Needs and Wants
The first step to creating helpful content is to know who you’re providing it for. Who is your audience? What do they want? How does your product or service help them?
Get to know your audience and you can create content that more effectively leads them to a purchase.
Choose Format
Consider the best, most helpful content format for your users. Do they like text? Would video be more appropriate? Perhaps lots of graphics and imagery is the way to go? Again, knowing your audience is key here, and while one person might find a step-by-step written guide helpful, another may prefer a “show don’t tell” method.
Content can be very long or very short-form, and everything in between. Consider an in-depth, 3,000-word essay, a video showing how to use a product, in-depth product specs, or reviews. Content comes in all sorts of formats, and which you use will depend on audience, placement, and subject.
Get the Length Right
The length of your content will very much depend on the subject and, again, your audience. A guide to a complex topic isn’t going to be very helpful if it’s only a couple of hundred words long. On the flip side, creating a 50-minute video describing a single candle you sell is going to mostly be bloat.
Remember: your content should be there to answer the user’s questions, and to provide information that they find useful. Content that’s too long is boring and repetitive, and may be hard to extract relevant details from. Content that’s too short may not hold enough information to be valuable.
Think About Language
What kind of language resonates with your audience? What kind of words and phrasing would help them best understand your content?
The type of language you use will come down to both your audience and your brand. A peppy brand aimed at teenagers will be very different to that of a company that runs yoga retreats, or from a business that specialises in antiques.
If you use wording that’s too complex or too simple for your audience, they’ll find the content less helpful (or be less willing to consume it), so picking your words carefully is important .
Consider Page Layout
Think about how you read a webpage or watch a video. Do you watch every minute or read every word? Or do you skip through it to find a specific nugget of information?
Chances are, you do both, depending on your goals at the time. That’s why it’s important for businesses to cater for skimmers as well as those who are going to consume something in full. Think about how you could break content into sections for easy navigation, or highlight particularly pertinent information that can be picked out at a glance.
Think about using a table of contents, video bookmarks, text formatting, and filters to achieve this goal.
Demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)
Google is very keen to share information that is accurate, unique, and backed up by genuine knowledge and understanding. It specifically advises against using duplicate content, or content that provides the same old information in the same old way.
When the internet is so full of information – much of it very similar – your personal expertise and experience is invaluable here. No one can have exactly the same experience as you. Google uses a measure called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) to identify – in part – how helpful content is.
Consider how you can bring your own unique perspective to your content. Have you tested the products you’re selling? Can you share tips and recommendations as a result? Do you know your subject in-depth enough that you can impart plenty of useful information? If you don’t, then consider having an expert check and approve your content (and share that you’ve done so).
Trustworthiness comes from proving your knowledge and experience. It also comes from being honest. Don’t promise to answer questions where an answer doesn’t exist. Drawing users in with false information is heavily frowned upon and you should absolutely avoid misleading site visitors or outright lying to them.
Finally, if it’s relevant, link to any relevant sources, double-check for easily-verifiable errors, and link to author bio pages that outline qualifications and expertise.
Stay Focused
What is your site’s primary focus or aim? Is all your content relevant?
There may be a current trending subject receiving a lot of interest, so you decide to jump on the bandwagon and write a blog or record a video about it. However, if that topic has nothing to do with your site, Google is going to look unfavourably on the content you create around it.
For example, a site selling garden supplies doesn’t need to write about the best local wedding venues. Even if the content is informative, it’s not relevant to the site.
Always Be Human-First
Ultimately, good Search Engine Optimisation is all about putting the human user first. Remember that you’re creating content to help a person – your customer – and not a robot like Google or ChatGPT.
If you’re not sure about how helpful your content is, then get feedback. Find a friend who would be similar to your ideal customer. Or contact your past and current customers and ask for their feedback. Getting real-life responses will really help you create successful, helpful content.
Conclusion
Google wants your content to be helpful to potential customers and consumers so, when you achieve this, your site is more likely to be seen in both traditional and AI searches.
In order to create useful content, consider your audience first of all: who are they, what are their pain points, what questions are they asking, what is the key information they need? Then provide the relevant information in a format that suits the subject and audience, and that is backed up by expertise and experience.