It’s official: Google’s September 2023 Helpful Content Update is finished. What is it and what does it mean for your business strategy? 

What is the helpful content update? 

The Helpful Content Update was originally released in August 2022. Google’s aim is to “better ensure people see original, helpful content created for people in search results.” 

Here, Google is looking to move away from content that is created with the intent to rank well in search engines for a keyword or group of keywords and provides no valuable or ‘help’ to searchers. 

Google’s key goal is to help searchers find high-quality content that answers their questions quickly and provides them with the information they need to take action. Think about when you use Google - are you frustrated when you can’t find the information you need immediately? Do you have time to visit 5-10 different websites to piece together the information you need? 

Usually, the answer is no! 

As a result, the Helpful Content Update aims to reward the content that’s useful and written primarily for the human user rather than to please Google’s algorithm. This is an ‘ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in search’. 

Why does this matter to you? 

If Google’s algorithms decide that your website has a high amount of unhelpful content, you’re going to struggle to get your website to rank. Even if you’ve got some helpful content in there, it’s not going to make much of a difference. 

If your site is impacted by the update, you’ll start to see a drop-off in rankings over the next couple of weeks, and it may take a few months to recover. We all know that there aren’t really any quick fixes when it comes to SEO, so you need to build content over time to prove that you’re looking to provide your visitors with the information they need rather than simply trying to please the search engines. 

How do you know if the content you’re producing is people-first or search engine-first? Google has provided a list of questions that it’s worth looking into whether you can answer or not before, during and after creating content.  

Google states: “Sites identified by this update may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.” 

Another factor to take into consideration is many previous Google updates have been applied on a page-by-page basis but this update is sitewide. 

What does that mean? 

It means that if Google deems your entire site to be producing high amounts of unhelpful content, the whole site will be impacted instead of just the page that is considered to be unhelpful. 

You can find our recommendations on the actions you can take to make sure your site provides helpful content in our blog: How do you create ‘helpful’ content for your business? And get your site to rank in the search engines 🤫

What do we think? 

These updates signal Google’s shift over the last few years to creating a good user experience for searchers and being able to provide users with the exact information they’re looking for at the exact moment they need it. Google doesn’t want users scrolling through pages of irrelevant content before they find the answer they need. 

It looks like the lines between a good user experience (UX) and good SEO are becoming blurred, and from Logica’s perspective, this is great news! 

Buyers are savvier than ever across both B2C and B2B markets, so being able to provide them with exactly what they need at the click of a button is certainly going to set your brand apart from the rest. 

Being able to provide your website visitors with valuable information that solves their needs and problems helps to fill your sales pipeline with customers who are engaged and ready to buy from you once they’ve done their research. 

If you’d like to know more about creating helpful content for Google, why not get in touch with our team? We’d be happy to provide advice and a quick audit of your website content. 

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