👀😬
Part of me appreciates the honesty. The blatant keyword grab fits the brand’s irreverent personality. I also enjoyed the gentle mocking of modern website structure, tucking the unsightly content bits where we don’t think people see them.
The more significant part of me wondered what Google thought of such BRAZEN activity.
My answer came pretty quickly.
Introducing: Google’s Helpful Content Update
Look, I’m not saying I caused it, but nine days after I shared this, Google announced the Helpful Content Update. The update introduces a new signal Google will use to rank websites, rewarding content written by humans for humans and devaluing content written to influence search engines.
Google is saying, “I see what you’re doing, Mr. Water Bottle Site. Now, stop.”
👉 Does your website prioritize keyword rankings over providing value to a living, breathing person? If yes, it’s time to change course.
This Google update could be significant. Unlike others we've seen, the Helpful Content Update will have a sitewide impact. If Google finds too much “unhelpful” content on your website, the whole domain will see decreased visibility.
Google provided two sets of questions to help you determine if the update will affect you. Yes, read those, but there's an easier way to think about it.
⚡Lisa’s Guide To Writing Helpful Content
First, optimizing your content for search engines is still essential. SEO is not dead, dying, or evil.
Go ahead. Read that again.
Helping search engines understand your authority and relevance to a topic helps the end user by making your content easier to find.
So, how can you do that while creating the people-first content Google wishes to reward?
1. Align content with business goals.
Setting metrics and KPIs for your content keeps everyone honest. It ensures that you create strategic assets aimed at specific use cases rather than chasing keywords or rising trends.
Goals give your content purpose and help earn buy-in from internal stakeholders. It ensures you’re thinking about the different content objectives and types of content needed to reach varying audiences. Your business goals should dictate your content strategy, not your keyword tool.
Knowing why you’re creating content will help guide the content you create.
2. Write content around your expertise.
“Write what you know” reads like exceptionally-obvious writing advice. Yet, we’ve all found ourselves consuming articles where it’s clear an AI generator wrote the content or, worse, a junior-level SEO.
Stop that.
Your content strategy should focus on demonstrating your expertise and helping your audience become more informed about a product or area of interest. That’s not to say you can’t write an off-topic post or talk about things that don’t immediately dial up to your business, but this shouldn’t represent the majority of your content.
Understand your audience and your purpose, and build your content strategy accordingly.
[If your website or blog does contain a high amount of unrelated content, this is the time to audit it and fix it.]
3. Be the search result you want to find.
My toxic trait is writing a 6,000-word blog post to answer every question you might ever have about a topic.
You have hobbies. I have an intense need for people-pleasing.
💡 As writers (and marketers overseeing writers), we have an incredible opportunity to shape the search results by building the information someone else will use to decide, learn, or grow. That power intoxicates me.
Write people-first content by putting yourself in your audiences' shoes and creating the content they’d want to find.
- What are their pain points?
- What questions do they have?
- What are their objections?
If you don’t automagically have all the answers to create the ULTIMATE content piece on your own (hint: you don't), there are strategies to get them.
- Interview your audience. Talk with actual and potential customers about what keeps them up at night, how they research information, and their secret wants and wishes. Use that insight to create a complete picture of their problems and draw a connection to how you solve them. A tool can help you identify words, but speaking with people provides the color needed to understand intent.
- Leverage your subject matter experts. Your experts know the topic best, but they might not be the most suited to explain it to someone else. At Overit, we’ve found it helpful to hold knowledge transfer sessions that allow subject matter experts to share what they know with our content team. Then, our writers produce the content for their review. We make the process shampoo simple for the SMEs to share knowledge by setting up face-to-face interviews, creating recordable Zoom meetings, or letting them use a voice recorder while driving home or after putting the kids to sleep. Transcribing the conversation gets the information out of an expert's head and into an accessible format.
- Audit what you have. If it’s in your core area of focus, you likely have content somewhere. A webinar. A case study. A sales sheet. An old brochure. A blog post. An email you received five years ago. Don't let good content rot. Revisit your existing assets and find ways to reuse, repackage, and update them.
4. Adopt workflows to make content scalable
Taking a content piece from ideation to completion involves more than trapping a writer in a room with snacks. It’s a team sport that can include:
- 👩🔬 A data marketer to provide insights into audience behavior
- 👩 A content strategist to turn data into strategy
- 🤓 A subject matter expert to share knowledge
- ✍️ A copywriter to find the story
- 👀 An editor to reorganize words like furniture
- 👨🎨 A designer to create graphics and introduce flow
- 🤖 A developer to get it loaded
- 🗂️ A project manager to wrangle those people
Oh, and buy-in from your executive team.
Marketing teams must adopt a scalable framework for creating content- it was essential before the Google Helpful Content Update, and its importance continues.
We’ve seen clients do this successfully with internal task teams dedicated to the mission. Workflows are created that identify the steps, who is involved, and the process and sign-offs required. These processes develop rules for how the content gets created AND how it will be updated and maintained.
Again, no letting content rot. Keep it fresh with updated information, research, and graphics.
We've also seen clients partner with an agency like Overit to build and manage that content process. Sometimes it's easier to let vetted teams run while you stay on as the subject matter expert. Whichever way you go, putting that framework in place is critical.
Google's new update officially rolled out this week and is a good reminder that:
- Creating helpful content for people, by people, was our true purpose all along.
- Helpful content doesn't happen accidentally. It happens by process and with intent.
Thanks for reading. It's good to talk to you again, and I wish you major good content vibes.
I'll be back in two weeks.
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