What is Helpful Content? A Guide to Google’s Helpful Content Updates

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You might ask yourself: “Helpful content? Who’s creating UNhelpful content?” Believe it or not, there are many websites out there designed to exploit Google’s ranking algorithms to make a quick buck.

Some good news: If you’re already concerned about keeping your website helpful, you probably don’t need to be concerned about these algorithm changes. Most established sites with dedicated SEO strategies are already generating helpful content.

Still, Google’s ongoing updates to its Helpful Content System can impact even the most helpful sites. This is why it’s so important to stay up-to-date on changing algorithms and search trends. As new algorithm updates roll out and Google’s ranking strategy continues to evolve, even the most established sites should remain focused on producing high-quality content.

Read more about Google’s Helpful Content Update below and learn how to use these updates to earn an organic boost for your website.

What is the Helpful Content Update?

In August 2022, Google rolled out its first algorithm update focused on promoting helpful content. The Helpful Content System, a suite of ranking factors Google uses to determine the “helpfulness” of content, was designed to improve the search landscape by:

  1. Elevating content that searchers find most informative, and 
  2. Flagging for penalty any content that doesn’t offer value to searchers.

An important note: Helpful content is a site-wide signal, meaning that any unhelpful content on your site can impact your entire site’s performance.

Since that first roll out, two other iterations of the Helpful Content System have been introduced, with the most recent edition coming live in September 2023. And with so much buzz around the system to this day, it seems likely that an emphasis on helpful content will remain relevant for the long term.

What is Helpful Content?

As defined by Google, helpful content is “original, helpful content created for people.” Generally, this means that your site content answers the questions that searchers are asking in Google Search and leaves a visitor feeling satisfied after visiting your site.

Experts at Search Engine Land have identified four main factors to consider when determining whether a site’s content is helpful:

  1. Content is designed with a specific purpose and audience in mind.
  2. Content relies on (and makes prominent) expertise on the topic.
  3. Content is trustworthy and credible.
  4. Content is designed to help searchers find what they’re looking for.

Keeping these factors in mind when developing new content, or auditing existing webpages, ensures that your site benefits searchers, maintains its search rankings, and drives more organic traffic.

4 Major Factors That Make for Helpful Content

Google has made it very clear that its Helpful Content System exists to meet the needs of searchers. But without clear guidance, it can be very difficult to know exactly how to judge your site’s content quality. These four criteria can help SEOs and content creators to understand exactly what that requires.

1. Designed for a Specific Audience

Optimizing a site for SEO is often a numbers game. Content marketers are always looking for high-search volume keywords to target, while remaining in a level of competition that makes sense for their brand and allows them to rank.

However, while a robust and varied content repository is important to have, sites must still be careful to “stay in their lane.” For example, if my website is about photography, I shouldn’t be writing articles about toy cars. It’s too far from the core topic of my site, and my target audience isn’t coming to my website to learn about toy cars.

Your website should have one, clear focus. Broadening your content base in that space is fine, but moving into completely different verticals can signal that your site is more focused on ranking for more keywords than helping your audience find what they’re looking for. And at the end of the day, writing content for people is most important anyways. Building winning content strategies requires a clear focus and robust supporting articles.

This is why the popular pillar page strategy is so effective. A list of target keywords is broken into distinct topic clusters, and each topic cluster is then mapped to a unique blog article designed to rank for only those keywords. Pillar pages are those pages targeting a high-search-volume topic cluster core to the site’s purpose. This strategy allows your blog to cover more ground while staying focused on its main area of expertise.

2. Utilizes Expertise

Google has always placed an emphasis on real expertise when ranking content. In the early days, this meant the .gov and .edu sites got a leg up on many searches, as they were seen as more likely to be experts in their respective spaces.

Now, search engines look for content that refers to or quotes experts. My blog article about photography shot composure could have perfectly-optimized meta tags and content, but might still struggle to rank. Including a quote from an expert photographer, or linking out to their blog, can give my content a boost in rankings.

Additionally, first-hand expertise is incredibly valuable. If my blog article includes reviews of popular cameras, including proof that I have used each of the cameras I’m reviewing, my article will likely rank prominently. Google promotes content that relies on first-hand experience, so including any mentions of this can be incredibly powerful, especially in instances of review content.

Search engines want to see that content marketers are doing their research and getting their facts from reputable sources. Featuring this expertise in your content can therefore have large payoffs.

3. Trustworthy and Credible

Similar to the use of expertise, search engines want to feature content that searchers can trust. The same blog article published by two sources can rank differently based on the source’s reputation and established credibility.

This factor is a bit more difficult to impact than the others. Moz, creator of powerful SEO tools and an SEO thought leader, developed their Domain Authority score to measure this exact factor. A site’s Domain Authority is based on the site’s overall credibility, measured mainly by the number and quality of backlinks pointing to the site.

While Domain Authority can be difficult to quickly improve, writing articles on topics that your brand is known for can be a great way to ensure you’re getting the most out of your content. High-quality, authoritative, shareable content is more likely to attract backlinks from other domains, lending a boost to your site’s Domain Authority.

4. Helping Searchers Find What They’re Looking For

This last point may seem obvious, but it represents the core of Google’s Helpful Content System. Keeping your content focused on the altruistic purpose of the internet, helping users find information based on their search query, can be the best way to make sure your content ranks well.

So how do you do this?

Write content for people, content that gives useful information concisely. Avoid burying answers to questions in paragraphs of text, and make it clear, to search engines and people, what they can expect to find on each page. Your goal is to provide users with a satisfying experience, so consider your audience’s perspective when developing copy.

Why Should You Care About Helpful Content?

In addition to helping keep the web a productive and efficient place, keeping your website full of helpful content can have plenty of performance benefits. Helpful content is more likely to rank well for its target keywords, leading to more search traffic and more conversions.

With recent announcements and advances, many are wondering how AI will revolutionize content marketing. When deciding whether or not to use AI-generated content on your website, it’s wise to keep helpful content in mind.

While Google has made no mention of how AI content may impact helpfulness, keeping these four factors in mind when producing any new content will benefit your site. As Google has stated: “If you see AI as an essential way to help you produce content that is helpful and original, it might be useful to consider. If you see AI as an inexpensive, easy way to game search engine rankings, then no [you should not use AI to generate content].”

Want to learn more about these strategies and our comprehensive SEO services? Reach out to the team at sales@synapsesem.com.

When and How to Use Broad Match Keywords

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The landscape of match types across paid search is constantly changing. More recently, Google has pushed users away from the traditional exact and phrase match types to the notoriously avoided broad match. For years, advertisers were content with utilizing phrase match and exact match terms because they were safe and often resulted in relevant queries. With the sunsetting of the broad match modifier, there is more pressure by Google to switch over your keyword match types to pure broad.

Is it time to stop ignoring those pesky messages saying your campaign is limited by search volume? Could broad match keywords actually help your campaigns improve? Well, your program’s KPIs, strategy, and budget could help dictate whether broad match is the right move. Discover when and how to use broad match keywords for your campaigns below.

When is it the Right Time to Test Broad Match Keywords?

 

Campaign Goals are Focused on Growth Not Efficiency:

Broad match keywords can be a great tool to generate growth in your account when there is additional budget to spend. Due to their generic nature, broad match keywords allow advertisers to “cast a wider net” into the search results by matching out to related terms. For example, if your account was focused on advertising “luxury watches,” your exact match terms would limit the search results to just “luxury” related terms. Broad match keywords could match out to “best watches,” “high end watches,” “Rolex watches,” etc.—generating more traffic to the site and the opportunity for greater conversion volume. According to a study from Search Engine Land, broad match often results in lower CPCs, even with instances of exact match terms driving $1 higher CPCs in comparison to broad match. Depending on conversion rates, broad match could be an opportunity to expand accounts and also influence traffic/sales across additional channels.

When Your Business is Easily Defined:

A pure broad match strategy relies on Google’s algorithm to properly define the true nature of your product. If your product is straight forward, like “luxury watches” it will be easily for Google to generate keywords relevant to your search. However, if your company is more restrictive like software specifically for web developers, there is a greater chance that Google could generate queries that are irrelevant to your product.

When You Need to Save Time:

A broad match strategy can result in fewer keywords, fewer expansions, and fewer optimizations which can save advertisers time in their marketing process. Because broad match terms loosely match out to various searches, you no longer have to devote time to keyword expansion. Time can even be saved on campaign builds as advertisers will likely spend less time building out tedious variations of terms like “best watches,” “high-end watches,” “expensive watches,” and more.

When you are Implementing RLSA Campaigns:

Broad match keywords can be an excellent component of RLSA campaigns where relevant audiences are already overlaid on top of search campaigns. Since we know the user is already targeted, or in some cases, has visited the site before, we can expand the keyword set to focus on less restrictive iterations of the targeted keyword set.

When your Account has Strong Conversion Volume:

The key to implementing any of Google’s bid strategies is ensuring that you have enough data for the system to work efficiently. Broad match works best in accounts that generate strong daily conversion volume. Since we recommend combining broad match with bid strategies, the system will begin to “learn” which iterations work best in generating conversion volume or revenue. Google recommends having at least 15 conversions per week for a successful smart bidding strategy.

How to Use Broad Match Keywords:

Broad match can make or break your search campaigns so it is important to understand the best methods of implementation before we open the gates to a pure broad match keyword strategy.

Negatives, Negatives, Negatives:

Quite possibly the most important element to incorporating broad match keywords into your Google Ads strategy is to not only keep an extremely close eye on the search query results but to also proactively and regularly add negative keywords to avoid any irrelevant traffic. We recommend keeping a daily eye on the search query results, particularly over the first 7 days of a new program utilizing broad match.

Smart Bidding:

Through testing and overall Google recommendations, the best way to apply broad match terms to any campaign is utilizing a smart bidding strategy. Broad match terms generate more data through clicks and conversions for Google which allows the automated bid strategy to have greater learning to make decisions. If conversion tracking is properly set up, the bid strategy will, over time, stop showing your ads for less relevant searches as it acquires better data. In general tests, we have found that broad match works best when combined with exact match terms and can even result in exact match CPCs and conversion rates improving.

Analyze Backend Data (for lead generation companies):

Maximizing conversions is great, but if it is not driving deeper funnel leads, it will not be a profitable strategy. It is important to always evaluate backend data when running any test, but especially with broad match terms that are likely to drive in more generic traffic. If possible, we recommend importing in any offline conversion data to feed into the system so that Google’s bid strategies can optimize off quality leads and conversions.

Set Restrictions with Target CPA or Target ROAS Goals:

A good strategy for adding broad match keywords to your account in a conservative manner is to launch with target CPA or ROAS goals. Google’s learning algorithms will begin to identify what is most efficient for your account in order to avoid overspending with these new terms.

 

If you have any questions regarding automation best practices, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com to talk through your Google Ads optimization needs.