Good morning everyone! Have you heard about the “helpful content update” that Google is rolling out? As a SEO and content marketer, this is in my wheelhouse… and here’s my take: This will be mostly a nothing burger assuming you create helpful content that meets your audience’s search intent. This means no AI-generated content (hello “Jasper”?)… Google is coming for AI writers, indeed. I support that move, but in general, there’s not much else that we haven’t already been doing in terms of creating E.A.T. content to answer questions from our readers and helping meet the search intent based on the keywords the use. I emphasize “intent” here, because the key is to not use literal keywords, but to look at what they are trying to find based on their word choices. Sometimes they are trying to buy something, sometimes they are comparing products, and other times they are just researching the problem and looking for a solution. The data and insights in my SEO trends research report basically predicted all this. My report is based on a survey across 300+ marketers and has insights from 10 SEO experts. I will link a Google Doc PDF so you don’t have to give me your email address to get it. It’s 100% free, no strings attached, and you can download it yourself and read it. It would be nice to hear some feedback from you though! https://drive.google.com/file/d/14J42AZisfcLESDYYObpotQOT4IBYYgMY/view?usp=sharing

Thank you for this. Really appreciate this resource. Will go over it during the weekend and share my thoughts :)

Would love to hear from you @acceptable-jackal-19307!

The report is excellent @strong-vr-89255

Thank you @lemon-wolf-48661!

My take: The short version: This isn’t something we should be concerned about. The language is (intentionally) confusing and this feels more like a PR push by Google than an actual update. The long version: Google is getting a lot of bad press for some of their (quite) bad search results. This is meant to counteract it and is meant to provide as much business air coverage as it is an actual update. The biggest risk I see here is that they’re going to really lean on their machine learning (ML) to decide what good content is, and that means some sites are going to get penalized for no reason. But, unless you programmatically spun up 5000 pages and used some fake AI synonym software to scrape/rewrite content for them all, you’ll be fine. WE will be fine. 🙂 Otherwise this update is what Google has been saying all along. Honestly, “content created for SEO” is the BEST kind of content. Google’s worst nightmare is having a lot of search volume and no content addressing it because then people leave Google. So, counter to what this update says, they WANT people to create content that matches existing and emerging search intent… it just has to be good.

Impressive report, thanks for sharing 🙂

Hey Gabe and everyone! We’re hosting an SEO Roundtable with Aleyda, Kevin, Ethan, and Bernard next week to discuss just this. Check it out: https://content-career-growth.slack.com/archives/C012AUSC85C/p1662650865416719