Fasten Your Seatbelts! Google announced that “Next week, we will launch the “helpful content update” to better ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic.” This is going to cause a major shift in the world of SEO in my opinion and negatively affect numerous small and large businesses.
This can be a great thing for your website or a disaster – if you have followed Google’s rules you likely will notice a traffic increase! If you are working with a digital marketing firm that is producing content focused on the search engines using Artificial Intelligence (robot written content) or if you are doing it yourself, there is a high chance you are going to notice a MAJOR traffic drop soon (they did say it will take up to two weeks to fully roll out). Content has always been a major factor with ranking well with Google and they have always emphasized the importance of focusing on the ‘user experience’ – content written for the search engines is not user friendly. It is that simple.
Recommendations:
1. If you do not have direct access to Google Analytics, get it now and monitor your traffic.
2. If you do not have direct access to Google Search Console, get it now. This will let you view if Google has penalized your website, your exact rankings and trends, how often they are on your website and much more. This will be a simple way to see if you were impacted.
3. Remove content that is intended for the search engines and not your end user. I highly suggest spending time reviewing your site in detail.
4. Google says once you remove the content they will reevaluate your website meaning you have hope but it “could take months” to recover.
5. I also highly suggest running a free website scan on SiteLiner to check for duplicated content and other issues – mainly because it will hurt you as well so if you are fixing things, find out everything you are dealing with.
6. Finally, quality content is king and Google will never penalize you for high quality, user-friendly content written by people for people. To avoid long weekends of panic or hoping you don’t notice a major traffic drop – just do it right the first time.
If you are unsure of what to do next, it is important to first truly review your website, with your own eyes and spend the time evaluating if the content on there is natural and makes sense. If you were a potential consumer, would you read it and leave the page feeling that you found what you were looking for? We highly suggest reviewing our detailed content marketing guide to better understand what you need to do in order to use content to dominate online and also take advantage of the content review. Another great resource in learning more about the Google Algorithm Update is from Search Engine Land, it is well worth the read.
Content is vital for search engine optimization and equally important is the content you write for your website is unique, focused on providing your website visitors useful information and is not written specifically for the search engines so that your website can rank higher. When you write original, high-quality, and informative content for your website, you are providing value to your readers and also making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website. The more original, high-quality, and informative content you have on your website, the better your website will rank on search engines and the higher your conversion rate will be. Long story short – better content equals better rankings which leads to more income for your business.