How Google’s ‘Helpful Content Update’ Could Greatly Impact Franchise Businesses

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Google’s Search algorithms are constantly changing. As a result, for business owners and their websites, content marketing practices that worked years ago aren’t as effective today. By adapting your marketing strategy and following content marketing best practices, you can stay ahead of the competition and keep the spotlight of search results on your website.

Last month, Google released a “helpful content update” for its search algorithm. Digital marketing specialists call it one of the most significant updates in a decade that can affect how current content marketing strategies fare. Here’s how it can potentially affect your business website.

What Is Google’s ‘Helpful Content Update’ All About?

Google’s helpful content update rewards websites with better content catered more towards humans than search engines. In the past, many content marketers wrote content for search engine optimization (SEO) keywords rather than content that answered people’s questions. Unfortunately, this method led to results that didn’t always provide users with the best results.

But with Google’s new content update, its search engine can fine-tune results and find content that meets users’ needs rather than content written mainly for search engines. By using an automated machine learning algorithm, the update introduced a site-wide signal to identify low-added value content. As a result, websites with large amounts of unhelpful content are less likely to rank, assuming there are other websites that provide value-adding, in-depth content that’s written for people.

Google’s content guidelines are unchanged, but its search engine’s ability to pick out people-first content means its ranking could change for users’ benefit. In short: quality over quantity.

What the ‘Helpful Content Update’ Means for Your Franchise

Because Google’s new update looks at the volume of low-value and unhelpful content, we strongly recommend website content overhauls and deleting content that might be considered unhelpful. Even if you have key pieces of high-quality content, a few unhelpful blogs can impact your entire website and how each page ranks. Some of the steps you can take to avoid a significant drop in rankings include:

Follow Google’s content guidelines. Google’s content guidelines haven’t changed, but how it detects content quality has been fine-tuned. If your content has always been people-first and has been written for users looking for answers, there should be very minimal changes to your search engine rankings.
Write for people. Google values people-first content that’s written with user intent in mind. Evaluate your website’s content and ask yourself the following:
- If someone came to me with a question about my business, would this article or page answer their question?
- Does my content sound like it’s coming from someone who knows what they’re talking about?
- Does my content help people know more about my business?
- Am I just rewording old content that’s already on my website?
- Are there other websites tackling the same topic? If there are, am I just summarizing or rewording what they’re saying?
Build a consistent content marketing strategy. You can write SEO-optimized content that’s still people-first. When you work with a team that knows content marketing best practices, you’ll have professionals that understand the delicate balance of content writing SEO strategy to create optimized high-value content.

Let Professionals Build People-First Content for Your Business

Google’s new update may change the way most websites handle online content. But if you have a website that has already valued content of a high quality or has the means to create balanced, high-value content, you can find minimal or positive changes to your search engine rankings.

Thrive Agency’s team consists of experienced professionals who understand content marketing best practices, even with Google’s ever-changing algorithms. With their SEO content writing services, you can overhaul your existing content to remove duplicate and low-value pages and add original, relevant, and well-researched content that establishes your niche expertise while catering to user intent.

About the Author:

Justine is content writer for Thrive. She started her digital marketing career in 2016, juggling her role as a freelance content writer with her literature degree. Since then, she has gone on to write different forms of online content for international SMEs and local corporations in the Philippines in various industries. She specializes in traffic-driving articles, keyword research, and technical writing.