Helpful Content and how it wins in SXO - Organic

Man running through a finish line with the word

The helpful content update – what was it?

Launching in August 2022, followed by subsequent updates in December of the same year and September 2023, the Google Helpful Content updates had, it’s fair to say, a far-reaching impact on a significant portion of the web. While not everyone welcomed this update with open arms, there seems to be a method to the madness. Google is now pushing website content creators even harder to improve the quality of their output. Sadly, the days of SEO’s giving google updates cute names that downplay the challenges they bring are long gone. In my opinion, the Helpful Content Update could have been called “The Quokka Update” because, let’s face it, few creatures are cuter, and the aim of these changes seems to be to make the web a nicer place to be.

That’s all well and good. Now that you’ve finished Googling Quokkas it’s probably time to talk about what actually happened. Well, it’s worth mentioning that this wasn’t just an update to the existing algorithm. This was the addition of a new system that generates a sitewide signal. This signal is then fed into the automated ranking system. The key feature here is that the signal is sitewide! It’s not PageRank or RankBrain; it’s not concerned with links or the relevance of individual pages.

The Helpful Content system evaluates the entirety of the indexable website and generates a single score. Sites that felt the negative impact probably had too much content that Google deems as being written for search engines rather than users.

This assessment of sitewide content is important because it shows a shift towards seeing SEO as part of wider search experience and not just how specific pages you hope to rank well are optimised. And the focus on usefulness for users brings SEO ever closer to UX, where the focus is squarely on user needs.

How e-commerce brands were hit by Helpful Content

E-commerce seems to have been one of those sectors that suffered as a result of this update, and there are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, many e-commerce stores have a paucity of good content. Where content does exist, it often appears to be an afterthought or merely a vehicle for keywords. This is particularly true of Product Listing Pages (PLPs) and, even Product Detail Pages (PDPs). The latter should be an area where content is most helpful, right at the bottom of the funnel, providing customers with everything they need to know about the product.

For e-commerce stores with a blog, there’s plenty to worry about too. A poorly maintained blog with thin pages lacking authorship or clear Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E.E.A.T) signals will not contribute to improving the helpful content score. Blog content is vital for a powerful search experience that puts a brand centre stage at different parts of a customer’s journey from intent to conversion.

As with any Google update, the initial advice was to not panic and rush into making changes, which is always good advice. However, months have passed and some sites have not yet seen any kind of recovery. Typically, when Google releases a new technology, there is a period of change followed by stabilisation, and for those most affected, recovery. This recovery phase has not appeared, leaving many businesses unsure of the next steps.

How to win with words

So, What does all of this mean? Google has been clear about what it expects from content in the Quality Rater Guidelines and has been pretty frank about the Helpful Content Update System. It all boils down to providing quality for the user.

Google lays out the playbook pretty explicitly in the catchily titled “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” article. The advice is simple: priortise the user and their needs first and use that lens to go back and interrogate your existing content. If it doesn’t meet expectations, consider either pruning or enhancing it. Initiate your next content audit promptly (right after reading this), and ask yourself the following questions:

Is it original?
Does it offer real substance about the topic?
Is there anything in it beyond the obvious?
Are the headings and titles well-written?
Does it offer more, less or the same as other content ranking for the same query?
Is it free of grammar and spelling errors?
Is it written by and attributed to an expert (or at least reviewed by one)?
Is it free of factual errors?

There are more questions, but these are probably the most pertinent. If you answered no to any, it’s time to prune or improve! You can also use the much simpler “Who, How, and Why” system to evaluate your content. Ultimately, your pages should focus on people first and not search engines, an essential pillar of search experience optimisation (SXO)

What’s next?

Start auditing and create a content inventory. Surface absolutely everything you consider to be content and understand everything about it.

What do you consider content and where is your content? Run a crawl to find every content element and keep a directory of where it all is.
How old is it? If you’re struggling to work it out then Wayback Machine is your friend.
Is it performing? How has the content done so far? If you’re assessing it for helpfulness then it’s more important to look at engagement and backlink metrics. The page/video/image etc may be driving lots of visits but if the average time on page is low or no one is linking back to it then it probably isn’t very helpful.
How’s the internal linking? If you found all of your content with Screaming Frog (or similar tool though SF is the best) it will tell you the inlink numbers for each page that houses content. Are these links useful? Are the links from higher up in the site architecture and from highly performing pages?
Removing unhelpful content. Don’t be scared to prune low-value pages. You can block crawling to certain pages with the robots.txt file or, for duplicates and near duplicates you can add a canonical to the preferred version. If you do remove a page, you need to decide if it can 404 or needs redirection.

Test, measure, improve, repeat

Now you know where all of your content is, how it’s performing, and how to make it better. It’s time to start testing. Take a sample set of content and make improvements. Wait til it’s indexed and monitor its performance for changes. Compare these changes to a control set of content that hasn’t been changed and check for improvement. Bear in mind that Helpful Content is a sitewide signal so improvements to one group of pages should have a knock on effect meaning the control set might not function as a true control.

Is that it for helpful content?

Dealing with Google is never straightforward. The Helpful Content System may be tweaked, and its weighting in the algorithm could change. What is for certain is that this new system is here to stay and if you don’t keep it in mind when creating or improving content, success is not guaranteed. Thinking of AI rewriting all your content? Beware! There is no substitute for an expert sharing their opinion or information when it comes to anything SEO. If we all up our game, who knows, the next big change might even get a cute fuzzy name.

It’s time to move towards an SXO lens for everything you do, and see the search journey end-to-end, creating content that satisfies user needs.

If the Helpful Content isn’t enough to worry about, rumor has it that a recession is looming—don’t fret. Learn how SEO can assist during a downturn.