Many businesses have seen their SERPs decrease after the Google helpful content update.

Therefore, copywriters are scrabbling across the globe for ways to fix their content marketing so that the Google helpful content update approves it and their SEO improves.

Therefore, this article has been written to help you improve your business’s content marketing.

 

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 15/02/ 2024

It can happen to many businesses that work hard and diligently to get their companies right to the top of Google.co.uk. They might not make any further changes to their organic SEO, yet after the Google helpful content update, their rankings have sometimes substantially decreased.

 

So, how exactly does Google’s helpful content update work?

What is essential to note is that this could be a sitewide penalty. meaning that all the pages / blog posts are ranking notably lower on Google. Often this is because of the following:

– A lot of content thin content
– Content marketing that has a low Google E-EAT score

All of your pages and blog posts could get dragged down if you have a lot of low-quality pages, such as content or thin pages on your website.

So this means that if you have a lot of low-quality content marketing, such as content-thin articles, or just pages that are not that useful, as they don’t offer much useful advice to a shopper, your businesses rankings could get dragged down the ranking after this update.

Today in 2024 your content marketing has to be very good.

 

When you consider that there have been numerous updates rolled out by Google

Google has gone through an enormous effort, rolling out the Google Panda update, the Google Rank brain artificial intelligence update, and the Google hummingbird update. These have been significant updates, which have changed enormously where some businesses rank on the Google and therefore alterted these businesses organic rankings.

Therefore, this latest update, the Google helpful content update is just another step in weeding out low-quality content marketing. For example, if over 50% say of the blog posts are content thin, then the whole website, including main product pages may start to rank lower on Google’s organic results.

So basically, the long and short of it is this: if you hire the wrong agency which creates lacklustre, not very well written content marketing, what this can hold your website back. You might have been doing well, ranking at the top of Google.co.uk, but after that Google update, your business may move down the ranks, because of all the blog posts that haven’t been well written.
It can take a long time to recover from a Google penalty

As with all sorts of Google algorithmic or manual penalties, it does take time to recover, so let’s say that you believe the Google helpful content update has impacted your website. Let’s say that you have noticed that your rankings have plummeted after the Google helpful content update was rolled out. Then you will want to set about improving your content marketing.

However, it’s worth noting that with all algorithmic and manual updates, it can take a considerable amount of time, sometimes even years, from our experience, to recover from such an update. Therefore, it’s not simply a matter of updating the content marketing, and then watching the rankings improve, it does take time.

To recover from Google algorithm penalties therefore, you have to be extremely patient. And be continuously working on trying to improve your business content marketing

 

Could there be a possible over-optimisation issue?

There could be a possible over-optimisation issue that the SEO consultant or business has implemented. This could be over optimising the content marketing for a particular keyword.

Let’s say that that keyword is a particular brand of “ladies’ handbags”.

The marketing agency may have over-optimised the page or number of pages for that particular handbag brand.
Therefore, the marketing agency needs to go back and ensure that they don’t over-optimise; for example, if keyword stuffing has been used on that page.

Keyword stuffing is simply over-optimising the page, which can severely damage the business’s SEO moving forward.

 

Write for real humans.

Now, this might have you somewhat confused, scratching your head thinking, well, obviously, when writing content marketing it will be for humans, we’re not writing; therefore, for extraterrestrials, are we?

However, a problem that many SEO agencies and businesses have fallen into, is that they try to write content marketing just purely to try and improve their SEO.

However, you have to turn this marketing strategy entirely on its head.

If you write super helpful content marketing that is very useful, well written and has a high Google E-EAT then this type of work will rank high on Google.

So, by offering helpful advice, you are actually improving your seo.

 

Write detailed articles

Try to make your content marketing as detailed and in-depth as possible.

What you most definitely don’t want is for the content marketing to be deemed as “content-thin”.

So do work hard to make the content marketing detailed as possible. Perhaps you don’t want to publish a piece of content marketing every single week; instead, focus on writing superb and high-quality piece say perhaps just once a month. Use your time wisely; therefore, create quality content marketing, that’s instead of churning out low-quality content marketing.

 

Keep on point

This is a critical point that should be carefully considered.

Sometimes, some businesses start to talk about things within their company blog posts that are not directly related to the products or services they sell.

For example, a firm of solicitors might be talking about a rugby team they sponsor, so we recommend removing non-relevant content marketing if you have a lot of it. This can confuse search engines, such as Google as to what your business is offering.
For example Google’s algorithm may ask are you offering legal services, or are running a rugby team?

 

Fully understand Google E-EAT.

Google now wants content marketing to be written by an expert; it wants the writer to demonstrate expertise, on what they are writing about.

Google also wants the writer to to demonstrate real-life experience of what the person is writing about.

If any work on your website that doesn’t fully answer Google EEAT, then this work should be revisited and improved.
This might take a lot of time, but it needs to be done because this is a critical consideration in assessing whether the content marketing is deemed as high quality.