Google Search wants “People-First Content”

On Wednesday (8/24/2022), Google announced that Search will be rolling out a “helpful content update” in the next two weeks. This behind-the-scenes update is intended to maximize the usefulness of Search to users. That means they’re tweaking Search to ensure it keeps giving users high-quality, informative links to content “written by people, for people.”

While Google doesn’t share the mechanisms of this update, they repeatedly emphasize that Search will return “people-first content” in response to queries.

What does this mean for SEO?

Broadly, SEO is the practice of creating and maintaining web content that will be ranked highly by search engine indexes. That means that when a user enters a query, the most informative results will show up first—not necessarily the ones that contain the most SEO keywords.

Google explains that organizations should apply SEO best practices to their people-first content, not the other way around. Do not, Google explains, design content first to appeal to your best guess of what search engine indexes will like best:

SEO is a helpful activity when it's applied to people-first content. However, content created primarily for search engine traffic is strongly correlated with content that searchers find unsatisfying.

Good SEO is ensuring that your site structure and content are clear so that when the crawlers index your site, they’re optimally capturing your content.

Good SEO includes the practice of regularly posting informative, enriching content that compliments your brand.

· Posts should link internally and externally.

· Posts should use headings to indicate structure.

· Posts should use keywords strategically and integrate them into the text seamlessly.

· Metadata should be present, clear, and brief.

This announcement is good news for businesses already providing helpful content that is relevant to their customers’ needs. If you’re not already investing in this kind of content creation, consider doing so. You will incur costs to create the content (you’ll have to pay someone to write those posts), but once the content is published, it’ll keep working for you for the long term (you don’t have to pay for ad placements!). Content SEO strategies take time to pay off (most users report anywhere from 3 to 9 months to see notable changes), but that content will never quit.

You’ll gain the trust of the searchers who find you, making them more likely to become loyal customers.

What’s your next step for SEO?

If you’re a small business or organization looking for someone to write high-quality, people-first content for you, please email me. Following your guidance, I will research and write highly readable, engaging content that searchers (and search engines) will love.