After Google’s constant updates throughout the first half of 2022, content marketers and SEO specialists have all gathered to figure out what really matters for web pages to rank.
Up until now, what mattered most to Google was the number of page visits your website acquires, how much time visitors spend on your website and of course if the content aligns with the foundational E-A-T principle of Google.
What we have observed and discovered in all of this is that the ambitions Google has for users and businesses originate from the same foundational principles – originality, high-quality and useful content.
Google’s Goal For Users
For Google, fetching highly relevant, meaningful and original content to its users is of prime importance. It wants users to discover content that they cannot find elsewhere.
It stores users’ search intentions and tries to respond to them with the closest resources that help them in finding solutions and answers.
For instance, a search for “best summer juices” wouldn’t exactly know if the user is searching for juices for kids, adults or specifically vegans. So Google ranks content according to its quality raters and fetches the most relevant content with the keywords “best summer juices.”
But this is not as simple as it sounds.
Google’s helpful content update looks to remove or flag low-quality unoriginal content that simply seeks to meet the SEO criteria to rank higher. Content that does not include useful information and uses keywords simply for the sake of it would be pushed down the result pages.
This ensures users only discover high-quality content that is informative and useful.
Similarly, the latest update on Google’s product reviews displays only reviews that are highly unique reviews curated from individuals who have tried and tested the product. This means businesses can no longer simply pay for good reviews. Instead, they need to form a pool of reviewers that can genuinely endorse the product and mention their experiences using the product. It now pushes up content that one cannot find on retailer websites or eCommerce platforms. It also pushes up content that shows evidence of testing through photos, videos and demos.
Google’s Goal For Businesses
Since Google wants users to discover high-quality content, it consecutively wants businesses with a digital presence to improve the quality of the content it publishes. For this, Google encourages businesses to follow one single rule – write for users, not the algorithm.
What this means is that businesses that simply want to catch the algorithm’s attention are easy to detect. Customers who spend less time on a webpage, and leave without any engagement, pages that don’t demonstrate any level of E-A-T, stuff content with keywords are common indicators of low-quality content.
To avoid this, a good digital marketing agency would recommend aligning human psychology with SEO.
This means the following two things:
- Writing with the intention of informing and solving a problem for the user.
- Following the latest SEO guidelines only to the extent that it is relevant.
For your business to rank on the first page of Google search results, you need to take a human-first approach. Following SEO guidelines are important if you want to catch the reader’s and algorithm’s attention. But what will serve you points for high-quality content is your ability to retain audiences for longer durations.
All the best!
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