By Erik Newton, VP of Marketing, Milestone Inc.
If you are just asking yourself this question now, the answer may be no. If you have been using generic or curated content or using your blog to publish too many product and company selfies, the answer may be no.
Are you answering customer and prospect questions, providing guidance, and solving problems? If yes, then that’s helpful.
I have said many times that Google is not changing what it is doing, it is getting closer to the goal it has always been promising: to connect high-quality content with searcher intent.
Rolling out now is the Helpful Content Update or HCU, and it could be a major one.
So what is helpful content? It is content that answers the reader’s question or solves the reader’s problem. Remember, every search query is a question and every search listing is an answer. Be the best answer, and Google will send traffic your way.
Helpful content is:
It may be useful to look at what Google considers unhelpful content:
As a point of reference featured snippets typically highlight helpful content, so look at the content that is featured there and emulate the content and approach. Milestone sees Featured Snippets on about 3% of SERPs.
So where does that leave marketers planning to create content? Make sure your content contributes something new, unqiue, and very useful.
Answering searcher questions is undoubtedly helpful. To enable companies to deploy an effective FAQ content strategy, Milestone offers FAQ Manager, a breakthrough product solution for curating questions, organizing the best answers, and distributing those consistent answers across multiple points of contact, like the website, chatbots, and voice assistants.
Customers that use an effective FAQ strategy, see a significant lift in rank, CTR, FAQ impressions and traffic and lift in engagement and revenue.
Creating clarity on existing content will help the search engines understand the helpfulness and utility of the content. Using schemas is helpful because it disambiguates content and entities, and Google rewards that effort with visibility in Top Stories, Recipes, HowTos, Images, Featured Snippets, FAQ Rich Results, and more.
Research shows a 20-30% lift in traffic, especially for rich media, with an effective deployment of schemas.
Milestone Schema Manager enables companies to efficiently tag, deploy, and maintain schemas with a no-code platform. It offers a unique tracking solution to measure and report the impact and return on schema markup efforts. See a partial list of our successful schema case study deployments.
Milestone POV: If you have been using white hat best practices to plan, create, and deploy your content, this updaet will not impact you that much. Make sure any machine-assisted content generation is fully integrated by a human editor. Review existing content and improve weaker material or 301 redirect it to a more helpful page. Understand your users’ questions and needs and write to answer them.
Milestone increases acquisition by enhancing digital experience and increasing content visibility. Contact us at sales@milestoneinternet.com or call us at 408-200-2211.
Erik Newton has been working in SEO and digital marketing since 1999. He is a frequent webinar and podcast speaker and published more than 165 blogs and 12 research reports on SEO.
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