People Tell Me What to Say: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content for Google Search in 2024 & Beyond (An SEO Deep Dive)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
*Note: All of the information in this post is still valid today, but I plan to do a refresh for 2025. Stay tuned! 🤗
Did you know traditional tactics for creating SEO content can lead to search engine-first content, which may be hurting your visibility in Google’s search results today?
I’ve been helping websites with their SEO content strategies since 2015 and have seen this scenario happen many times, but even more so lately in what I call the post-helpful content update era.
That’s why I’ve created this guide to creating helpful, reliable, people-first content to help you future-proof your SEO.
We’ll take a deep dive into a Google Search Central document called Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, as well as Google’s history of people-first guidance for SEO.
We’ll also delve more into the helpful content system and its impacts on search rankings last year in 2023 and explore how you can create content in light of how Google Search’s increasingly sophisticated AI-driven ranking systems can evaluate content today.
I’ll also explain how you can use a collaborative process involving subject matter experts to get beyond “traditional SEO content” with more original, insightful, and uniquely valuable content that satisfies your particular audience’s search intent better than what’s currently ranking, thus earning you better rankings, more qualified clicks, and increased conversions.
So, are you ready to dive in and learn about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content for SEO?
Well, let me stop you right there …
This article will give you the full picture, but it’ll also take about 30-45 minutes to read from start to finish.
If you’re tight on time, jump down to the related resources section, where I’ve linked to some helpful content checklists and guides, related articles I’ve done, plus a video summary of this guide.
See how helpful I am? People first. 😉
That said, I believe by taking this actionable deep-dive into what Google’s helpful, reliable, people-first content guidance means from an SEO perspective, you’ll learn actionable tips for improving your content strategy in 2024 and beyond.
Still down for that deep dive? Well then, buckle up!
But first, feel free to pause a moment to meditate or fuel up on your drink or snack of choice before we proceed, as this journey will take some brain power.
I’ll wait here …
You’re all set? 🙂
Great! Here’s a summary of what we’ll cover:
- The history of “people-first” content guidance from Google
- What it means to go beyond traditional SEO tactics for content creation
- What makes helpful content for Search?
- How to create helpful, people-first content
- Key vocabulary
- Introducing the 11x approach to people-first SEO content
- Rock on with final thoughts
Feel free to bookmark this article and use the table of contents to jump back in at any time.
What can you expect from the remainder of this guide?
Basically, I’ll go over everything I think website owners, marketers, and content specialists need to know about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content for SEO today and into the future.
The information I reference will be based on official Google sources, including Google Search Central documentation, blog articles in The Keyword, and social media contributions from search advocates like John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Danny Sullivan (Google Search Liaison).
I’ll also include thoughts from other SEO professionals plus my insights and opinions learned from doing SEO work on my site and clients’ sites, researching Google Search’s ranking systems, and examining the rankings volatility felt during 2023, including recent impacts from the August, October, November, and March (2024) core updates, the November reviews update, and especially the September helpful content update.
If you return to this guide and it looks a little different than last time, that’s because I’m also maintaining the freshness of the information by doing regular updates, including adding the most current resources or analysis pertaining to helpful content.
When I attribute a source of information, I’ll include a direct quote or excerpt and try to maintain or provide the original context.
That’s because, when talking about SEO, the precision and context of words are very important. The saying “It depends” in SEO is not because we’re indecisive; it’s because specific SEO advice for, say, an ecommerce site on Shopify may not apply to a local business site on Wix, a service provider on WordPress, or a SaaS company with a custom CMS.
That said, I believe creating “helpful, reliable, people-first content” is universally beneficial to SEO today. I’ll go in-depth on how Google and SEOs define that topic shortly.
But to get us started, here’s my definition:
Helpful, reliable, and people-first content is Google’s terminology for SEO content that’s created primarily to satisfy the search intent of a particular audience better than what’s currently available in search results. It uses original information and insights from either a subject matter expert or someone’s personal experience, and it transparently states who created it, how, and why. Meanwhile, all SEO decisions in the content are equally beneficial to the user as the search engine.
A shorter way to define it would be:
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content involves taking a user-first approach to SEO, where the primary focus is satisfying the search intent of a particular audience better than what’s ranking today.
And here’s the most concise way I can think to phrase it:
It’s people-first SEO.
That terminology, people-first, was inspired by how Google explains the role of SEOs in Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content:
“There are some things you could do that are specifically meant to help search engines better discover and understand your content. Collectively, this is called “search engine optimization” or SEO, for short. Google’s own SEO guide covers best practices to consider. SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content, rather than search engine-first content.“ [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, What about SEO? Isn’t that search engine-first?
Speaking of inspiration, when helpful, people-first content is approached with unrestrained creativity, where the creator uses intuition and imagination to put themselves in the shoes of a particular audience to best satisfy their search intent, instead of focusing on what’s already ranking on Search, I call that creating SEO content with an 11x process. (You’ll learn more about that below, as well!)
So, now that we’re equipped with working definitions of helpful, reliable, people-first content, let’s get started analyzing Google’s goals for ranking search results today.
In my opinion, the best way to do that is to look back at Google’s history of people-first guidance, along with the recent impacts of the helpful content system on search engine-first content and the rollout of the hidden gems improvement to Google’s core ranking systems.
If you know your helpful content system history already and want more actionable information, jump ahead to the next section about going beyond traditional SEO content tactics.
Google’s history of people-first content guidance, the September 2023 helpful content update & the SEO community’s response
Google’s guidance about creating people-first content for Search isn’t new.
It actually goes back decades.
In June 2023, during a high period of SERP volatility on Google Search, Danny Sullivan posted on X (then Twitter) a particular page of guidance from Google Search Central called Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content:
A month later, Danny Sullivan again referenced the guidance, this time in a tweet with a quote from 2002 to “Make pages for users, not for search engines.”
Then, a month later, after a prescient Search Off the Record podcast episode about ranking updates, which aired the same day the August 2023 core update started rolling out, he reshared the guidance:
After the September 2023 helpful content update, however, the search engine’s ability to surface more “original, helpful content created for people in search results” (the purpose of the helpful content system classifier) became more apparent.
That’s also when I started noticing more discussion in the SEO community about that particular page of guidance from Google Search Central.
This was partly because Google updated their helpful content guidance on September 14th when the third HCU began rolling out:
Danny Sullivan also continued to reference it often on social media when site owners would ask about (or criticize) the HCU or meaning of helpful content:
Some site owners took HCU traffic losses in stride:
Other SEOs felt Google’s helpful content system had gone too far, at least this time (the third update was much stronger than the first two in August and December of 2022):
Some SEOs, often with websites in the niche or affiliate marketing space, even suggested that Google would roll back the HCU as a mistake, but as John Mueller responded to such a claim on X:
“To be direct, I don’t see us rolling this update back. Also, none of this was done to spite anyone – we want to highlight fantastic, helpful, unique, compelling, “people-first” content in search, and we will continue to work on our algorithms to move in that direction.” [Highlights added.]
– John Mueller on X
The reply unfortunately has been deleted, but you can still read about it and similar discussions in this Search Engine Roundtable article.
In reference to such removed posts on X, Danny Sullivan also recently clarified the HCU had not been rolled back:
As I mentioned in my article on 11x content, discussion in SEO circles about the September 2023 HCU lasted for months afterward. (You can reactions from people in the SEO community to the HCU in my Hamsterdam recaps from late September and early October, like Part 24 and Part 25.)
SEO and website owners’ questions and concerns over the helpful content update were also a focal point of Danny Sullivan’s November presentation at brightonSEO San Diego, where he also discussed Google’s history of giving “people-first” guidance to content creators, and how it went back to 2011 and even 2002.
At that same presentation, Danny told SEOs to “buckle up.” This was likely a precursor to the March 2024 core update and spam update.
Importantly, the helpful content system was incorporated into Google’s core ranking systems, and that change was announced at this time.
This means there will be no more helpful content updates, and whatever classifier or signals were associated with that old machine-learning system are now a part of other more holistic systems. (I wrote about this more (in a hypothetical sense) in a recent article on neural network architectures.)
The March core update lasted 45 days, running from March 4th to April 19th. (You can see more of what SEOs had to say about this update in Hamsterdam recaps from March and April, particularly Part 48.)
It also seems that as of late 2024, Google may be moving away from the term “helpful” content and embracing “satisfying” content. This is based on insights from a summit with creators whose sites were impacted by the HCU.
Getting back to Google’s people-first content guidance, the year 2011 was particularly important because that’s when Google released the first Panda update, which was incorporated into the core ranking systems in 2015 (similarly to the helpful content system in 2024).
Along with the Panda update rolling out in 2011, Google shared a list of 23 self-assessment questions for website content, which included:
- “Would you trust the information presented in this article?”
- “Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?”
- “Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?”
- “Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?”
- “Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?”
- “Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?”
The spirit of those Panda questions is reflected in Google’s current list of helpful, reliable, people-first content self-assessment questions:
- “Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?”
- “Is this content written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?”
- “Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?”
- “If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources, and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?”
- “Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?”
- “Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?”
- “Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?”
“You say you’re creating unhelpful, search engine-first content?”
Danny Sullivan will also concede from time to time, though, that Google’s “systems aren’t 100% perfect.”
This has left room for debate among SEOs over the years regarding the types of helpful, people-first content Google claims it wants to rank and what actually ranks on Search.
But as Bob Dylan once said, “the times they are a-changin’.”
In an analysis of Danny Sullivan’s brightonSEO San Diego presentation, Roger Montti, a search marketer with over 20 years of experience, offered insightful context in Search Engine Journal:
“And it’s true that Google has been advising the same thing for decades about being helpful and people-first.
The only difference between then and now is that back then we all kind of knew Google didn’t have the technology to create ranking signals that corresponded to what they were trying to rank.
When Google says the same thing today it’s against the background of AI, neural networks and machine learning.
So, unlike in 2002 or 2011, we tend to accept that it’s plausible that what’s in the documentation is also in the algorithm in some form or another.“ [Highlights added.]
– Roger Montti, Search Engine Journal: Google Presentation May Change How We Think About Ranking
It’s an interesting perspective on an evolving landscape.
While we’ve been seeing people-first content guidance from Google for decades, some search marketers didn’t always believe it was possible to achieve those aspirations.
Some SEOs still express skepticism:
Others followed the concept of helpful content from at least 2003:
Yet after the September HCU, more in the SEO community have seen compelling evidence that Google’s ranking systems may have caught up to its ambitions of not only rewarding helpful, people-first content but also demoting search engine-first content:
The helpful content system was also only one aspect of this goal to rank more helpful, people-first content.
Google continues to innovate in that direction, such as with its recent “hidden gems” ranking improvement that rolled out fully to the core ranking systems in November.
As Lauren Clark said about “hidden gems” on The Keyword back in May of 2023, when Perspectives, another source of people-first content showing the “experiences of others,” was announced:
“Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.” [Highlights added.]
– Lauren Clark, Google, The Keyword, Learn from others’ experiences with more perspectives on Search
Helpful, people-first content is thus the (past) present and future of Search.
Meanwhile, the landscape of how that content can surface organically on Search is also expanding, including on Google Discover.
“As part of Google Search, Discover makes use of many of the same signals and systems used by Search to determine what is helpful, people-first content. Given this, those looking for success with Discover should review our advice on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Discover and your website
In summary, the sooner you embrace helpful, people-first content as the foundation of your SEO strategies, and set aside older, more traditional, and potentially search engine-first tactics, the better off your site’s visibility will be across the evolving (and expanding) landscape of traditional, generative AI, and other types of search results in 2024 and beyond.
Going beyond traditional SEO tactics for content creation
What do I mean by “traditional” SEO tactics for content creation?
Here’s a standard process some SEO professionals likely would have used in the past (or may still follow today) for creating website content:
1. Gather keyword research based on metrics like volume, difficulty, intent, etc.
2. Do a competitive gap analysis to find topic opportunities.
3. Create topical groups with a pillar-cluster or hub-and-spoke model.
4. Pick a target keyword for an individual webpage (guide, blog article, etc.).
5. Analyze top-ranking competitor results for that target keyword.
6. Compile an outline suggesting headings, word counts, etc.
7. Create new content with keywords inserted in “strategic” places.
And voila!
It was a good process, and we can still use it.
Except …
That process alone can lead to search engine-first content because it focuses primarily on earning rankings and clicks on Search, versus accounting for what people actually want in terms of expertise and originality.
And that’s not what Google’s helpful content system and other ranking algorithms seek to reward:
It’s not just SEOs who need to adopt this line of thinking, though.
Companies who employ SEO services (and digital agency sales teams and account managers who onboard clients) also need be made aware that traditional SEO methods for creating content no longer fit today’s Search paradigm:
There’s no magic formula for creating “helpful, reliable, people-first content” that stays ahead of Google’s ranking algorithms.
But there are guidelines to get you on the right track.
Let’s explore …
What makes helpful content for Search today?
In short, helpful, people-first content is about quality, trust, and relevance. Or, the who, how, and why:
- Who created it?
- How was it created?
- Why was it created?
These words come from Google’s documentation about helpful, reliable, people-first content, i.e., people-first standards for SEO content.
“Consider evaluating your content in terms of “Who, How, and Why” as a way to stay on course with what our systems seek to reward. …
Something that helps people intuitively understand the E-E-A-T of content is when it’s clear who created it. That’s the “Who” to consider. … If you’re clearly indicating who created the content, you’re likely aligned with the concepts of E-E-A-T and on a path to success. …
It’s helpful to readers to know how a piece of content was produced: this is the “How” to consider including in your content. … Sharing details about the processes involved can help readers and visitors better understand any unique and useful role automation may have served. …
“Why” is perhaps the most important question to answer about your content. Why is it being created in the first place? … The “why” should be that you’re creating content primarily to help people, content that is useful to visitors if they come to your site directly. … If the “why” is that you’re primarily making content to attract search engine visits, that’s not aligned with what our systems seek to reward.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Ask “Who, How, and Why” about your content
Knowing what makes people-first content “helpful” for searchers is largely the ticket to doing well with SEO today and beyond.
Let’s explore some actionable steps to get there …
Having a collaborative process
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content is typically a collaborative process between a subject matter expert (SME), a content specialist, and an SEO strategist.
The SEO strategist uses keyword research, audience personas, and buyer’s journey evaluations to understand content topics relevant to the target audience’s search intent.
The content strategist assists in creating the content, whether writing it or editing it.
The SME either writes the first draft of the content based on their expertise or experience, which the content specialist edits, or the SME takes the content draft written by the content specialist and then reviews it from an expert’s POV.
The SEO strategist then reviews the final content to make sure it has the right formatting and on-page signals — like heading structures and wording, internal links, and an appropriate title tag and URL slug — and that the page is indexable for Search.
Chances are if you’re still creating “SEO content” the way you may have for years prior — likely by having the SEO strategist and content specialist working in isolation from the SME and just relying on keyword research and SERP analysis — you may not be adding the original information or insightful analysis in “helpful, people-first content” that Google’s ranking systems are increasingly rewarding with organic visibility in SERPs, such as after the September 2023 helpful content update.
Following guidance for AI-generated content
Helpful content practices are especially necessary in light of AI-generated and AI-assisted content. I’ve been pitched tools that generate AI content at scale for SEO, but I passed on them for one simple reason: the content they created violated Google’s guidance around helpful content, particularly around “how” and “why” it’s created.
In Google’s guidance about AI-generated content (created by Danny Sullivan and Chris Nelson on behalf of the Google Search Quality team), there’s a section titled Rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced, which says:
“Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high quality results to users for years.”
– Google Search Central, Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content, Rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced
Some people took that to mean that all AI-generated content was fine for Google.
That’s not the full guidance.
Later in the document, there’s a section on how to “create helpful content,” where it says:
“When it comes to automatically generated content, our guidance has been consistent for years. Using automation—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.“ [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content, How automation can create helpful content
Here’s an example of a website that relied on AI-generated content at scale, and then lost its visibility in search results, due to a manual action from Google’s webspam team:
As Google’s documentation on manual actions explains:
“Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s spam policies. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index.”
– Google Search Console Help, Manual Actions report
In other words, sometimes the fastest defense against unhelpful AI content is a human reviewer. 😉
If you do plan to use AI technology when creating your content for SEO purposes, take caution from those examples.
AI should be used as part of a collaborative process between the content specialist, SEO strategist, and subject matter expert, all working together for a common goal of creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. At each phase of that content creation process, AI tools may apply to each person’s role. For example, maybe you’re using ChatGPT for brainstorming topics, improving readability, or asking for ways to improve your content. (I’ve personally used ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude AI for various SEO tasks.)
That said, if you use AI in your content workflow, always do so in pursuit of a user-first agenda for SEO — to make helpful content, not spam.
Aligning with E-E-A-T, especially for YMYL topics
The consideration for reliable information in SEO content is especially true for businesses and websites in a Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) vertical.
As Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines explain:
“Pages on the World Wide Web are about a vast variety of topics. Some topics have a high risk of harm because content about these topics could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society. We call these topics “Your Money or Your Life” or YMYL.“ [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines, Page 11
This means your content needs high consideration for aligning with E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
As Google Search Central says in its helpful content documentation:
“While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful. For example, our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society. We call these “Your Money or Your Life” topics, or YMYL for short.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Get to know E-E-A-T and the quality rater guidelines
These are factors Google’s quality raters look for when judging search results, which indirectly contributes to how Google’s ranking systems work. Here’s an excerpt from the How search works documentation:
“We work with external Search Quality Raters to measure the quality of Search results on an ongoing basis. Raters assess how well content fulfills a search request, and evaluate the quality of results based on the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the content. These ratings do not directly impact ranking, but they do help us benchmark the quality of our results and make sure these meet a high bar all around the world.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search, How Search works, Improving Search with rigorous testing, 894,660 search quality tests
That document also discusses, in reference to the Quality of content and how Google ranks results, that:
“After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify signals that can help determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For example, one of several factors we use to help determine this is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. This has often proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted. Aggregated feedback from our Search quality evaluation process is used to further refine how our systems discern the quality of information.“ [Highlights added.]
– Google Search, How Search works, Quality of content
While it’s true the role of search quality raters may change in the future if GPT-4 can fulfill that responsibility, it’s unlikely search engines will totally move away from human evaluators. As Dawn Anderson writes in her recent Search Engine Land article on this topic:
“It seems unlikely that search engines (or IR research at large) would move completely away from using human relevance judges as a guardrail and a sobering sense-check or even to act as judges of the relevance labels generated by machines. Human quality raters also present a more robust means of combating “overfitting.”
Not all search areas are considered equal in terms of their potential impact on the life of searchers. Clarke et al., 2023, stress the importance of a more trusted human judgment in areas such as journalism, and this would fit well with our understanding as SEOs of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL).” [Highlights added.]
– Search Engine Land, Dawn Anderson: Quality rater and algorithmic evaluation systems: Are major changes coming?
But this concept of reliability has also been identified as a key signal for how Google Search ranks results based on testimony given by Pandu Nayak.
As Danny Goodwin summarized in Search Engine Land:
“The key signals, according to Nayak, are:
- The document (a.k.a., “the words on the page and so forth”).
- Topicality.
- Page quality.
- Reliability.
- Localization.
- Navboost.” [Highlights added.]
And here’s the direct quote from Pandu Nayak’s testimony:
“There are sort of code IR type, information retrieval type algorithms which cull topicality and things, which are really important. There is page quality. The reliability of results, that’s another big factor.“
– Pandu Nayak, 101823-USA-v-Google-PM.pdf
Providing a good page experience
In its helpful content guidance, Google has a section specifically for page experience:
“Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Site owners seeking to be successful with our systems should not focus on only one or two aspects of page experience. Instead, check if you’re providing an overall great page experience across many aspects.”
– Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Provide a great page experience
The section is short (that’s most of it), but it links to another document called Understanding page experience in Google Search results.
As that page outlines:
“Answering yes to the questions below means you’re probably on track in providing a good page experience:
- Do pages have good Core Web Vitals?
- Are pages served in a secure fashion?
- Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?
- Does the content lack an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Do pages lack intrusive interstitials?
- How easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages?
- Is the page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page?” [Highlights added.]
Summarizing those elements, a good page experience includes site speed and UX (Core Web Vitals), HTTPs, mobile friendliness, non-aggressive advertising (if relevant), non-intrusive pop-ups and other interstitials, as well as making the main content easy to locate and distinguish on the page.
It’s important to note these aren’t a holistic checklist for a good page experience, but rather key items to consider, among many others. Google says this as well in the guidance: “Please note these questions don’t encompass all page experience aspects to consider.”
Meanwhile, elements of the Page Experience report in Google Search Console have since been retired, including the “Mobile Usability” report as of December 1st.
Core Web Vitals
From that list, Core Web Vitals is notable. Many site owners (and frankly SEOs) were under the impression that CWV was considered a ranking factor. Danny Sullivan clarified in February 2024 that CWV is not a confirmed ranking factor, but that was adjusted in Google’s updated page experience documentation in March, which clarified CWVs are used by Google’s ranking systems.
Regardless, the consensus among many in the SEO community has been that any impact of CWVs on rankings is small. John Mueller has even said it shouldn’t be a top priority for smaller businesses.
I typically advise clients to use Core Web Vitals to assess the usability of their webpages, but the focus should be a user’s experience, not the CWV scores themselves.
On it’s page about how it ranks results, Google Search includes usability in its key factors behind which results are returned for queries. But that refers to page experience in its totality.
Mobile usability
While mobile usability isn’t reporting in GSC any longer, it’s still important for SEO. Not only has Google fully switched to mobile-first indexing, but its quality raters primarily evaluate sites based on their mobile versions:
Navigating to the main content
Also of high importance, in my mind, is the second to last bullet: “How easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages?”
As I wrote in a case study on content structure, I believe an outdated SEO tactic for content was to include a fluffy introduction or block of text on a page to add more keywords and make the page seem more relevant to Google’s ranking systems. However, that’s a search engine-first optimization practice, and it’s one of the aspects of unhelpful content that was targeted in the September HCU.
Marie Haynes pointed this out in one of her analyses of a site impacted by the HCU; the full post is cut off in the preview below, but here’s a key takeaway:
“I think this might be a case where the unhelpful content is not necessarily pages to be noindexed. Rather, it means removing the fluff on pages. All those words that are saying things readers are skimming over are there for search engines – that’s SEO first content.” [Highlights added.]
– Marie Haynes on X
One method I use when creating content is to address the searcher’s main intent early on the page. For example, in this guide, I included a definition of helpful, people-first content in the opening section.
When a page covers a topic holistically (like this guide also does), I’ll include a table of contents with jump links, as well as place them contextually in the content, to help the user find the most relevant sections to meet their needs.
If you’re into visual examples, I made an instructional video explaining how to add jump links in WordPress with HTML, as well as how this ties into Google’s guidance on helpful content and page experience:
Now with the fundamentals of helpful content and page experience understood, let’s explore using user-first SEO practices, how to measure the impacts of helpful content, and how to position content along an audience’s buyer’s journey and get the most out of it.
How to create helpful, people-first content with SEO in mind
Making helpful, people-first content that ranks well in search results involves collaboration, where the expertise or experience of someone who’s knowledge directly and reliably satisfies the search intent of a target audience on their buyer’s journey is put into the most helpful format and context, particularly when the stakes are high for that query (i.e., YMYL).
But, given that we now know more context around what Google describes as helpful, reliable, people-first content, and how the search engine may be evaluating pages in its search results against those criteria, what does this all mean for your SEO content strategy today and beyond?
In my opinion, we should take several steps to create people-first content that’s beneficial for SEO goals:
- First, we have to look beyond older SEO content tactics alone and apply optimizations in a user-first manner.
- Next, we need to devise a pillar-cluster strategy (hub-spoke model) that accounts for your audience’s unique buyer’s journey.
- Third, we must structure a content strategy that fuels collaboration between stakeholders.
- Fourth, we should analyze historical traffic impacts from Google’s ranking updates.
- Finally, we can factor in the strengths and weaknesses of a site’s existing content.
User-first SEO optimizations
To go beyond older SEO tactics — when content specialists and SEO strategists tended to work in isolation from SMEs, and optimizations were made with clicks and rankings in mind — the core focus for people-first SEO content should be on satisfying the user’s search intent while aligning with what Google calls E-E-A-T.
In other words, people come first, while most SEO considerations are secondary.
Here are examples of how SEO tactics can be done for the user first:
- Indexability, relevance, and readability:
- Helpful, people-first content is indexable and relevant to keywords the audience would search for and has an optimized title tag, but this is done to enable the user to more easily find the information on Search.
- No keywords are stuffed unnaturally on the page, no fluffy content is added to achieve an arbitrary word count, and there are no aggressive CTAs or ads, all of which can make it harder for the user to read the information.
- Page experience:
- People-first content may have an organized heading structure, concise paragraphs of information relevant to each heading, or a table of contents with jump links, so the user can easily scan and find key information. It may also lazy-load images, avoid cumulative layout shifts or intrusive interstitials, and account for mobile UX.
- But these steps are taken so the page loads quickly across all devices and allows the user to read the main content without distraction, and not simply to pass Core Web Vitals or mobile a friendliness.
- SERP enhancements:
- Helpful content may be marked up with structured data that Google supports, such as product information to identify pricing, availability, and reviews, or organization or person markup to signify the entities associated with the content, and while this is often done to achieve rich results or improve knowledge graph representations, such as in knowledge panels, the aims of that SERP visibility are for the benefit of the user to more quickly understand the context of the page on Search.
- Structured data and rich results shouldn’t be pursued only to manipulate SERP visibility, like often happened with FAQ schema in the past, hence its limited application today.
When SEOs optimize content to improve accuracy, authority, and relevance for the user’s benefit, and not just for Google’s ranking systems or SERP visibility, they’re acting in the spirit of creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.
This type of content is not only equally satisfying to your audience and Google’s ranking systems’ criteria, but it can also serve as the basis of your long-term SEO strategy because it earns qualified clicks while ranking for queries along your audience’s buyer’s journey.
Remember, people-first SEO is done for your audience, and that’s not directly Google:
One way to know if you’re reaching the right people and your SEO campaign that’s built on helpful content is successful is by measuring qualified clicks.
Measuring the success of your SEO efforts with qualified clicks
“Qualified clicks” is a term used by Fabrice Canel of Bing in a video interview with Jason Barnard of Kalicube (also covered in Search Engine Journal).
As Roger Montti says about AI Search in reference to clicks from Bing Chat (now Copilot):
“Users provide so much query information that the click to the website is essentially a perfect click, the qualified click.”
– Roger Montti, Search Engine Journal: Bing Explains SEO For AI Search
The idea of being a perfect click applies beyond SGE or Copilot (Bing Chat) citations or webpage links to normal search results on Google or Bing as well.
As generative AI chatbots answer more of users’ fundamental questions — and LLMs do the same in other places, like on ChatGPT — the goal of SEO content strategies is to earn qualified clicks by creating helpful content with reliable information that offers unique and relevant value at opportune times during the audience’s buyer’s journey.
Two ways to evaluate qualified clicks are to use advanced filters in Google Search Console to isolate rankings and traffic to pages associated with highly relevant queries or audiences as well as creating explore reports in Google Analytics 4 or custom reports in Looker Studio to measure engagement signals, user journeys, and conversions from organic traffic.
Understanding your audience’s buyer’s journey for content topics
Many website owners and marketers I speak with are familiar with the pillar-cluster and hub-and-spoke models of content topic ideation for SEO. Both have been around for years.
However, I’ve often seen these two models get misapplied in one of two ways:
- Individual pages created don’t align with the user’s search intent — I’ve seen this happen, for example, when massive informational pillar pages are created for transactional intent queries.
- Groups of content topics get selected based on keyword tool volumes or topical relevance suggestions, but don’t align with the target audience’s buyer’s journey — this is often done in pursuit of so-called “topical authority.”
When doing research on a buyer’s journey, I often start with keyword research, but I also account for audience personas, insights from internal marketing or customer relations teams, and other data, such as forums, reviews, and people also ask questions, which I might then consolidate into reports using ChatGPT.
But remember, if your pillar-cluster (hub-and-spoke) approach to content creation doesn’t follow your audience’s buyer’s journey, it’ll be unlikely to create helpful content that earns qualified clicks or leads to conversions.
Content topics also shouldn’t be chosen just for “topical authority,” without considering the audience’s buyer’s journey or the website’s domain of expertise.
In a recent SEJ article, Roger Montti explains why this idea of building topical authority with a pillar-cluster strategy doesn’t really make sense, including featuring a quote from Google’s John Mueller:
“And it’s true that Google will analyze a website or a section of it to determine if the site or section of it are relevant for a topic.
The SEO concept of Topical Authority takes those facts and creates an alternate reality that posits that creating content focused on a topic and linking them all together will cause Google to see it as authoritative for that topic.
But, that extra bit about linking related articles to each other in order to make Google give it a topical authority merit badge has no basis in reality.
Taking a bunch of related content and linking them all together based on their relevance to each other is a common sense best practice.”
– Roger Montti, Search Engine Journal: Google On Topical Authority: Don’t Worry About It
How can we think about buyer’s journeys for SEO?
Think with Google created an influential article and report in 2020 about the “messy middle” in the purchase journey. Here’s what it looks like:
I won’t go into full detail in this guide (you can also download the report online), but just as we spoke about “experience” in relation to E-E-A-T a little earlier, it also applies (in a different context) to the consumer journey, as does another E for “exposure”:
“Exposure is your awareness of the brands and products in a category. Exposure is the sum total of all the advertising emanating from a category that you’ve seen or heard. It’s the things you’ve learned through word of mouth, the things you’ve read in the press and online. …
But crucially, exposure is not a stage, or a phase, or a step. It’s an always-on, constantly changing backdrop that remains present throughout the duration of the decision-making process. …
The experience a customer has with the product or service they’ve purchased feeds directly into their background exposure. A brand that provides a good experience has a head start here, and a brand that delivers an amazing experience might even become a trigger itself, potentially increasing the frequency of purchases.
Implicit in the structure of our experiment (and marketing in general for that matter) is the idea that to take preference share away from a competitor brand, you have to be present when consumers are deliberating.
This might seem obvious, but it’s such a fundamental point that we don’t want its importance to be mistaken. And as we’ll see, there is surprising power in just showing up at the right moment. …
Being present from the first moment of deliberation is table stakes for any brand hoping to emerge triumphant from the messy middle. …
To cut through in the messy middle and make swift, effective connections with customers in “explore” mode, you should:
– Think with Google, Decoding Decisions: Making sense of the messy middle (Downloaded from How people decide what to buy lies in the ‘messy middle’ of the purchase journey)
- Use available data to qualify and categorise shoppers whoare exploring – data-driven algorithms should eventually make this identification possible at scale.
- Provide a great user experience that makes exploring your offerings as easy as possible.
- Present all the relevant information potential customers need to make a rapid transition into evaluation and then on towards purchase.” [Highlights added.]
When users are searching on Google or Bing and need more information or to complete an action, they’ll feel motivated to click through to view a webpage from a trusted source.
By creating helpful, people-first content along your audience’s unique buyer’s journey, you’ll be there to deliver the final answer they need — be that perfect click.
Don’t forget about other types of content formats for SEO, as well
In this article, we’re primarily talking about helpful written content, like blog articles, guides, or text on other web pages (PDPs, category pages, etc.), but keep in the back of your mind that the present and future of SEO will likely include many other content types, such as UGC (reviews, comments, etc.) and social media posts or videos found in Google’s Perspectives.
Google recently updated its Search Quality Raters Guidelines on November 16, 2023, to include more guidance around content like forums and even TikTok videos as examples of results that can highly meet user’s needs.
If you’re interested, here’s one of several TikTok videos that I’ve made about helpful content:
We’ll get into the role of search quality raters and how they use the SQR guidelines to evaluate search results more below, but one point to grasp early on is:
“Reading the guidelines may help you self-assess how your content is doing from an E-E-A-T perspective, improvements to consider, and help align it conceptually with the different signals that our automated systems use to rank content.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Get to know E-E-A-T and the quality rater guidelines
The SQR guidelines are currently in a PDF with 168 pages. Most site owners probably don’t have time to read through them all. 😉
However, in announcing this latest update to the SQR guidelines, Elizabeth Tucker of the Google Search Quality team also mentions:
“The guidelines share important considerations for what content is helpful for people when using Google Search. Our page on how to create helpful, people-first content summarizes these concepts for creators to help them self-assess their own content to be successful in Google Search.” [Highlights added.]
– Elizabeth Tucker, Google Search Quality team, Search Quality Raters Guidelines update
So, if you don’t have time to read the full 168-page PDF, you can browse the document on “helpful, people-first content.”
Structuring your SEO content strategy
To help inform your workflow, here’s an outline for how you can structure your “people-first SEO” content strategy to apply the lessons outlined in this article:
1. Existing content audit
- Main pages, supporting pages, blog articles
2. Competitor audit
- Content gap analysis
3. Keyword and audience research
- Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools
- Google Analytics 4
- Semrush, Ahrefs, Keyword Insights, etc.
- Google Trends
- Other sources (AlsoAsked, etc.)
4. Organize pillar-cluster groups
- Pillar pages
- Main pages, supporting pages, new pages (guides or blogs)
- Cluster pages
- Blog content (new or existing)
5. Content calendar
- Monthly schedule for new or updated content
6. SEO briefs for each page
- Page URL
- Title tag and meta description
- Suggested outline
- Special instructions
- Unique audience notes
- Structured data
- Linking/navigation
- Primary target keyword(s)
- Related keywords and entities
- Competitor articles
- Inspiration articles or resources
7. Content creation
- Writing, editorial review
- Expert review
8. SEO pre-publish review
- Internal linking, on-page optimizations, indexability
9. Publish content on the website
- Content, metadata, links, images, indexing
10. Monitor performance
- Keyword rankings, traffic, conversions
The exact process depends on how each member of the team wishes to contribute.
In general, the more the SEO strategist and content specialist can incorporate the subject matter expert’s knowledge or unique experience in the content, the more value can be extracted by them to reframe the SME’s original insights to suit the search intent of the audience, thus creating helpful, reliable, and people-first content with SEO value.
If left in isolation from SMEs and reliant only on traditional SEO content practices, SEO strategists and content specialists may tend to create search engine-first content, where the primary focus is on extracting SEO value (rankings and clicks) and not satisfying users.
Analyzing the causes of traffic or rankings declines after an algorithm update on Google, based on your content’s quality and helpful, people-first attributes
If your site’s organic traffic declines after Google makes a ranking system change or core update, it’s important to remember Google’s core updates aren’t penalties.
These updates simply reward the content Google’s ranking systems think is doing a good job based on being the highest quality and most relevant for the query.
As Google explains in their documentation on core updates:
“Core updates are designed to ensure that overall, we’re delivering on our mission to present helpful and reliable results for searchers. …
There’s nothing wrong with pages that may not be performing as well as they were before a core update. They haven’t violated our spam policies, nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those policies. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better in search results.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Google Search’s core updates and your website
Increasingly, this means sites benefitting from core updates are creating helpful, reliable, and people-first content that aligns with E-E-A-T.
In fact, the same helpful content documentation we’ve been referencing throughout this document is also what Google recommends reading if you’ve been impacted by a core update:
“As explained, pages that experience a change after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. That said, we understand that those who may not be performing as well after a core update change may still feel they need to do something.
We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward. To learn more about how to create content that’s successful, see our help page on how to create helpful, reliable people-first content. It has questions that you can ask yourself when assessing your own content.“ [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Google Search’s core updates and your website, Assessing your own content
One way to assess whether your content aligns with Google’s ranking systems’ criteria is to evaluate how your website pages perform following an update, such as the September 2023 helpful content update.
Glenn Gabe has written extensively on Google ranking system updates and what to do if you’ve been impacted by one. In his latest article about Google’s review system updates and their implication for sites impacted by the HCU, he explains:
“The HCU is continually running now, so sites technically don’t need to wait for another official helpful content update to recover. But the reality is that the recoveries I have seen have occurred during official helpful content updates (when the classifier has been improved or other major changes implemented).” [Highlights added.]
– Glenn Gabe, Analyzing the long-term impact of Google’s reviews updates and what that could mean for sites impacted by the helpful content update (HCU)
In a different article on the September 2023 helpful content update, Glenn Gabe likened aspects of the update to the Panda era. In reference to the impact of on-site ads on user experience, he writes:
“This is exactly the type of aggressive, disruptive, and even sometimes deceptive, advertising situation I have spoken about for years. And when I say years, I mean from medieval Panda days back in 2011. I saw that on many sites I was helping recover from Panda. And now here we are, with what looks like Panda on steroids. I have always said, “hell hath no fury like a user scorned” and I feel like that might be the motto for the latest HCU.” [Highlights added.]
– Glenn Gabe, The September 2023 Google Helpful Content Update – Did Google’s Announcement in April About Page Experience Foreshadow What We’re Seeing With The Current HCU(X)?
Remember that the helpful content system was separate from Google’s core ranking systems, hence it had its own announced updates.
The point about the helpful content system not being a penalty is also slightly nuanced, given how it could demote content with a site-wide classifier, as Ann Smarty points out:
We later saw the helpful content system become part of Google’s core ranking systems in March 2024, like what happened with Panda in 2015 or the hidden gems improvement in 2023. Google also has continuous and unannounced updates, like the reviews system after its November 2023 update that concluded on December 7th.
Ann Smarty also recently provided context around how the reviews system is different from core updates:
Going back a few months, the idea of ongoing SERP volatility from machine learning in ranking systems was suggested by Marie Haynes during the summer of 2023, when we saw sustained ranking turbulence on Google Search:
I wrote an updated analysis of that summer’s Google Search volatility until the end of 2023, and what the advent of AI-based ranking systems (including deep learning and multimodal models like Gemini) implies for our future SEO strategies, in which helpful, reliable, people-first content will be a central part.
Also in the spirit of continuous Google rankings volatility and system updates, Dawn Anderson writes in the conclusion of Quality rater and algorithmic evaluation systems, an article I suggest reading in full, that:
“If Google takes this route (using machine labeling in favor of the less agile “crowd” approach), expect a lot more updates overall, and likely, many of these updates will be unannounced, too.
We could potentially see an increased broad core update cadence with reduced impacts as agile rolling feedback helps to continually tune “relevance” and “quality” in a faster cycle of Learning to Rank, adjustment, evaluation and rollout.” [Highlights added.]
– Dawn Anderson, SEL: Quality rater and algorithmic evaluation systems: Are major changes coming?
So given the nuances of ranking system updates, if your website’s traffic from Google Search is impacted by an algorithm update, it’s important to consider what that particular ranking system analyzes.
In one of his articles about Google’s core updates, Glenn Gabe explains how traffic losses could be from relevancy adjustments, intent shifts, or overall site quality problems:
“If you’ve been negatively impacted by a broad core update, then run a delta report to understand the queries and landing pages seeing the biggest drops. …
When reviewing those queries, determine if those are relevancy adjustments, intent shifts in the SERPs, or if there might be site-level quality problems causing the drop. And remember, you could be seeing a combination of reasons for the drop.” [Highlights added.]
– Glenn Gabe, Google’s Broad Core Updates And The Difference Between Relevancy Adjustments, Intent Shifts, And Overall Site Quality Problems
What was interesting to me before is how the helpful content system was still separate from Google’s core ranking systems, however, not only was the hidden gems improvement (which was initially associated with the helpful content system) part of the core ranking systems, but Google’s guidance in responding to traffic losses from a helpful content update or core update is to read the self-assessment questions in their helpful, people-first content guidance.
Remember earlier how I said Danny Sullivan as Google Search Liaison recommended that document quite a bit after the helpful content update, he also referenced it after the October 2023 core update:
As Danny says in the post above about the Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content documentation speaks to how to be successful in Search overall — “anyone looking to be successful with [the helpful content system] — or a core update — or search in general, should really get to know this page.”
That’s especially true now that the helpful content system is part of the core systems, meaning HCU-impacted sites will now depend on core updates for recovery. That seems to have made sense all along.
Case study of a site with search engine-first content impacted by a core update
Here’s a real-world example of a website in a YMYL vertical that was impacted by Google’s August 2023 core update (and again, but to a lesser extent, by the September 2023 Helpful Content). It’s not a large site in terms of overall traffic, but it is an interesting case study for evaluating helpful, reliable, and people-first content vs. search engine-first content.
The August core update began rolling out on the 22nd of that month, as you can see from the red bar (created with the GSC Guardian Chrome extension) in the Google Search Console performance report below.
Before the August core update, the site received around 70-90 clicks on Google Search per day in the U.S., but just one day after the update began, that average dropped to around 30-50 clicks. (It’s also interesting there was a slight dip in clicks a few days before the update began.)
After analyzing pages that lost traffic and for which queries, I did a deeper content audit and identified signs of unhelpful, search engine-first content.
Here are some of my findings along with related self-assessment questions from Google’s helpful, people-first content document:
- The drop was largely related to blog content that was clearly written to target keywords for SEO.
- Related question: “Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?”
- Many of the blog topics were not on the buyer’s journey of the website’s core audience.
- Related question: “Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?”
- The blog articles often covered medical topics with no authorship or functioning outbound links to sources to show the information was reliable.
- Related question: “Is this content written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?”
- Some of the language in the blog content had keywords inserted unnaturally, likely to try to make the content appear more relevant for those queries.
- Related question: “Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t.)”
It turns out the blog content was created by a digital marketing agency without input from the business’s subject matter experts — in other words, content specialists and SEO strategists creating blog articles in isolation, a recipe for search engine-first content. 😉
That’s one example of a site that strayed a bit from the “who, how, and why” questions in Google’s helpful content documentation, creating content without expertise or experience and pursuing topics that weren’t on their audience’s buyer’s journey.
Remember the helpful content system used a site-wide signal
When thinking about your site’s content quality, looking at both an individual page level and a site-wide level is useful. This is because Google’s helpful content system “generates a site-wide signal”:
“Any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.
This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search Central, Google Search’s helpful content system and your website
Although the system is now part of the core systems, the point about site-wide effects still applies:
“Our core ranking systems are primarily designed to work on the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand the helpfulness of individual pages. We do have some site-wide signals that are also considered.”
– Google Search Central, Helpful content and Google Search results FAQ
The point about how the helpful content system classifier was completely automated and driven by machine learning is also worth bearing in mind for how it could have been applied to your site:
I’d also recommend this thread, which helps explain how the system might work using website vectors, a term from semantic search:
In the context of this complexity of how Google Search’s ranking systems may operate, you’ll typically want a dual focus in your content strategy on:
- Updating (or pruning) existing content to avoid a site-wide unhelpful content classifier as well as ensure alignment with E-E-A-T.
- Creating new content on your audience’s buyer’s journey to grow the audience and build more authority — notice I didn’t say topical authority, but rather authority, through links and brand reputation.
In either case, whether you’re updating content or creating new content, the goal is to make each page individually satisfy the user’s search intent by:
- Understanding what the user wants to achieve by searching the keyword.
- Making it easy for the user to find the main content (key information to satisfy their intent) on the page — this ties into page experience, an element of helpful content.
- Demonstrating the information and source are trustworthy by explaining who created it and why.
Don’t write content only for rankings.
Instead, balance a pillar-cluster strategy with your audience’s buyer’s journey and your business goals.
You want to select content topics that:
- Are on the buyer’s journey (relevant)
- Have search volume (bring traffic)
- Create authority (pillar-cluster, E-E-A-T)
- Position your brand as the solution (conversions)
Working with your existing content’s strengths or weaknesses to make it more helpful
Examples I’ve seen working with clients where they could make their existing content more helpful included the following:
1. Reorganizing blog articles or other web pages to make the main content easier to find for the user
This often happens when the article is written to satisfy an audience’s search intent (based on keyword research), but the content itself isn’t helpful to a reader because of one of two reasons with how it was created:
- An SME will write an article that’s not well-organized and the reader has to piece the information together (this can be improved by consolidating the main content at the top) or
- A content specialist and/or SEO strategist created an older article, likely based on keyword or competitor research, but they were trying to hit a certain word count or make a page seem more robust and added superfluous sections or fluffy language that gets in the way of the reader getting the answer.
I did a case study of one example where this content restructure work improved rankings.
2. Adding author and/or reviewer information — including their name with a short bio or link to a bio page — plus last modified dates
The author and reviewer signals help align with E-E-A-T, showing that the information came from an expert or someone with experience or was reviewed by someone with those credentials.
Meanwhile, the last updated date helps inform the user (as well as Google) of when the information on the page was last changed. This can be part of helpful content by providing signals of freshness.
On my website, I used to add this manually, including my name linked to my about page, when I first created the content — I usually added “created” instead of “written” because I tend to add quotes and images that I didn’t write, so to speak — as well as the date I last updated the page.
Here’s an example from one version of this page:
Here’s an example of this done as part of a page template on the SEJ article I linked above:
You’ll notice it has one date (presumably the most recent) and includes additional information, like social shares and times it’s been read (page views).
Users also tend to like more up-to-date content, which is why freshness is important for several categories of queries — and arguably in general — but be careful not to tread into artificial freshness, which is search engine-first content tactics, and not consistent with helpful content:
“Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?
Are you adding a lot of new content or removing a lot of older content primarily because you believe it will help your search rankings overall by somehow making your site seem “fresh?” (No, it won’t)”
– Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Avoid creating search engine-first content
3. Restructuring content to better satisfy search intent, as implied by search results or user feedback
Sometimes content creators will identify a target keyword to be the basis for a website page, but they make a mistake with regard to its search intent during the research phase, such as:
Not considering the search intent of the keyword but rather choosing it as a content topic based on perceived topical relevance or other metrics from 3rd-party keyword research tools, like high volume or easy difficulty.
This can lead to writing content that nobody wants to read because it has no search demand in that form. (I’ve also seen this happen with AI-generated content at scale.)
An example can be someone finding a keyword like, [used ford taurus], where the intent is clearly commercial (compare and buy).
But they may write a blog article like, “5 Great Used Ford Taurus Models,” which no one is looking for on Search.
Not checking the actual search engine results page (SERP) for a keyword to confirm if the intent matches what the keyword research tool says.
As I’ve mentioned in my 11x content article, I don’t believe analyzing the top-ranking results’ content to create your own article is a worthwhile strategy in light of the helpful content system. However, looking at SERP results can inform your understanding of a query’s search intent, and the depth of helpful information a user wants.
If you see an informational keyword like, [what is seo], you may think the user wants a short definition.
But Google’s answer box and knowledge panel answer that quick search intent, so when choosing a web result to click, in most instances, it’s a comprehensive guide the user wants.
As Google’s helpful content documentation mentions, “Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?”
If you happen to create content that isn’t ranking well, it can be the case that the topic is relevant to your audience’s buyer’s journey based on keywords they search, and you may also have created helpful, people-first content by including reliable information with real expertise and experience behind it, however, that content must also satisfy the user’s search intent if it’s to have value for SEO.
Additional tips:
One way to identify which webpage content to update and make more helpful is to perform a content audit, namely looking for striking distance keywords in GSC.
Pages ranking just outside the top results for a query tend to be relevant but just not yet fully satisfactory or helpful enough content to satisfy the user’s search intent or deliver the right signals to Google’s automated ranking systems.
If you favor a more manual approach to content quality and helpfulness evaluations, you can also watch user recordings in tools like Microsoft Clarity to see how users engage with the content, or you can ask for real feedback, ideally from objective users.
Related resources & video summary
Maybe after reading this guide you still have questions, or you’d like to hear other viewpoints from related resources.
You’ll notice I didn’t talk too much about backlinks in this article. I do believe they’re an important signal to Google of content quality and aligning with E-E-A-T. This is based on how Google refers to them on its How Search works page:
“After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify signals that can help determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For example, one of several factors we use to help determine this is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. This has often proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted.” [Highlights added.]
– Google Search, How Search works, How results are automatically generated, Quality of content
I’m the type of SEO who passively builds backlinks using the merits of a website’s content and how well it’s distributed to relevant audiences, rather than actively building (asking for) them.
I’m also an advocate for people-first SEO, where optimization decisions are made equally for the benefit of users and search engines. Here, that means linking to other guides on the same topic for the benefit of you as the user.
If I’m too hesitant to link to other pages covering the same topic as mine because it might help them outrank me, then do I deserve to outrank them anyway? Life is for the brave!
To that end, here are other notable SEO resources I’d recommend checking out if you’re interested in helpful, reliable, people-first content:
- Google Search’s helpful content system and your website by Google Search Central
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content by Google Search Central
- Helpful content and Google Search results FAQ by Google Search Central
- Understanding People-First Content: What It Is and How to Write It by Nicole Inge, Express Writers
- AI or Human: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People First Content by Dean Long
- How to survive and thrive in a Google helpful content world by Casey Markee, Search Engine Land
- Use LongShot’s Helpful Content Checklist to Create People-First Content for your Readers by LongShot
Here’s a YouTube video summarizing this guide as well as providing additional context and insights:
Here are key terms from this article (you can find more in my SEO glossary.):
- Search intent: the goal a user has when they type in a keyword, usually categorized as navigational, transactional, commercial, or informational; to rank for a keyword in Search, content must satisfy the intent of it (be relevant). One way to determine keyword intent can be by analyzing top-ranking results, but be careful to maintain a people-first focus and differentiate your content based on quality and helpfulness.
- Helpful content system: Google’s helpful content system ensures “people see original, helpful content created for people in search results.”
- People-first content: content created primarily for people, not search rankings or clicks.
- Pillar-cluster model: This approach uses internal linking between related pages to cover a topic holistically based on topical keyword groups (clusters).
- Buyer’s journey: the journey from awareness to consideration to decision phases that a user goes through when solving a need; your content should be represented in rankings for keywords along this journey.
- Page experience: a component of helpful content that relates to different aspects of the content, including Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, and how easily a user can find the answer to their question (main content).
- Knowledge graph and entities: Google is partly a semantic search engine, which means it doesn’t just look at keywords in content but also the meaning behind words. Another way to strengthen the relevance of content is to incorporate related entities in writing to help build topical relevance based on Google’s knowledge graph. Related entities in content are a sign of topical knowledge and relevance, and SMEs will tend to incorporate them naturally in their writing.
- E-E-A-T: for YMYL verticals that can impact a person’s wellness, Google likes to see high alignment with experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust.
- Google SGE: the generative AI chatbot in Google Search that has the potential to reduce the visibility of many types of general content, making a thoughtful content strategy more important. Qualified clicks, where users find your website as the final answer to their need within a specific context, should be the focus.
But before you go … I’d like to quickly tell you about my framework for creating more creative, people-first content for SEO, which I call 11x content.
Introducing 11x, my approach for creating more original, creative & imaginative helpful, people-first content for SEO
The 10x approach for creating SEO content has been around since 2015 (and was later followed by the skyscraper technique). Both have been written about and used extensively.
However, sometimes these methods of doing SEO content are misapplied, resulting in search engine-first content that doesn’t align with how Google’s ranking systems aim to surface helpful, reliable, people-first content today.
That’s why I made an approach to creating people-first content that doesn’t consider what’s ranked in search results before.
The 11x content framework uses imagination and intuition to put the creator in the shoes of the user, so rather than trying to outdo what’s ranking on Search already, the focus instead is on satisfying their search intent better than what’s currently available. The result is content that’s more original, creative, and ultimately helpful for your audience.
Note the trend lines in the keyword research data below from Semrush:
While [10x content] has the most historical search volume, it’s also trending down, while [people first content] is trending up.
Just one more sign that creating helpful, reliable, people-first content is the (past) present and future for SEO.
I’ve also got proof this method of SEO content creation works.
I approached creating this guide as 11x content: I didn’t focus on what was already ranking in search results; I simply said, I’m an SEO who works with content professionals and website owners, what is it I think they need to know about Google’s helpful, reliable, people-first content guidance?
In the course of writing this article, I searched that topic often as a query during research.
Typically, I saw Google’s documentation ranking with a featured snippet:
Yet, as Danny Sullivan mentioned in that documentation, it’s not an SEO checklist for site owners:
“Just be the best you can for your readers. For people. Everything we do in ranking is meant to reward that. The more people try to things they think are just for us, the more they’re likely doing all the wrong things to align with how our ranking work.
This guidance is really important, but it’s not a “checklist” in terms of things you should or shouldn’t have specifically: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
It’s meant to help people better assess if they’re actually producing content that’s people-first.” [Highlights added.]
– Google SearchLiaison on X
That leaves an opportunity to provide content with more actionable information and that’s more helpful than what’s currently available in search results.
As it turned out, publishing this guide enabled it to achieve the featured snippet for that query:
As I wrote about in my rankings volatility article, Google has core ranking systems like Navboost, which use user click data. To that end, it’s possible my updated page was evaluated (based on certain criteria) and then reevaluated later, based on user signals.
So while this guide doesn’t consistently hold that featured snippet, I’m still proud it was able to rank alongside other webpages from websites with larger brand authority and backlink profiles.
“And following our will and wind we may just go where no one’s been”
One of my favorite lesser-known TOOL songs is Hush, which has the line, “People tell me what to say.”
You may recognize it from the title of this guide because it’s such a great way to explain the people-first content philosophy!
What that lyric implies to me is just as it sounds — when creating content for SEO, put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
Let your intuition about your user’s needs tell you what you say, and then let your expertise or experience guide how you say it.
When you’re creating content like that, with a purpose, because you have an audience in mind, and what you’re writing about has originality and unique value, and the information helps satisfy your audience’s needs because it’s relevant to their search intent and based on your expertise or experience, then you’ll be creating content for people that also performs on Search — what Google calls: “helpful, reliable, people-first content.”
With that in mind, let’s end with another lyric from a TOOL song, this time Lateralus — “We’ll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one’s been.”
Until next time, enjoy the vibes:
Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂
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