What is Content Helpfulness?
The last three Google algorithm updates have all been around something called Content Helpfulness.
To best understand what it is, let’s get the definition straight from the source. To measure Content Helpfulness, Google has developed what they refer to as their “helpful content system”. The purpose of this system, quoted directly from their website, is to:
Better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well. Source.
Okay, great! So how do we create a satisfying experience for our visitors?
The answer: By ensuring the content itself answers the actual question visitors are trying to solve.
Creating Helpful Content
Ready for this?
To help us beat AI in search, we’re going to use AI to do so. Muahaha!
Identifying Helpful Topics, using AI
Here’s a great trick:
- Go into ChatGPT, paste your article, and ask it to identify the subtopics of your article. You can ask it things like:
- What are the subtopics of this article?
- What are the questions that this article answers?
- Then, taking it a step further: If you can do that with your articles, you can do it with the top search results as well. The top 3, top 5, top 10.
And all of a sudden you have an understanding, from a helpfulness perspective, of what areas or subtopics these articles (the TOP articles) are writing about.
Now, you can make a rough outline for your own content.
Creating a Content Outline
Now that you’ve identified the actual question(s) you’d like your content to answer, you can create an outline.
This doesn’t need to be complicated. Keep it simple.
You’ve defined the quantifiable language that you want to be using (hint: the subtopics and/or questions identified for you by ChatGPT)…
The final step: Create a rough outline and fill it in with your experience and your expertise. Boom, done.
This is an excellent, simple content creation process that not only saves you time on every single piece of content, but also gets you thinking in the mindset of the types of content that rank the highest.
