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Explore strategic insights from Kevin Amos, Brunner Partner, Chief Media and Data Officer.

Perspectives from Kevin Amos | Brunner

Partner, Chief Media and Data Officer

Kevin Amos

Stay ahead of SERP changes and Google algorithm impacts with valuable viewpoints and expert advice from Brady Ashe, Associate Director of SEO. 


Perspectives from Brady Ashe | Brunner

Associate Director, SEO

Brady Ashe

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<h3><strong>Help Users Get Answers </strong></h3><p>SEO experts have been “answer focused” for years – ever since Google rolled out Featured Snippets that would elevate concise answers to relevant queries and link to the source website. Structured Data and Rich Results are recommended to support elevating helpful content in search results. In short, Google wants your content to be found – if it’s helpful. As you create content, consistently ask yourself if it’s addressing the needs of your readers.</p><p><strong>Answer questions succinctly and then expand: </strong>A brief answer to a direct question not only supports Featured Snippets – but also shows your readers you are an authority on the subject. From there, you can expand into supporting details and optimize that with keywords.</p><ol><li><strong>Leverage keyword questions in headings:</strong> Follow those headlines with a direct answer – try not to bury the information just to keep someone reading.</li><li><strong>Only make your content as long as it needs to be: </strong>Long-form content has been an essential component of SEO copywriting, and this shouldn’t change that – but if you’re stretching an article to meet a prescribed word count, you’re not creating helpful content.</li><li><strong>Include anecdotes and first-hand accounts: </strong>This can help your content be more relevant and approachable, as well as unique. No one else has the exact quote or perspective of you and your expert team. Leverage that to build your authority.</li></ol><h3><strong>Have Actionable Next Steps</strong></h3><p>Nothing is less helpful than doorway content that leads nowhere. Unactionable content keeps your users stuck in their search funnel and your business goals unmet. Craft content that helps your user learn something new about your product, service, or industry and provides a clear next step so they can progress on their journey – whether that is to learn more on a subject or to discover your solution to their problem. Links to deeper supportive content, videos, product pages, reviews, or applications all help your users take action. And with analytics, they help you better understand when content is actively engaging your audience. Build these next steps thoughtfully, ensuring your “Related Content” is truly related and your link to a product detail page is not an odd sell in relation to the topic of your content.</p><h3><strong>Review Existing Content</strong></h3><p>If there are content pieces on your site that were built from a search engine-first perspective and don’t offer unique human value, consider the following actions:</p>

<h2><strong>What Are Your Next Steps?</strong></h2><p>Best-practice SEO is still safe. This update is not devaluing keyword-optimized content, rather, it is ensuring site content is helpful and on message – not attracting users to boost traffic. If your goal is to help answer a user’s question, you have to know that question, and keyword research can help you find it – and bring them to you. Creating content that is still informed by, and optimized to, relevant keywords is still a best practice and supported by Google – it’s all in your approach:</p><ul><li><strong>Be altruistic in how you create content: </strong>If you always put your users first – in how you craft content and organize your website, you’ll be well positioned to succeed with this update.</li><li><strong>Create content that is relevant to your brand positioning: </strong>Choose keywords and topics that truly align with the goals of your company and your customers.</li><li><strong>Select keyword phrases that read naturally: </strong>If something sounds off, it probably is – while there will always be some awkward phrasing as you match up searcher intent with relevant content, try to control for this with the terms you select and how you incorporate them into your content.</li><li><strong>Focus on quality over quantity: </strong>The previous emphasis on the importance of long-form content may have resulted in websites with a large – though not always relevant – content repository. Going forward, rather than building up a deep library of content, focus on a targeted library of deep content.</li></ul><p>Monitor the impact of the update on your site’s performance in the coming weeks and months. If you know your website hosts content that was created from a search-engine first perspective, and you’re concerned about the value it adds – trust your gut and launch a review.</p>

<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google announced its Helpful Content algorithm update</a>&nbsp;on August 18th. The rollout is underway and will most likely be complete in early September. This update reinforces Google’s established stance on creating content for people, rather than search engines. As the algorithm has evolved over time, it’s become more adept at recognizing natural speech patterns and styles – it knows if you’re writing for a human reader or a search engine spider, and it prefers the former. This is why at Brunner; we always tell our clients to use keywords that are relevant to your product and your audience. And most importantly, write what you would want to read.</p><h2><strong>What Type of Content Will be Impacted?</strong></h2><p>The helpful content update aims to better reward people-first content from which visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience. Content built with a search-engine first approach (i.e. less substantive and valuable content created for the sole purpose of ranking in organic search to drive traffic flow and brand awareness) will be subject to devaluation.</p><h2><strong>How Do You Avoid Serving Search Engine-first Content? </strong></h2><p>In their <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Search Central post about the helpful content update</a>, Google poses the following questions:</p><ul><li>Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?</li><li>Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?</li><li>Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?</li><li>Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?</li><li>Are you writing about things simply because they are trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?</li><li>Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?</li><li>Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (It doesn’t.)</li><li>Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?</li><li>Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?</li></ul><p>Likely, content aimed at answering simple fact-seeking queries will not be impacted by the update. Instead, content that could be served for queries helping users make a meaningful decisions, will likely be the focus.</p><p>As an example, ‘what is smart home integration?’ won’t likely be the focus of the update, but content that answers the question ‘will smart home integration save me money/energy?’ will be.</p><h2><strong>How Will Sites Be Impacted?</strong></h2><p>One of the reasons this update has the SEO industry talking (aside from being the first named update in a while) is how this will impact websites. The update will not devalue search-engine-first content on a page-by-page basis but rather on a sitewide basis. This means if you are guilty of any of the above guidelines and routinely publish content with a search engine-first approach, you likely will see visibility and traffic declines <em>across your entire site</em>, including content pieces that may not necessarily violate those guidelines.</p><h2><strong>What Should You Do?</strong></h2><p>Brunner recommends a review of any website content that you feel will violate the guidelines, or is providing little value to users, and proactively remove it. We also recommend proactive content creation in-line with Google’s guidance. Below is guidance around creating new content and removing the old in line with Google’s directives.</p><h3><strong>Create Expertise-Driven Content </strong></h3><p>At the heart of what Google (and other search engines) aim to achieve through core, ranking algorithm updates is an enhanced ability to assess content quality. Recently, due in large part to enhanced AI- and machine-learning-driven capabilities to understand authors as entities, content quality is assessed not only based on <em>what</em> is being said but <em>who</em> is saying it. Ask yourself, “is the publisher uniquely qualified to speak to the topic at hand? Are they credentialed in this particular field? What is their level of education and experience on the topic? Can they provide first-hand anecdotal evidence or first-party research to support their claims?” Keep reading for more detail:</p>

Google announced its Helpful Content algorithm update on August 18th. Discover how it can impact your SEO strategies.

What You Need to Know About the Google Helpful Content Update

What You Need to Know About the Google Helpful Content Update

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