Better content means more traffic to your small business website.
Google and other search engines make profits when search engine users are satisfied with their services, just like every other business. When Google’s users are disappointed, Google does what any other successful business would do. They address the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again. If a business site delivers erroneous, untrustworthy, or out-of-date information, Google stops sending its users to that site.
In August of this year, the search engine giant released the “helpful content update” and offered guidance to businesses on how to develop more helpful content:
Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we’re launching what we’re calling the “helpful content update” that’s part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.
What constitutes better content?
Let’s break down Google’s statement to see if we can clarify what the search engine giant means by “better content.”
It connects people to helpful information.
If you’re a small business owner, your web content strategy should focus on providing helpful information relating to your business. Helpful information is current information. It’s relevant information that a search engine user can actually use right now. Have you ever visited a site that clearly hasn’t been updated in a decade or more? You’ve got to blow the dust off the blog posts, and you can’t even be totally sure the business is still in operation based on the cobwebs around the hero image.
It’s a bad look, and Google is going to favor a comparable business site with more recent content for two main reasons. More recent information is likely to be more relevant to search engine users. A site that has posted more recently is more likely to be an active, dynamic experience for users, especially compared to a dusty, barren site with static information.
It’s original content.
Imagine being an overworked Google bot scouring the internet for an article on “insulation for metal buildings” and finding 48,500,000 results. A quick peek inside many of these millions of results reveals a lot of AI-generated spam-style content. This lazy content is created to fill space and attract search engines, but it’s not designed to satisfy the human desire for novelty, entertainment, and enlightenment.
Serving up the same message as everybody else to boost SEO doesn’t cut it with Google. To be truly helpful to humans, a small business website has to be original. To stay useful, a small business website has to be original over and over and over again.
Don’t panic. Get excited!
Posting to your blog every month won’t just make Google happy; it’ll make your site visitors happy. That’s a conversion waiting to happen. You have professional expertise that people are looking for. You have unique opinions and ideas gained from years of experience. Your clients and prospects have questions they want answers to, and you’ve got Emery Design’s Content Machine at your disposal.
