What exactly is "helpful content"?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up.

Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're put you guys some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO I am Mordy overseeing the head of SEO branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the helpful, the always ready to help be very helpful, super helpful. Nothing is more helpful in SEO than our head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Help, I need somebody. Not just anybody. Help.

I don't know any other...

Mordy Oberstein:

I can't sing I have a cold. Wait a second. I can't sing anyway.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, any other songs about... Oh no, I get by with a little help from my friends those are both Beatles songs, maybe The Beatles are the most helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's not a lot of songs with the word help. I'm looking at this the other day, actually.

Crystal Carter:

"Won't you please help me?" That's one. That's one. Here we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's still Help by the Beatles.

Crystal Carter:

Is is? Oh gosh. Oh yeah, you're right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, we've gone full circle from the two Beatles songs that talk about help.

Crystal Carter:

Literally. Although to be fair, the help from my friends when I don't really count them, when I count the Joe Cocker one.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Joe Cocker version is fabulous.

Also Wonder Years, so.

Crystal Carter:

The Wonder Years, when the Wonder Years kicks in and it's like that, I'm like, yeah, Kevin, let's do this. Middle school is difficult.

Mordy Oberstein:

My association's always in the beginning intro, he puts on a Jets helmet. That old school Jets logo like Joe Namath Jets logo, that just sticks out to me. That's the way my brain works. I don't know.

Crystal Carter:

I just feel, I remember relating to him dealing with stress. He had so much stress. He had the weight of the world on his shoulders. And I was like, "Kevin I feel you."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's true though.

Crystal Carter:

The struggle is real.

Mordy Oberstein:

I got to re watch that. I haven't watched that in years.

Crystal Carter:

They rebooted it. It's pretty cool as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I did see they reboot. I watched one episode. I'm like, "I can't. It's too..."

Crystal Carter:

I've had a lot of associations with the original. You got to settle into it. I think that they kept a lot of the good aesthetic.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway, I got to go back into it.

Fine. Anyway.

Crystal Carter:

We digress.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter.

And where if Arby's has the meets, we have ADI. Not only can you use our ADI to literally leverage AI to create a website for you, but you can use GPTthree right inside the Wix editor, create AI generated content with the click of a mouse inside of the Wix editor.

Warning, AI content should be done with supervision and may result in the loss of rank, loss of clicks, loss of conversions, and loss of appetite for your audience. Always consult with the content provider or SEO before taking AI content. Do not generate AI content on an empty stomach since nothing should ever be done on an empty stomach.

That was a mouthful, but we have a lot of AI inside of Wix. You should definitely leverage it.

Crystal Carter:

You should absolutely check it out. It's pretty cool. I think that, yeah, you definitely have to find out what you can do, what you can't do because it doesn't do everything. It can save you some time and it's pretty rad. So check it out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Use responsibly.

Crystal Carter:

Use responsibly.

Mordy Oberstein:

All seriousness by the way, you should make sure your AI content is helpful 'cause it's super cool.

Crystal Carter:

Helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Cutting edge stuff from Wix. But you need to know how to use this stuff to make sure that, again, it's helpful. Which brings us to today's episode of What the Heck is Helpful anymore on the internet.

Crystal Carter:

What is helpful content? We keep getting lots of things about the less information, about the helpful content update and that your content should be helpful for people, but what exactly...

Mordy Oberstein:

Is helpful?

We're taking a hard look at Google's passion for helpful content and asking what exactly does that mean? We'll discuss the clues Google leaves, so we may define what is helpful content where page experience now fits into helpful content and what is the future of helpful content in the algorithm? Plus Sam Rush's own head of SEO Kyle Byers will tell us how he gauges content quality and will explore nifty little Google feature that may help us better understand how Google thinks of helpful.

Of course we have your snappy SEO news who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. Throw your site and its content a lifeline because we're here to help as episode 42 of the SERP's Up podcast is the call button to content that has fallen and can't get up.

Crystal Carter:

There's so many nineties references in this.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love that. I know it's so many nineties.

Crystal Carter:

I feel like we should get a clapper before we get going.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, clap on, clap off. Here's some helpful content for you.

Crystal Carter:

Let's pop into the introduction then Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just for a little bit of background, in August of 2022, Google released a new update called the Helpful Content Update. Ever since then, all SEOs can talk about is AI and also helpful content. But what exactly does helpful content look like, sound like, feel like? Exactly and that's kind of been a little bit of an elusive question.

A little bit of background about the Helpful Content Update. It looks at the domain, the entire site. Yes, I said site and not pages. Hopefully that myth around "Google only looks at pages." Which I know Glen Gabe hates that myth. Is now fully gone because Google has officially said that the Helpful Content Update looks at the site overall, which makes a great deal of sense because it's really important for the user to understand that the site offers a good content quality experience because after looking at one page, you may decide to go to the next page. Content quality applies to all pages.

Anyway in any regard the Helpful Content Update looks at the site to see how helpful the content is and if it passes a certain threshold and is deemed quality, which is good and that's what you want. If it doesn't pass that threshold, you might not rank as well. To put this in Google's own words, "content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people is what we're talking about."

This threshold, by the way, is constantly being evaluated. Google says, "the Helpful Content Update is also live and continuous. It's not that Google needs to press a button and then recalibrate is what I'm trying to say. Sites identified by this updat according Google may find this signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously allowing it to modern, newly launched sites and existing ones as it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long term, the classification will no longer apply."

By the way, Google's Gary ish at Pubcon in February 2023 made it sound like recovering from this is really, really, really hard. Which brings us to getting it right the first time.

Crystal thoughts?

Crystal Carter:

My first thoughts is, I remember when they were like, "we're releasing the helpful content update." And people were like, "oh snap. It's on!"

Mordy Oberstein:

Armageddon 2023.

Crystal Carter:

People are like, "people have been making junk content. You better watch out because here it comes." Everybody sat around going, "what? I'm not seeing, I didn't see, I'm not sure if I see anything straight away."

I think I remember Danny having to come out and be like, "no, it's slowly rolling through. It's a bit of a slow burn." I think it's interesting that we started with a little help from my friends because the way that they describe it is a bit like a relationship with a friend or something. You'll give your friend a little bit of slack if maybe they didn't return your call one time, but if every time you ask them to help you, they don't, then you're going to be like, "okay, maybe this person isn't actually helpful." If you have a lot of signals for that particular friend that maybe they're not helpful or maybe they're not engaging or whatever, then maybe you're going to think, "okay, so it's interesting that they're saying they're continuously rolling and it's continuously rolling out. And so I think it's something that might not immediately see a sharp change straight away as these updates happen." But you might see a gradual...

Mordy Oberstein:

Over time.

By the way, it's constantly evolving. First of it's a machine learning property and in my mind, these things learn slowly, develop slowly, we calibrate slowly. They evolve over time. You've seen them with the product review updates, which are now review updates. They expand, they get more prolific.

Even at Google IO, we actually covered this on our Google IO podcast. Google announced that the helpful content update is now going to be looking for the hidden gems of the web. Which by the way, Glen Gabe asked Danny Sullivan of Google is that new and it was new. It's a new ability of the helpful content that the way Barry Schwartz phrased it I thought was quite well, "Instead of looking at this from a negative point of view, is this site not offering a quality experience? The helpful content update will be looking in the positive sense. Is this a hidden gem of the web?"

It's a new way of the algorithm functioning with the ranking system functioning. And by the way, I think we talked about this back when we did that podcast on Google IO. The fact that they announced it at Google IO, as part of their official materials around Google IO tells you it's for real.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, indeed. Also, I think it's an evolution of the passage ranking thing that they were talking about 'cause they used the word hidden gem to describe that as well.

At search on, I think it was either 2022 or 2021, I can't remember. But at search on, they described the passive ranking thing and they said specifically we're looking for hidden gems and I remember that Martin Schlitt was explaining this in an interview on SEJ and he was talking about with the hidden gems' thing, it's essentially about people who have created good content, helpful content, but maybe it hasn't been overly optimized or significantly keyword optimized. Their systems, you said it's machine learning and it's learning the machines are learning to understand our language and we are seeing that with some of these LLMs, how they can understand my terrible prompts, I give them terrible prompts, misspellings and everything. And yet they're able to come back with something that makes sense. They're able to understand language better, therefore they can understand a piece of content that might not be fully optimized for that.

I remember there was one recently that I found and I was looking up... Not to give too much, I was looking up like Aura costumes 'cause I was like, oh, I think I might get a Aura costume"

Mordy Oberstein:

We're back to Star Trek. Star Trek.

Crystal Carter:

I was looking up Uhuracostume thing and the top ranking post had a YouTube video that was good but the page in terms of SEO, like terrible formatting, no headers, like that sort of thing. But the actual content of the page was good quality content.

I think that they're trying to do is make sure that if you have something that's good quality and it's worth saying that you're not so impeded for getting in front of users by some of the sort of structural things that people have required previously.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I think for some context, my personal theory around this whole thing is that Google realize there's a content gap. I don't mean in terms of the number of pages available to, but the number of good pages or helpful pages available to it. And realizes that while you might have gone to a content marketing agency or a content agency to spin up some content for you, they're not the actual experts on whatever it is that you were talking about.

So changing tires. I always go back to tires. Let's go to Star Trek costumes, a content marketing agency can help you, but they're not the actual experts on Star Trek costumes. You who are manufacturer Star Trek costumes or a Star Trek nerd, you are the expert, the business owner, whatever it is, they're the actual expert and they need to create an incentive for the actual experts to create content. In order to create that incentive, they have to rank, which means that they have to be able to pull up those hidden gems of the web.

I think what's super interesting, and we're going to get into it, what is helpful content actually look like in our opinion?

But it's one really super interesting point. I was just watching Google Marketing live recently, we're recording this a few weeks before we actually released this. And one of the stats they talked about was the propensity of people to do more conversational searches, meaning they're looking less for, I forget the example they gave, I think it was pajamas, less for men's pajamas. They're looking more for things like super comfortable men's pajamas that match. Whatever that... Much more specific. And I think that leans into what is helpful content.

Crystal Carter:

Again, I think it's important to know the history of some of SEO stuff. Like Barry Schwartzis our resident SEO historian and it's worth following along with the evolution of that because the conversational tone of queries is something that has evolved. Featured snippets enable that voice search enables that, SEO Assistantsor Google assistants enable that. And it facilitates you writing out more so that you can get different results. And as we move into search generative experience as we move into that, you're going to see more of that as well. When I'm speaking on Bing chat for instance, when I'm speaking to that, I'll say, "my plant has brown leaves and I don't know why. How can I fix my plant?" And it will say, "oh, this is..."

Mordy Oberstein:

Because you didn't water it, did you water it?

Crystal Carter:

No, I did water it. We discussed this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Did you stick it in the closet? Because it needs light.

Crystal Carter:

I watered the plant...

Mordy Oberstein:

And you gave it light and it's soil?

Crystal Carter:

I have it light, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, I'm just covering the basics.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, thank you very much.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry.

Crystal Carter:

But to be fair, it doesn't have any drainage. Maybe it needs drainage's. That's the thing the plants need sometime, this is what the bot suggested.

Mordy Oberstein:

We all need drainage. But it's a really good point that not about the plants needing drainage, that is a good point.

Now the way people search tells you a lot because what Google's trying to do is align with what people are looking for and it's going to align the kind of content that people are looking for, what they're looking for.

If people are looking for something more targeted, more specific, that gives you a clue as to what Google thinks is helpful, which is TLDR in my opinion. Helpful content is targeted specific content with purpose.

Crystal Carter:

And based on some actual relevant experience.

You've talked about this before when you were saying about Google's changing your title tags and you said that Google is changing your title tags because they're flexing, it's a flex. You're like, Google's able to do this because they're flexing on your title tags. They're like, you wrote a title tag, we could write one better. And that's essentially brightness. Yeah, that's what you explained to. There's a great article on it on the Wix SEO hub. What Google is able to do, and they've done this with featured snippets for years, they're able to do this. They add that kind of ability into meta description sometimes.

Sometimes if I'm looking up a list of best Star Trek costumes to wear or whatever, sometimes the meta description will actually be the bullets from the article so they can pull out things like that. Essentially what they're saying is that, "you wrote some content, cool, we can serve it on search in a way that's useful. We can send people directly to the section of the website that is most useful for them. We can pull out the images from your website." They have more skills and because they have more skills, they have more capabilities, now they're able to deliver search in a way. They're helping you and you need to help them and that's essentially what I see.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, reverse engineering that goes into I think what always reverse engineer the SERP, what Google thinks is helpful, meaning if it's reformatting content, it means to me that the format of the kind we'll call the usability of that content is part of what's helpful.

Actually in the helpful content update guidance, it talks about how easy is it to access the main content on the page, meaning you have to go to a bunch of popups and ads. So usability is part of helpful content. Imagine you had two pieces of content and they're both the exact same content, but one is formatted with bullets and tables, which one is better?

Crystal Carter:

I say this all the time, if I said to you, "Hey, I'm going to give you a copy of everything that Miles Davis ever recorded." You'd be like, "cool, thanks." Then I said, "they're all eight tracks."

Mordy Oberstein:

Unhelpful.

Crystal Carter:

That's not helpful. Now I just have a bunch eight, I don't even know where I would put them.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let me go to my 1970 Chevy station wagon and pop that eight track in.

Crystal Carter:

Then if you said here it is on an iPod. That would be better if you said here it is on your Spotify account. That would be fantastic. They're like format matters and this is where I think that when we're thinking about helpful content, I think when they first announced it, they said something about, it shouldn't have too much SEO on it. I think people reacted to that a little bit.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I mean they said if it's written for search, trying to get search engines to rank it, that's not we want.

Crystal Carter:

SEOs are like, excuse me?

Mordy Oberstein:

Reasonably offended, let's be honest with you.

Crystal Carter:

But I think that what you need is you need a marriage of the two things. I remember I worked with a lawyer for a while and lawyers write letters, they write prolifically and this team of lawyers would just write and write and write and they were publishing articles all the time about various questions that clients have asked them and stuff like that. I just go back in and I just hit it with the like, "okay, well this needs a header, this needs a this, this needs a that." But I wasn't doing heavy, "let's rewrite this and open a guide..." I was just making sure that it was all supported and that sort of thing rather than rewriting it for them. They always rank really, really well.

I think that when you get the combination of the form and the function of good quality experience and somebody's like, "oh yeah, I wrote this great thing." And some of the formatting skills, some of the support for things like schema markups, some of the support for making sure that the page flows properly, et cetera, et cetera. That's where you hit the sweet spot.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's kind of how I think about when I'm creating content I kind of look at much more pedagogically than I do SEO, it's when I'm initially writing it.

I think about who am I targeting? Is this targeting them? Is this structured in a way, for example, and this I think is very helpful. Is this structured in a way where I'm really developing the topic so that they clearly understand step one to step two to step three, I'm not missing any steps. Am I throwing in resources to help them along the way? For example, one of the ways I look at links from a helpful content point of view is if I'm making a point and I don't want to dive into that point because I don't have the time, it's not the appropriate place, then a link might be a great way to send them off so they can go learn about that and then better understand what it is that I'm talking about.

Setting up content in a very pedagogical way, in a very structured way, I think is helpful by the way, in order to do that, you have to have topical expertise and or experience, which is where the whole EEAT, I can't believe we haven't brought that acronym in a minute yet, comes in. You can't do what I'm telling you to do right now unless you have some kind of expertise and experience in it. Then I go back and look at my headers, "okay, do I need to be a little bit more explicit for the bots?" Kind of thing.

Crystal Carter:

I think that this is really important and I think that also what's core to that, they say helpful content is written for people.

I have an article on how to do user first topic and keyword research for SEO. The reason why I wrote this article is because when they say that it's about audience, it's about audience. In that article I talk about talk to your salespeople, ask your salespeople, what are people asking them about your products? Where are the gaps that they're experiencing? Where someone's going, "oh, but can I use it on a bicycle?" And they're going, "I don't know." If you have content for that, you can help your sales team, you can help the users, you can help your website things, you can help your customer service team because they don't have to answer that question all the time because they can refer someone to a link.

I think that it's really important to understand your audience and also when you're creating content and you want it to be helpful write with an audience in mind. You were talking about your pedagogical.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a crazy word, isn't it? Pedagogical. It took me forever. I was in grad school, pedagogy, pedagogy, pedagogy, pedagogy.

Crystal Carter:

Pedagogy.

When you're talking about your approach, really you're thinking about the person reading it. The person reading this is going to want to know what that acronym means, I don't have time to fully explain it, but here's the acronym, here's the spell out of the acronym, here's the link to the page that explains to you what that acronym is if you need to go off and understand what that is. You're not leaving them hanging and that's really important. And nobody likes that when they're like...

Mordy Oberstein:

I've always said this, that the best way to create helpful content or good quality content is by predicting the needs of the user, while you're writing. Are they going to understand this point? No, I got to do something to help them here.

Crystal Carter:

Right, precisely. So when you think about the eight track thing, if that person doesn't have an eight track player, that's not going to help.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not going to. By the way, I think again, that goes back to in my mind that helpful content is specific.

For example, if I were to ask, "who's the best baseball player?" That's a very nuanced question. What I really might mean is who is the best pitcher? Because you can't compare pitchers to position players or two totally different things.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed.

Mordy Oberstein:

You need to be a little bit more specific. I think that the world, the content world, the web content world is getting a wee bit more specific. People are looking for things that are more specific. I think search engines are asking you to be a little more specific, they're trying to filter out what they user actually wants when they ask something very general. Google has all sorts of filtering features there to help you get a little more specific.

Crystal Carter:

They've also been doing things where for SERP's that have giant search results. For instance, if you look at something like a big, big head term like Yankees or Apple or something like that. If you look at a search tool, they'll tell you that there are 4 billion pages on the web all about Apple or the Yankees or whatever. But if you go to Google, they'll tell you they're showing 72 pages. These are the 72 pages that we're giving you for this. We're giving you the Yankees website, we're giving you the major League baseball website. We're going to give you a couple of those things if you need to find out some more things, here's some disambiguation bubbles.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, there's a lot of disambiguation, a lot of refinement.

Crystal Carter:

You can dive into those, but we know that most people are going to click on this or this, so we're going to keep it short and if you want to go into deep dive, then you need to deep dive. Here's some fins, get out there.

I think that it's important to think about that when you're thinking about the content you want to make. Can we please talk about page experience?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes. I just want to make one last really, really, really real quick point and let's talk about page experience. Then we'll get into what Kyle Byers had to say.

I think again, in being specific, which I think is what the core of helpful content is, because you're answering a specific question or you're fulfilling a specific user need, I think that really plays well into creating content with EEAT because you can't write something specific.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unless you actually understand what the heck you're talking about. That's all I wanted to say.

Let's go into page experience.

Crystal Carter:

Good facts.

Page experience things, so basically in 2023, they updated their guidance designating security consideration as part of the helpful content ranking system. Essentially they explained that the secure websites generally align with success in search ranking and those creating and maintaining websites should ask if pages are served in a secure fashion. And they also said this about page experience as well. They said, oh, it's part of the helpful content thing, but after spending all that time working on page experience things and all of that sort of stuff, they didn't specifically say that it impacts ranking anymore. They said they just removed it from the ranking systems and added it as part of their helpful content thing. I think this comes back to the formatting discussion that we...

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, I'm just thinking that.

Crystal Carter:

...We've been having, but I think it's interesting that they've pivoted in this way that they're maybe less concerned about technical impediments for accessing content. As I said, maybe they have more abilities as a search engine in order to surface content that is valuable and maybe that's what this is a reflection of.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's interesting.

Conversely, I do think at the same time, the fact that they put the more technical experience elements into the helpful content update sort of contextualizes the value of page experience and that it helps the content be more usable. It comes down to usability, which is a part of helpfulness and usability can be anything from format or the stuff not shifting around as you're trying to read it.

Crystal Carter:

Things like schema for instance, makes it more visible in the SERP, makes it more easy for people to find it, makes all of those different things. The form and the function again, they should work together seamlessly and I think that it's still the case. When they first announced that they were moving this to the page experience thing and it wasn't a direct ranking signal, essentially those people were like, "oh, I'm not going to do it anymore." People were like, "yeah, because everybody loves a website that takes three days to load. Yeah, cool."

Mordy Oberstein:

I always thought that that is more relevant for not saying more relevant, but it's really about usability, conversions, those kind of things than it is about, "I got more ranking juice out of it."

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, and I think also you talk a bit about security and page experience and things and security is also a consideration in this. With security, it's also about making sure that users feel secure about giving you their details because your website is secure and encrypted. Also, that link, when you get those back links, when people click on the back link, that CloudFlare doesn't roll up a big old sign that says, "nah, don't do it, man, don't do it." Because you don't want that and CloudFlare will tell you, cloud CloudFlare will snitch on you. They'll just put you completely on blast and go, they didn't sort out their SSL, y'all don't go.

Make sure that you've got your security and things because that will affect your page experience and that will affect whether or not it's helpful because if you've got a great t-shirt, it's not helpful for me when I give you my details, somebody else can get my details and then it's all...

Mordy Oberstein:

Unhelpful.

Crystal Carter:

That's unhelpful, I don't want that spam, I don't want that drama. Keep it clean people.

Mordy Oberstein:

What you do want though, you do want is to check out SEMRush's own director of organic search, Kyle Byers as he joins us to help us understand, how do you actually gauge? What is quality content? How do you know?

How do you analyze it? Here's Kyle,

Kyle Byers:

This is a great question because. I could talk about this all day, but I know some listeners are driving and I don't want to put them to sleep, so I'll try to keep it short.

There are three angles I like to think about when it comes to gauging content quality, the business perspective, the user's perspective, and Google's perspective.

From the business perspective there's one major question. Is the content achieving your business goals? Leading indicators can be really helpful here, like rankings and visits and dwell time. But how about revenue, customer acquisitions, leads, attracting links or press coverage? What are your goals for this piece of content and is it achieving them?

Then you have the user's perspective. Is it genuinely great content? The most important thing to get right is really nailing the search intent. People make searches on Google when they have an itch to scratch. They have a goal in mind, whether it's getting a simple fact or learning something more in depth and it's your job to make sure that your content scratches that itch. And you have to make it very obvious very quickly that it's going to scratch that itch, especially in your title tag, meta description, headings and introduction. Otherwise, people just won't read it. But then how can you make sure that the content actually scratches their itch? Well, the easiest way is to look at the pages that are already ranking well for that query and take inspiration from them. what format is working well? Are they how to guides, review videos, listicles, case studies, product pages? What subtopics are being covered by those pages and how in depth do they go and so on. To get a little more advanced a lot of queries have multiple search intents behind them.

For example, queries like the best X, Y, Z product, you'll often see a mixed SERP with product comparison lists in the top maybe five or six positions. And then e-commerce category pages or product pages or something else after that, you can almost think of those as two separate SERPs when that happens and plan accordingly.

Then last, we have to pay attention of course to how Google defines great content. Google's given us some pretty good information about this, especially in their quality rater guidelines and helpful content system updates. Here are some of the most important things Google has said that they care about.

First up, there's EEAT experience, expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness. Each of those could actually be its own entire podcast episode. Then some more specific points Google looks for are, Is it accurate and error free? Does it contain original non-obvious valuable information? Is it comprehensive content? Does it avoid click bait or exaggerated claims in the H1 and title tag? And so on.

Then there are also some less obvious ones like having a site with a primary purpose or focus and not having content that's mass-produced or outsourced to two large, a number of different creators.

Then ultimately Google's biggest question is, does the content satisfy the user's needs? Which comes back in large part to search intent. Again, if someone lands on your page from a Google search, is your content going to scratch their itch? If it is, it's probably pretty high quality.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much Kyle, make sure you follow Kyle on Twitter. We'll link to his Twitter account in the show notes.

I'm really glad he brought up the quality reader guidelines, I can't believe we didn't bring that up yet. How do we not do that? But it is something you should definitely take a look at, definitely read. It's not that Google's using that in the algorithm itself, although Google has said they kind of try to mimic some of those things algorithmically, but it definitely tells you how Google is thinking and what it's ultimately trying to do. Which is really important, at one point I'm glad he mentioned was that that sort of topical identity, that's part of, in my mind, the quality experience. It's not a quality experience you go to a website and have multiple pages that don't relate to each other, that are not topically associated with each other.

Because if you zoom out of the query, let's say it's like who is Captain Kirk? Going back to Star Trek again, am I really trying to understand who Captain Kirk is or if you want to be more zoomed out? Am I trying to understand Star Trek as a concept, as a entity? And while my specific question is about Captain Kirk, I might really be looking to understand Star Trek. The website I go to has one page about Star Trek and then another page about Star Wars not relevant to me. Just kidding. I had to go there.

If it is talking about Star Trek on one page and then it's talking about bricks and then it's talking about windows and it's talking about spaceship. Well spaceship might be relevant on another page. That's not a quality experience.

Crystal Carter:

I was talking to someone about this, about tags like blog tags and stuff. Basically I was saying let's say you were doing a Star Trek convention, you went to a Star Trek convention in New Orleans or something and you were talking about it and you wrote a blog about it and you say your website is about Star Trek. You would make a tag that says convention, but you don't necessarily need a tag for New Orleans because you're not going to write any more content about New Orleans and if you did make more content about New Orleans and you had a whole thing that was like, "oh yeah, beignets and Mardi Gras." I don't know, Gators or something, I don't know, essentially. Let's say you started making content about that for your Star Trek blog. That wouldn't make any sense and it's not helpful to the audience that you have, which want to know more about Star Trek stuff.

Unless there was an episode where they go to New Orleans in Next Gen or something. I don't know I mean they do a lot of stuff …

Mordy Oberstein:

There's always creatures that are kind of gators.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so you want to keep stay on topic. If you want to veer off into something else, do it on a different channel. You can either do something on social where you talk about something different or you could maybe make another blog or you could even set up a sub domain maybe that was specifically around travel to conventions or something. But there's ways that you can do that and staying on topic is helpful. It's helpful to people.

I also like that he mentioned money because it is important to think about that people are able to convert, people are able to do the things that they came to do from that business. I saw a thing on LinkedIn the other day and it was saying that SEOs be like, the question is how to open a beer and the answer is you pull the tab.

Mordy Oberstein:

Saw that.

Crystal Carter:

And then SEOs be like, what is beer? What is the beer can, how do you consider this? Here's a video explaining of all of the different steps.

And sometimes people just want the information and in the quality rater guidelines, which I was just looking at the recent ones yesterday. They talk about the main content it's what helps the user achieve their goal. That's what it is. In the beer case, maybe it's a new beer can, because sometimes they do that. Sometimes there'll be some bespoke thing and they've got a different ring-pull or something. Maybe it's a new beer can, so they just want to know how to do it. How do I get to my beer? If it's a video, if it's a picture, if it's like three words, that's fine.

I've seen high ranking content that is very short. I've seen content that ranks well that is just a video. It's just a video and it doesn't have much underneath of it. It's just a video but it ranks really well because that's what the intent is. The intent is to watch the video. The intent isn't to read a 3000 word essay as well. That's like the recipe ones, that's the classic one as well. Where they tell you about every...You just want the recipe, you just want the recipe.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of the right recipe for helpful content and content, and I'm glad we brought the idea that context is important because I think Google's doing something that might show us what exactly is helpful content. Just so we bit Google themselves have created some, I guess, content that essentially for every result shows what they think might be helpful for users to know contextually. That maybe we should explore and grab some lessons from. So this is a newish version of is this new because it's not really new.

So is this newish?

In case you didn't know Google has a little feature called about this result and what you essentially do is on this survey is this three little dots next to the result to the right of the results. If you click on it brings up this whole little panel that shows information about this result and it's giving you context. Lesson number one off the bat context is helpful. And that does go by the way, back to what we were talking about before, that the context of your website needs to be topically appropriate. If I have one page about Captain Kirk and then a bunch of pages about Gators in New Orleans, doesn't necessarily make sense the context doesn't make sense and context is helpful. In this feature, Google's giving you context.

Crystal Carter:

It's great. So I found this feature really interesting. It's got a lot of information about the particular result and the case I was looking at was Better Homes and Gardens, and I looked up Best Coffee Makers 2023 and when you click about this result, it showed me a little popup from Wikipedia that was saying, Homes and Gardens is a British monthly interior design thing and it tells me that my connection is secure. Again, adding in that information there, it also tells me some of the search terms that appear in there and then it has images that are related, so explains why they're showing it to me.

But the thing I found really interesting though was that you can click through and you can find out more about this search. I was able to find out lots about Homes and Gardens magazine and it talked about who they are and when they were first doing this sort of thing and that I think is really fascinating.

I think that that's really interesting for people to think about their wider presence and how who they are affects whether or not it's a helpful content. For instance, if I had, I don't know, a rash something on my hand and I said, Mordy, what do you think this is? And you said, "oh, it's that it." Well Mordy, but with all due respect, you're not a doctor.

But if you said like, "oh actually I've seen that before, I had a similar thing." Or whatever, then I'd be like, "oh, okay, that's helpful. I can take that experience into account and maybe I should pursue something or whatever." But who gives you the advice is really important.

What I found was that if there isn't in information on that particular business, so I found one for a smaller business and Google didn't have a Wikipedia page and it says they looked for a description of them and they couldn't find them. And that's interesting as well because that might mean that they're not able to verify you in the same way that again might give people trust signals that maybe you're not able to provide helpful content about this information. Then what they did instead was they pulled the information from their website.

We've talked about homepages on this podcast. We've talked about homepages on a webinar, we talked about homepages in an article. Homepages are super important and you should say what you do on your homepage because it can very well appear in this kind of result.

Mordy Oberstein:

To me, this features all about context. By the way you can actually just side point, you can tell Google, remove this result from your searches.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, right,

Mordy Oberstein:

That button there. You can save the result there's a lot of stuff going on there, you should definitely check it out. But to me it's really all about context.

Like Google tells you they have a link to how search works. They tell you why this result showed up for your query and then there's a button inside it said more about this page and you can learn when this page was first indexed by Google.

If I Google baseball stats 2023, I get baseball reference.com, it tells me this site was indexed more than 10 years ago. It even tells me about this source and it lists a review site about this website. It's a site reviewing this website that I'm looking at. It has a bunch of articles or a bunch of websites talking about what this website is. What it does is trying to give me context. The lesson of the day in my mind is helpful content is content, that has context.

Crystal Carter:

Also, can I just say, the word says you and the search result and it tells you the search terms that appear in it. As an SEO research point, if you're wondering why a page ranks, you can click on those little dots and have a look at why the page ranks.

I looked up Beyonce Tour because I don't know if people know, but I went to Beyonce recently. It was a life changing experience.

Mordy Oberstein:

You did?

Crystal Carter:

I did, I did. We talked about costumes, I wore a Beyonce outfit and people literally clapped, so I just want that on record.

Anyway, so I looked up Beyonce Tour and Live Nation, for instance. It says it's ranking forwhy I got the search result. And it says the search terms appear in the search result, Beyonce and Tour a term related to your search result appears in this result. Beyonce, the results are in English, they know I speak English and it says this seems relevant to the UK, which is where I am.

This tells you that these are priority information for Google with regards to that and it's fairly top level, but it's still useful. Because the Better Homes and Gardens one said images are important for instance.

These are different things, but if you're not sure where to start, it's a really good little tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's very cool. And by the way, it'll talk about whether or not the result is personalized or not, which goes back to what we were saying before about helpful content. It's supposed to be specific, nuanced, targeted content. That's exactly what Google's trying to do and its results which tells you what Google thinks helpful content is.

Crystal Carter:

That's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to deliver you great value people. We're trying to be helpful to help you.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're trying to be helpful. You know you know who else is very helpful?

Crystal Carter:

Who's helpful?

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry is helpful. Barry Short is very helpful. He writes all sorts of articles about the news and SEO. Him and other people like Roger Monty and Matt Southern, Danny Goodwin, Lauren Baker, all very helpful. People who cover the SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

They are very helpful.

I tell you what, we talked about the history of SEO. Like I remember doing a deck on featured snippets and I literally just went through every report that Barry's ever done on featured snippets and you can see the evolution of it as you pull it out. Like it's incredibly... Shout out to Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's get into some not only snappy, helpful SEO news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Google's search generative experience gets quality updates and majors speed Boost says Barry Schwartz over@stroundtable.com. Google search liaison Danny Sullivan says quote, "we've made a number of quality updates, including a major improvement that reduces the time it takes to generate AI snapshots by half." Official judger of all things speed took at a stopwatch, Barry Schwarz said it feels twice as fast. Officially unofficially is twice as fast as Barry.

As for the quality updates, no official word from the big G, but an even bigger G as in Gabe as in Glen Gabe Double G. Showed that there were improvements related to some YNYL queries. For example, Glen was searching and pulled up the SGE related to strep throat. He showed there's a little bit more nuance, some more caveats in there about strep throat in the new SGE result compared to the previous one. We don't know for sure, but that could be as a result of Google's quality update to the SGE.

With this as reported by Kristy Hines over at SEJ search in journal, Google seems to be inviting more people to try the SGE. Perhaps as has released a new YouTube short showing how to sign up. My invite must be lost in the mail.

At the same time, Reuters reports that advertisers are balking at the idea of being shown in AI chat experiences on the SERP saying quote, "Microsoft Google strategy to test AI search adds irks some brands." This says, "Microsoft is testing placement without advertiser consent within the AI chat experience, which has led to some huge media buyers pulling back on their Microsoft advertising spend." This reminds me of reminiscent of what went on back in the past with YouTube placement. Advertisers do not want to have their ads appear next to, we'll call it questionable content, unreliable content, any sort of content that might position their brand as being associated with something that's not of the utmost quality because brand associations is a huge part of the game.

I would pay very close attention to this story. I think it's going to be when the narratives that comes out of the hole, AI on the SERP experience, and I would expect there to be a lot more of this sort of issues or these sort of issues rather coming up in the future. It's all part of the web, it's all part of navigating the web. It's almost to be expected and I'm sure it all gets sorted out.

That's this week's version of the Snappy News.

Wasn't that news, not just snappy, but also helpful. We're trying to be helpful today. Thank you to those people who covered the news for helping us help you be helpful.

Crystal Carter:

I feel help.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel at that pivot needed some help. Somebody, anybody please help me.

Crystal Carter:

Not anybody.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. I'm just going to just lean right into it. Who else is very helpful? Our follow of the week is a very helpful person.

Crystal Carter:

Who's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Melissa Bash.

Crystal Carter:

Melissa Bash.

Mordy Oberstein:

At SEO Aware at SEO. That's S-E-O, A-W-A-R-E over on Twitter. She's the lead content manager over Kelly Blue Book and Autotrader. She's always sharing useful information, helpful information about SEO, about Star Wars and about the Bucks, which I'm not a big Tom Brady fan, but it's helpful if you are.

Crystal Carter:

I was checking out some of her content the other day and you're absolutely right. She shares some really great stuff about SEO. That's really...

Mordy Oberstein:

OG. Melissa's an OG.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely. I think she's got some really interesting insights on some lighter topics as well. She's a great follow and she's interested in, she's been following along with the information about Chachi BT and about generative search and things like that. She's a great follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

She's literally been in the SEO world for a long time. She used to run Sam Rush's blog. She's somebody who has a lot of experience in creating content and having that content rake well on search.

Definitely give Melissa a follow over on Twitter. We'll link to her Twitter profile in the show notes.

Hope that was helpful.

Crystal Carter:

I hope that it was of assistance. I hope that it was useful and valuable and gave you context to the topics at hand.

Mordy Oberstein:

'Cause context is helpful. Make sure your content has context.

Crystal Carter:

Then it wasn't not helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unhelpful.

Crystal Carter:

Helpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's always helpful to be efficient when you speak, so not helpful to be unhelpful.

Crystal Carter:

That's true, that is true.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you remember The Office where Kevin wants to save time by only speaking like the core words, like me hungry. Like I am hungry, why waste time saying I am, just say me hungry. That's not helpful.

Crystal Carter:

Unhelpful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unhelpful. The office though is very helpful if you want to have a good time, have some fun.

Crystal Carter:

Is this true? This is true.

Mordy Oberstein:

I watch The Office.

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