Author: Ashley Segura
A lot has happened since Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) back in 2022, causing publishers and brands to rethink how they approach content. Some websites lost so much traffic they closed their digital doors. While other brands, like Reddit, saw huge traffic increases.
And for the rest of us? It’s been a rollercoaster of algorithm updates, strategy pivots, and endless debates over what helpful content really is.
Here’s a quick look at how HCU has evolved since its official launch:
With each update, specific industries, like gaming, product reviews, and travel took hit after hit. Many brands saw their traffic nosedive and others pivoted, changing their content strategies in an attempt to bring back traffic.
For some, the answer was clear—Google had finally cracked down on thin, keyword-stuffed, and/or AI-spun content. But for others, the question remained: What exactly does Google consider helpful?
Now that we’re three years in, we can more concretely define what helpful content means to improve visibility on Google and genuinely help potential customers.
Table of contents:
The true definition of ‘helpful’ content
Google was kind enough to provide a self-assessment full of questions to help you determine whether your content is helpful.
Some argue the true benefit of this assessment, but it does highlight a clear standard for content that performs well. It’s content that:
Truly addresses the intent behind a search
Offers a unique take on the subject
Is written by someone who has the expertise and authority to contribute to the conversation
That’s where E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) comes into play and is the defining characteristic of helpful content in 2025.
Expertise
Helpful content is written by someone with subject matter expertise. For example, a food blogger that specializes in creating baked goods recipes should probably stay away from creating a new recipe about unrelated types of cuisine, like salmon skin hand rolls.
Instead, focus on creating pillar pieces of content around your subject matter expertise (in the case of our food blogger, that might be artisan breads and pastries).
What if you’re an expert in multiple subject areas? You can still create helpful content that successfully demonstrates your expertise. The key is to niche down and create dedicated content for each topic, while reinforcing your multiple expertises through your author bio (more on this later), social media presence, and guest posts on websites relevant to each niche.
This is where a well-planned strategy that encompasses pillar content around topics that represent your specific knowledge across multiple niches comes into play.
Experience
It’s difficult to showcase your expertise on a subject without sharing your experience. You don’t need decades of experience for Google to recognize your credibility. What matters is how you share your first-hand experience and apply it to the content you create.
Lean into real-world examples when creating content. Share those personal insights and hands-on experiences instead of only sharing generic facts and data.
Tell a story that includes:
Your personal experiences
How you resolved the issue
What others can learn from your experiences to demonstrate your firsthand knowledge
Authoritativeness
To cultivate brand authority, it’s incredibly helpful to have the reputation to back your expertise. As part of your marketing strategy, prioritize securing brand mentions on:
Relevant websites
Guest spots on webinars and podcasts
Speaking opportunities at events
If your palms are sweating just by reading that, then there are other ways to establish credibility without getting on camera or on stage. You can dust off those link building skills and secure links on relevant, trusted websites.
Head to forums like Reddit and Quora and start responding to comments. Avoid only dropping an emoji (that might come off as salesy or spammy) and instead add an informative comment to a conversation, actually contributing to the topic/thread.
Between this, securing relevant backlinks within your niche, and collaborating with relevant brands, you can gradually build authority—helping your content stand out and rank higher.
Trustworthiness
Lastly (and perhaps most importantly), include honest and well-researched information in your content. If I started this article off by telling you the HCU rolled out in January 2020 (years before it actually did), I would likely have lost your trust moving forward.
If you have a technical subject matter or worse, a controversial one, include sources with any facts or data you provide. Do your due diligence to vet each source, ensuring they have the credibility to produce such data.
Trust isn’t only about sharing accurate information—it’s also about creating a smooth, user-friendly experience. If intrusive pop-ups keep interrupting as I try to read your content, it doesn’t just feel frustrating—it makes your brand seem pushy and less trustworthy.
Before we move on, it’s worth emphasizing that each aspect of E-E-A-T complements one another. If you put effort towards establishing your authority within a niche, you’re naturally going to share your expertise and experience while establishing trust.
How to optimize content after the HCU
From the HCU, we’ve learned that prioritizing E-E-A-T in your overall content strategy is more likely to produce content that is genuinely valuable and helpful.
Yet, there’s still some confusion about how to optimize this helpful content to ensure it’s not seen as spam.
So, let’s break down some of the best ways to optimize your content post-HCU:
Create content for users
Identify topics based on your audience, not volume
Guide users with internal links
Optimize your author bios
Prioritize content updates over content volume
Create content for users
The HCU has helped us break away from traditional (and sometimes spammy) optimization tactics, like keyword stuffing and over-optimizing content. Instead, the aftereffects of the HCU encouraged us (now more than ever) to put the user at the forefront of our content and understand keyword intent.
To do this, you first need to understand why a user is searching for something.
User intent | Description |
Informational | Researching a topic (oftentimes before making a purchase) |
Commercial | Looking for a specific product or service |
Transactional | Trying to complete an action (e.g., newsletter signup or purchase) |
Navigational | Searching for a specific brand |
Before you create a new piece of content or prepare to update an existing piece, ask yourself what a user wants out of this topic. Why are they searching in the first place? The answers will help guide your content optimizations and ensure you’re providing exactly what the user is searching for.
This results in a better user experience and a much more natural way of making your content helpful.
Identify topics based on your audience, not volume
While we’re on the subject of users, let’s rewind a bit and identify topics that they are interested in. Instead of focusing your entire content strategy on keyword research, let’s identify topics that users actually want to learn.
If you have a sales and/or customer success team, connect with them to identify questions that potential and existing customers are asking. These make great new topic ideas!
You can also perform a content gap analysis to identify new topics that your demographic is actively searching for. These are great topic ideas that are more likely to generate traffic because the demand is there, and the competition isn’t delivering exactly what the user wants out of the topic.
Take these new topic ideas and go into forums and Facebook groups to see what the real conversation behind the topics looks like. What kinds of questions are people asking, what is the sentiment, and what do they really want to know?
While you’re listening to the conversation, consider what kind of content medium will best deliver the message the user is looking for.
A 3,000-word blog post might be too long when the user just wants to know why your SaaS product is better than Joe’s SaaS product.
Instead, package that information into something easily digestible, like a 30-second video that shouts exactly what makes your product unique. Add a short, 750-word blog post with a table chart that highlights the differences between the products. This article explaining Jasper.ai’s features and benefits does a great job of showing and telling in a format that fits a user evaluating AI tools.
When you think of how to optimize your content, making it easy for the user to get exactly what they want should be your top priority.
Guide users with internal links
You can’t talk about optimizing helpful content without talking about internal links. These link opportunities tell a story and guide users to their next logical step on the customer journey, while also addressing primary and secondary user intent.
Provide links on pillar content (primary intent) to supporting posts (secondary intent) to keep users engaged and help further establish your authority on a topic.
Having secondary topics that you can link to (in the case of our baking example from earlier, brownie toppings and the best brownie pans) helps strengthen your site’s topical authority and reinforces its E-E-A-T.
Here’s an entire guide on how to improve your internal linking.
Optimize your author bios
So many bio pages don’t explain the full story of who the author is and why they contribute to the conversation. Flex your expertise and authority with well-optimized author bio pages for everyone who authors content on your website.
To create an authoritative author bio page, include things like:
Relevant certifications
Any honors or recognitions
Number of years of professional experience with the subject
Links to industry contributions and published work
Hands-on experience (e.g., “Tested over 10 coffee brownie recipes” or “Baking for 4 years”)
If it’s a bit difficult for you to talk about yourself and highlight all that greatness, put the above information in bullet format and drop it into ChatGPT.
Give ChatGPT a very specific prompt, like this:
“I need to put together a bio for my author bio page. I want to emphasize how I’m an expert baker and have personal experience creating baked goods recipes. Act like a professional copywriter and write an author bio in my tone using fun and catchy phrases and lots of imagery that a baker would use. Here is the information I want to highlight [paste bullets]. Write at least 500 words and let me know if you need any additional information about me to create a well-rounded, optimized author bio that showcases my expertise as a baker.”
Once you have copy you’re proud to publish, make sure it’s accessible site-wide, connected to each blog post you publish, and on the About page or Team page.
Prioritize updating content over producing volume
Instead of churning out a ton of new content, go back to the drawing board and analyze which pieces of content could use a refresh. I have a 60/40 rule that I like to stick by and recommend to most brands.
You should focus 60% of your time and resources on updating and optimizing your existing content, and the remaining 40% should be spent creating new helpful content.
To figure out which pieces of content to update, I like to start with a mini content audit.
Here’s my process:
Crawl the site and collect data — I use Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to extract all content-related and organic performance data from a client’s website.
Analyze social engagement — After understanding content from an SEO perspective, I want to know how content is performing on social media. For this, I’ll grab social media performance data using BuzzSumo.
Sort and identify Opportunities — Once I have the data, I sort the content from highest- to lowest-performing and focus on the middle-tier pieces (i.e., those that have potential but aren’t ranking as well as they could). These are typically articles with good search volume, meaning people are actively looking for information on the topic, but the content itself is buried on pages 2-5 of search results.
Now that you’ve identified the pieces of content to update, it’s time to make some changes. Here’s how:
Use tools like Answer the Public, Semrush’s Topic Research Tool, or Google’s People Also Ask to find new, related questions your audience is currently searching for. You can add the questions to the content as new headings, FAQs, or additional information within paragraphs.
Update the content with your latest personal experiences on the subject matter.
If the topic falls within a specific period (e.g., The Top Gluten-Free Brownie Recipes of 2024), make sure to update any relevant content to today. This includes updating all data and sources with the most up-to-date facts.
Check current search results to see what kind of content Google shows. Is it long-form, primarily videos, etc.? Is it shorter articles, videos, or something else? Use that info to adjust your content format and give users what they’re gravitating toward.
By strategically updating mid-performing content, you’re not only optimizing it, but also making it more helpful by adding new, relevant information.
There’s even more you can do, though, to optimize your helpful content and connect with potential customers…
Go beyond keywords: It’s all about unique takes
Traditional content optimization meant sprinkling keywords in every other paragraph and the icing on the cake was stuffing the headings. Let’s take the apron off and not do that anymore.
Instead, focus on optimizing your content by offering unique perspectives. If you’re truly an expert in your field, you should be able to offer a fresh perspective or a new angle to drive traffic to a helpful piece of content.
Let’s take that baked goods food blogger and consider how we can create new content for a traditional brownie recipe. Brownie recipes are a pretty saturated topic. A lot of people are searching for it, and there are even more published recipes out there.
So, how can you stand out and publish a helpful brownie recipe that drives traffic? Try adding a variation!
Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder tool is a great way to come up with variation ideas for a specific keyword and sub-topics to create secondary content around.
Instead of creating yet another general brownie recipe, our baker friend—who loves coffee-flavored baked goods—can develop a unique twist: an instant coffee brownie recipe.
To build on this even further (and deepen their authority as a baker), they can create secondary content that supports the instant coffee brown recipe, such as:
A blog post on the best brownie toppings
A brownie cake recipe featuring FAQs, like:
The best pan for baking a brownie cake
How to reheat a brownie cake
Best ways to store a brownie cake
By internally linking these posts between each other, our baker friend is able to:
Expand on a popular topic with a fresh angle, giving users something unique.
Establish expertise within their niche by publishing secondary topics.
Increase opportunities to attract organic traffic.
If you don’t have Semrush or an SEO tool, you can do this by Googling the primary keyword (or topic) you want to create a new piece of content for. Take a look at the search results and ask yourself, how can you add to this conversation in a unique way?
For example, the search results for [braised chicken] feature a variety of ways to cook braised chicken, from drumstick recipes to garlic and ginger, and even mojo sauce—each of the top three results offer a unique take on the recipe.
Originality beats repetition when it comes to a saturated topic like braised chicken, and it will do so for your saturated niche topics as well.
Moving forward: What you can learn from the Helpful Content Update
The HCU has shaped how content strategies are created in 2025. To be helpful, we need to truly understand why users are searching and then create content that demonstrates our expertise, showcases real experience, establishes authority, and builds trust—all while providing genuine value.
To ensure you’re creating helpful content (and optimizing it correctly), your content strategies should look a bit like:
Conduct topic ideation — Identify unique topics based on search demand and content gaps rather than just volume.
Define the user intent — Take a moment to understand the primary and secondary intents behind the topic.
Pick the right content format — Match the content medium (blog post, video, infographic, interactive tool, etc.) to the user's intent.
Showcase E-E-A-T — Share real-world experience and unique insights. Back claims with credible sources and data. And, optimize your author bios to highlight expertise and authority.
Add internal links — Connect related posts to build topical authority and guide users to discover other relevant content.
Optimize for engagement & readability — Your content should be easily digested, scannable, well-structured, and free of annoying, intrusive ads.
Build trust & authority with digital PR — Get brand mentions, contribute guest posts, and build high-quality backlinks from relevant websites.
Regularly audit and update content — Pinpoint and update those mid-performing pieces with new insights, secondary intent optimization, and a better structure.
As long as your content strategy follows the practices above, you can sleep easy knowing that what you publish really is helpful, optimized, and provides value to users.
With 15+ years of experience, Ashley Segura is a Top 100 Content Marketing Influencer and host of the Content in the Kitchen podcast. Currently the Head of Content at ContentYum, she has launched four agencies, leading global marketing teams and driving growth through impactful content strategies. Twitter | Linkedin