Serve your reader, not your search engine
Is your brand’s content truly serving its audience? As Google encourages content creators to avoid a ‘search-engine-first’ approach, your team might need to rethink your brand’s output. Speak’s junior content producer says it’s about time.
How ‘helpful’ is your content?
We all want the content we create to produce tangible results and engage audiences. But in the rush to boost your results-page ranking, maximise clicks and get your brand’s name out there, comms teams can neglect to think if their output is actually serving their target audience.
In the past, many content creators relied on sneaky tactics, such as keyword-stuffing and clickbait, hoping it would boost a site’s visibility. But as search engine algorithms get more sophisticated, if you don’t prioritise your audience, you’ll not only lose the hearts and minds of your consumer base – but also lose in the SEO rankings. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
Internet powerhouse Google’s ‘Helpful Content Update’, published in August 2022, states that the search engine is looking to “better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience”.
“The helpful content update aims 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,” outlines an explainer article on the update.
“How can you ensure you're creating content that will be successful with our new update? […] People-first content creators focus first on creating satisfying content, while also utilizing SEO best practices to bring searchers additional value.”
That’s all well and good – but what does ‘people-first’ content mean?
Traffic jams: audience over algorithms
Google has provided a helpful (and slightly quippy) checklist of questions that creators can use to make sure they are creating people-first content.
A few of our favourite prompts include:
“Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you'd get search traffic?”
“Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't).”
“Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience?”
So, is your content providing something meaningful? What have you got to say that hasn’t been said before? Has your brand got the right person to say it – and the most engaging way of presenting it?
Getting the brief right at the planning stage is essential to thinking ‘people first’. At Speak, before we start work on any content package, we extensively research, pitch and refine – making sure we’re considering our target audience’s key messages and the most user-friendly format.
And even when we’re not pitching, we consistently analyse and read about the subjects our newsroom clients and audiences are thinking about to make sure it’s something that readers – rather than an SEO checklist – will want.
Best practise SEO might change, and new algorithms may require a rethink – but taking a ‘people-first’ approach to content will always be timeless.
Want to find out how we can help?
Contact Gabrielle Bridle from our client services team: gabriellebridle@speakmedia.co.uk.
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