Last September and this March, Google rolled out two serious updates: for helpful content and a Core update. With these updates, Google aims to greatly improve the relevance and quality of online content.
From unhelpful content to helpful content
But is it possible to rise in Google with helpful content? What happens if you give your standard SEO texts a serious upgrade to so-called ‘helpful content’? Will you also rank higher in Google? That was the question that occupied me at the beginning of this year.
Experiment for organic growth
I did an experiment myself to answer this question. Because with helpful content, SEO and CRO come closer together, exactly what I have been looking for for a long time.
What is helpful content according to Google?
Before I share my experiment with you, let me first delve into the question: what exactly is helpful content?
Google has published quite a bit about this.
Do you offer helpful content? 10 questions
To assess whether this article is interesting for you, I have below a selection of questions (formulated by Google) that you can use to assess for yourself whether your SEO content is also useful.
Old fashioned SEO content
When it is almost always the standard old-fashioned SEO content.
You can recognize this standard SEO content by:
- Many keywords
- Lots of marketing terms
- Long blocks of text
- Often hidden behind a ‘read more’
- Sentences that don’t flow well
- Texts that are not easy to read
- Often with many internal links
- Etc.
Well, I think you know what I mean…
So Google wants to give nt a better position and websites with low-quality content no longer rank high in the search results.
Experiment: Does helpful content help you rank higher in Google?
To answer my question, I did the According to Market Finder 90% of the population following experiment:
- Main question: does helpful content help you rank higher in Google?
- Test period: January to April 2024
- Test domain: my own website: marcobouman.com
- During this period I did not have any SEO improvements made
- And I didn’t do any backlink activities during this period.
- All results below are the result of helpful content improvements only
What have I done?
Since the end of December 2023, I have had a number of sessions ntent strategist. I found her by searching for ‘useful’ content.
ON THE FIRST PAGE SHE GAVE
me feedback on (is this content useful?) she literally came Streamline Your Workflow Building a Database Driven Contact Form in WordPress up with 57 comments/improvement points. While I thought my content was pretty good, I had put a lot of time into it!
I have tried to schedule myself a day off every week from week 1 to make my content more helpful. Below are what I feel are the 10 most important improvements that I have made to the content of my website in the period January to April.
