Updates for the week ending September 28, 2024

A couple weeks ago, Google released a set of guidelines to help writers create better content. We incorporated them into our processes this week.

Lately Google has been all-about “helpful content.” In fact, they had a major algorithm shift (at this time last year) that centered around this. As a result of that change, they recently released a guide on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.

Why is Google doing this?

Although it seems like Google might being altruistic for its users, I think the real motive here is that Google knows the world is wanting more LLM (learned language model- aka AI) results. To produce those results, and keep them effective, it needs to read content that is reliable and helpful- so it can produce answers that are reliable and helpful.

The alternative is people producing content “optimized” for search engines. That’s usually repetitive with different “keywords” stuffed in there.

Another alternative is content written in light of SEO by AI content generators. Content like this is not what Google wants to feed it’s AI/LLM answers. That would be an echo-chamber of AI answering content with AI- and not be particularly reliable or helpful.

What does Google want then?

You can read the guidelines yourself but basically it wants original content written by experts. This ensures you’re not just producing something for the search engines or taking shortcuts by using AI-generated content (that’s really just reiterating what was already said on a topic.

What should you do about it?

Now’s not the time to cut corners and start using AI to write your content. Sure, it might “work” for now. However, eventually it will be easier for Google’s systems to detect LLM-generated content and ignore it (you’ve heard the conversation about “watermarks,” right).

Instead, take the time to incorporate the experts in your company to contribute to your content by name. You can use the guidelines in Curious Ants to help you write a blog post or optimize content on a landing page, too. These are the two processes we updated in light of Google’s updated guidelines.

And, by the way, keep up with your Google Analytics Certification by joining our study group. This will help you see how Google is valuing your content as its algorithm changes.