Hi there, I want to share with you some important news about Google’s ‘helpful content update’ and predict how it will impact your HVAC company.

First thing first, when it comes to the digital search market, there are two audiences in this space: People [potential customers searching online] and Machines [internet crawlers to display your site to the user]. In SEO, a typical practice was to write for BOTH audiences. In the past several years, low-value SEO companies were writing ONLY to the machine audience and occupying the internet space with word garbage that did not appeal to the People audience. As a result, Google crawlers were spending so much time crawling billions of pages that had low-quality content or duplicated content from other sources (websites). Google is cracking down on its resources being occupied by this sloppy practice by rolling out a significant algorithm update.

Disclaimer here, it would be premature to say we know 100% of Google’s strategy with the update (no one knows outside of Google). BUT, we can predict how it will impact us by referencing past big algorithm updates like the Panda update in 2011 and other market shakeups.

Much like Panda, which was geared towards reducing the rank of low-quality sites or “content farms” sites while increasing the rank of higher-quality sites, we can take some of those lessons and apply them to this update.

So, what are we going to do? Marketing with a Flair is auditing the site to ensure only “helpful” content is displayed (again, these are subjective terms from Google, so this is a learning curve). However, we are taking the charge by doing the following:

• We will be removing content that is not People Audience directed
• We will also remove content that are duplicated on several pages

We will also run all content through a quality filter of:

• Does your content demonstrate your expertise?
• Does the site have a primary focus tone and content direction?
• After reading your content, can a user leave the site feeling like they learned enough about the topic to achieve their search goal?
• After reading the content, will the user feel their search was fulfilled and enjoy the experience?
• Is the content readable for crawlers and are we following all the Google updates/ guidance?
• Is this content within our industry or are we reaching for trending words?

As always, we will take a holistic approach to this, we don’t want to compromise anything here. But overall, our focus is to remain steadfast and ensure you are positioned as the expert and have content created for people to be educated and not create content intended for machines. The Google helpful content update started rolling out about a week ago but Google said it would take two weeks to fully roll out.

Interestingly, Google’s update is similar to our overall company philosophy that I pride myself on living every day:

“Stay steadfast to quality in a world of comprising standards and focus on people first.” While others are worrying about this update, please rest assured that our practices are not threatened by this update as our high-quality standards are already been in place.  Overall, we don’t want you to worry, you are in good hands; we just want you to be aware (and frankly ahead of the curve) of some pretty big impacts and changes in the digital search space.

More to come,

Dr. Anissa Villegas & Team

Marketing with a Flair