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Content Strategy Updates

Content Strategy Updates for Google's Search Generative Experience

Content Strategy Updates for Google’s Search Generative Experience

Fine-tuning content strategies means ongoing research and adjustment for Google’s AI Seach Generative Experience.

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence is irrevocable and transformative. Everyone’s content marketing strategies may be on the verge of disruption or prepared to prosper beyond belief. Content updates and revisions are vital in order to see your content on page one of Google’s search results. So how do content marketers and writers keep up?

Generative AI answers (GenAI) and content proliferation are changing how effective content marketing works. Whether you feel excited or daunted by the rapidly emergent content challenges and opportunities, we can guide you through this. For readers to follow along with these new content strategy concepts, we need a basic understanding of Google’s AI Seach Generative Experience.

Table of Contents

Creating a Holistic Content Strategy for the New Google Search

A holistic content strategy involves multichannel content marketing. As the SGE evolves, sites need an integrated marketing strategy crafted to be found by your audience at various touchpoints versus a single marketing channel. The intent is to publish content that both existing and potential customers can easily encounter on one or more of the channels they use.

Google has made it clear that content is used as a search ranking signal. Over time, it assesses how steadily improvements are made to a domain’s quality content factor. This has several determinants, including how directly and effectively your content answers specific questions.

What is the Most Important Content Factor to Google’s SGE?

If I had to choose one at this moment, I’d say relevant, quality content matters most when search selections are chosen. To do this effectively, use intent relevant words. We are fortunate to have the following information about how Google’s helpful content system works.

“The helpful content system 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.

 

The system generates a site-wide signal that we consider among many other signals for use in Google Search (which includes Discover). The system automatically identifies content that seems to have little value, low-added value, or is otherwise not particularly helpful to people.

 

Any content—not just unhelpful content—on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content. – Google Search’s helpful content system and your website [5]

Great Content Begins with Relevancy to User’s Queries

Relevance factors include not only your article’s body of content text but also your images, videos, downloadable PDFs, etc. How does each aspect meet people’s real needs? Answering questions commonly asked by your audience is critical.

The lesson here is that you have to know what your audience is asking before you can truly create exceptional, helpful content that meets their needs. What is no one is helped or searching for what you publish? It’ll likely sit there unread. SEOs and others often ask Google staff, like John Mueller, how to get their content to rank. Here is a recent Mastodon conversation that offers needed clarity.

QUESTION: “Does semantic HTML help Search identify and evaluate content?”

ANSWER:“It’s not a ranking factor but does help us understand the content better. It’s a fine line – people often take the ‘it helps Google’ angle as a reason to hyper-fixate on it, and assume all of these add up to #1 rankings. And with that, it’s easy to forget that a site doesn’t just ‘rank’ on its own, it ranks for what it’s relevant for. No ranking factor compensates missing relevance, or missing user interest.” – John Mueller’s response on Mastodon [3]

Understand the practice of writing in semantic triples; it will boost your content reach. This is also a basic way to ensure that your content has an excellent readable score.

This reminds me of the statement “For example, after viewing the first page of a website the raters can be prompted to categorize the website based on its content.” That also comes from Google Patent US8442984B. It’s important to know how Google sees your site and what content it is relevant for.

By evaluating SERPs, we know that Google takes a searcher from a general search to what they want. Often a searcher doesn’t know how to start with a perfect query. Therefore, by using Google’s search filters, site links, featured snippets, carousels, PASF, etc…, they can get precise answers. For example, People Also Ask and Related Questions provides a list of questions related to the user’s initial search query. While a lot of technology has changed, other content stretegies have not.

“Make pages for users, not for search engines” – Google 2002

 

“Make pages for users, not for search engines” – Google 2023

Ensure that your content is adding value

Before you begin writing an article to publish on your domain, or update past content, determine if your topic idea aligns with what your audience is searching for. Double-check your active audience’s search patterns and create content that builds a super helpful knowledge base for them.

John Mueller stated, “The one thing I sometimes run into when talking with people is that they’ll be like, “Well, I feel I need to make this page.” And I made this page for users in air quotes, which you don’t see. But then when I look at the search results, it’s like 9,000 other people also made this page. It’s like, is this really adding value to the internet? And that’s sometimes kind of a weird discussion to have. It’s like, “Well, it’s a good page, but who needs it?” There are so many other versions of this page already, and people are happy with those.”

If there is no real need for your next article, then expect that may be challenging to rank in SERPs.

Plan each content piece wisely and align with:

  1. The business’ objectives.
  2. Your audience’s core needs.
  3. Consumer search intent along user journeys that may take them inside the Google ecosystem.

Helpful content marketing is long-serving and always maintains an effective overall content marketing strategy.

How to reinvent your content marketing approach?

One say to make sure your content stays findable and needed is to evaluate content on the SERPs.

  1. Focus more on Outcomes that Outputs.
  2. Be less concerned about new content trends and stay grounded in on-target strategy.
  3. Prioritize your audiences’ long-term needs over quick wins.
  4. Using Generative AI is helpful for building Knowledge Graphs, but write for humans instead of machines or bots.
  5. Remember it is also about content distribution, not just creating more publications.

The big challenge is to deliver consistent, accurate gap content across customer touchpoints. This includes pre and post-sales and a multimodal focus. Fostering content collaboration between your marketing, SEO, and technical writing teams enables everyone to offer users a truly immersive web experience.

How Google’s Search Generative Experience Propagates Content

Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a compilation of content found in search and interface competence that integrates generative AI-powered responses into Google search query results. The tech giant’s search engine is the flagship product of Alphabet’s Google division, providing users with responses to queries.

Google’s Deepmind Gemini is an emerging artificial intelligence language model that currently works on text. It is emerging as the most recent high-level project that is currently in development. Like ChatGPT and SGE, it will expand the boundaries of new innovations in how AI technology surfaces quality content.

Since the SGE is currently labeled “experimental”, time will tell how Google’s revised search engine will populate content. Its blog and documentation have recently added key information about E-E-A-T and YMYL content qualifiers. Check out the following statement by Google.

“Google’s automated systems are designed to use many different factors to rank great content. After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T.” – Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

Learnings From Google Bard AI & SGE TrailsContent Strategy Updates that Reach People Effectively

By participating in Google’s Search Lab, we learn from what Google says and our own first-hand experience. Already LLM-based outputs suggest that we’ll see more in the future through the AI snapshot box and the conversational mode on Google SGE.

“Bard will become more visual both in its responses and your prompts…boost your imagination and creativity in completely new ways.

Bard will also be able to tap into all kinds of services from across the web, with extensions from outside partners, to let you do things never before possible.

There’s a lot ahead for Bard — connecting tools from Google and amazing services across the web to help you do and create anything you can imagine through a fluid collaboration with the world’s most capable large language models. When we combine human imagination with Bard’s generative AI capabilities, the possibilities are boundless. We can’t wait to see what (content) you create with it. – What’s ahead for Bard: More global, more visual, more integrated [1]

This feels like Google is adding further emphasis on being genuine online. It’s less about building your backlink profile or producing content for keyword gaps. It’s more about being a trusted topic expert and valid online resource. This is clear in the quality rater guidelines and consistent with Google’s general messaging about helpful content.

Google has updated its Helpful Content ranking system to surface the Internet’s “hidden gems”. It talks about favoring high-quality, expert-written content in search results over the content of little value. Demonstrating “experience” is more important, according to Google’s recent updates to E-E-A-T explanations to its quality raters. Already, mediocre content is lapsing further behind in rankings.

This is how we’re testing Bard AI. By clicking on the SGE’s Converse button, before entering a search query, a dedicated SGE page opens. This is where we directly interact with SGE by asking it queries. I most often prefer the expanded, more visual card option in the top right.

We see new types and updated versions of expandable boxes being tested by both Google and Bing. In SGE, you get different results from tradition search. It is more efficient at helping the user refine their search. Conversely, it seeks to surface content that is truly helpful to Google’s client – the searcher.

Content Strategy Revisions for the Search Generative Experience

Content planning is crucial for every content marketer.

  • Content that meets the needs of searchers at consideration and research stages.
  • Content that provides comparisons that help people make key decisions.
  • Consultive or market research-backed guidance.
  • How-to steps for completing a task from an experienced writer.
  • Unique viewpoint or opinion content pieces that add value in-the-moment on popular topics.
  • Content ideal for conversational answers to users’ queries.
  • Publishing that fulfils content gap needs with low saturation.
  • Make agile content updates that adapt to algorithm changes. Example: Google’s product reviews criteria now applies to all content that is intends to help buyers make decisions.
  • Write in a manner that establishes credibility and trust.
  • Maintain a realistic content schedule that meets tougher time and resource constraints.
  • Ensure that your content is engaging by offering next steps.
  • Improve visual appeal with images and videos that break up text blocks.
  • Content creaters’ will need to prepare for more immersive user search experiences.
  • Engage an approch that is truly consumer-centric in order to meet personalized content demand.
  • Strategize for your site’s overall content not just individual publications.
  • Optimize Organization and Person profile pages so that readers can be confident that they know who you are.

“Rating the blog as a whole allows the rater to determine whether a user directed to the website would be satisfied with the quality of the blog as a whole, rather than focusing on whether an individual web page has quality content,” according to Google’s Website Quality Signal Generation patent application.

Consider the following content workflow strategy from Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute.

“84% of marketers say they use generative #AI, but only 17% of that group has formal processes. Organizations that successfully integrate generative AI into their marketing and content processes aren’t using the tools to create awesome blog posts or the next great e-book. My research suggests their successes come from using generative AI to shift workflow processes.” – Why You Should Hit Pause on Content Tech

What Google Search Updates Mean to Content Writers

Informed, agile, innovative, and forward thinking content writers can prepare for changes to their advantage.

Publishing generic or mediocre content will be even less effective in the future. Sites with major authority and additional trust signals will still be able to mitigate high content value for a percentage of articles in SGE. However, most of us must work harder to get pages indexed and ranked.

The skills of information gathering, customer profiling, content engineering, question answering, fact sourcing, and content schemas allow for the crafting of high-value content. It must resonate with individuals and be trusted, indexed, and served by search engines.

As the demand for high-quality content soars, the need for topic-expert authors increases. To develop comprehensive content strategies, these experts need verified experience, knowledge, and proficient writing skills. Effective content modeling skils will mean that your content can meet viewer needs.

Daily, we recieve messages like “Our AI takes what is already working based on top-ranking content for your target keywords, then writes completely fresh content modeled off of that.” Yet niche expert authors are needed to verify if AI-Generated content is accurate or worth publishing. Some may find that they can decrease time and resouces allocated to content creations. This generated a critical need to track such content pieces. Over a few weeks and months time, several domains relying to heavliy on AI wrting tools are experiening sharp ranking drops.

Writers need to understand how your content should align with your business goals. This helps them execute effectively, and document the outcomes. Their role is crucial role in maximizing the impact of content efforts and ensuring that your business is competitive in your content landscape.

Immediate AI answers has the potential to lower website traffic. Entities that are heavily reliant on content marketing strategies should prepare. With searchers finding answers directly on SERPs, they have less need to click through to a website to gain the desired information. This change will almost certainly lead to declining organic website traffic.

But if content writers adjust thier strategy, they can still win phone calls and sales directly on the SERP.

SGE Expanded Search Experiences From Additional Channels

It’s going to require a lot more effort to get content indexed

As people make purchases, they often mix channels as they as they consume content. Your updated content strategy should consider publishing tailored content experiences in a variety of formats and across multiple channels. It won’t work to publish low-quality or medicore content and just hope to get indexed. Prepared your content for marketing accross mediums and channels for it to yield sales leads.

Someone asked on Twitter, “What if my content just isn’t being indexed as quickly as I want it to be? I’m pretty sure my blog post is the most unique take of all the blog posts out there, but I need to get it indexed today. Otherwise, nobody will look at it.”

Gary Illyes of Google responded that it’s unlikely that anyone will actually find and read it anyway.

“Unless you are publishing something utterly unique and something that people are actually interested in, it’s pretty hard to get stuff indexed.” – Gary Illyes, an Analyst on the Google Search team

Likely, more conversational, “snackable” content is needed going forward. Its generative AI capabilities will be considerably more adept at answering complex, conversational, and multi-clause queries.

The user search experience is going to transform, as will the content Google delivers as part of its new search. The functionality Google demonstrated during I/O 2023 showed a “Perspectives” tab. We are already seeing that come into play. It expands search experiences across a lot more mediums and channels. It may include consumer review platforms, long and short-form video content from various sources, blog posts, discussion boards, and forum dialogs, and social media soncersations.

The Impact of Generative AI on Content Creation

We already see sites positively and negatively impacted by the helpful content system. Google largely avoids providing specific guidance that states what exactly to do or not do, but we learn a lot from its Quality Rater Guidelines about what is useful content.

We expect that recovering from poor, mediocre, duplicate content will be even more challenging in the future. That is why updating your content strategy today is a priority task for most content marketers.

The new SGE is meant to permit content strategists and writers to streamline processes and explore new creative content ideas. “With 18% of North America-based marketers already utilizing AI for content creation and 23% harnessing its power for creative and design work, AI-generated content presents opportunities for efficiency and innovation”, says Ana Sofia López Zúñiga of Simplea.

The July 20, 2023 Forecasting The Future of Content article predicts that content personalization and relevance are necessary to reach diverse audiences. Not only do we need to reach more diverse audience, but also participate in conversations with them across various platforms. This AI content revolution has new challenges for those striving for success in modern content production.

We see both Google and Bing Search Answer Panel adding more question answer responsed in search. Bing Search permits searcher interactions with some of the right bar answer panels using emojis. The SGE in Search labs has both “Ask anything or try an example (question)” and “Ask a follow up (question)“.

By evaluating SERPs, we know that Google takes a searcher from a general search to what they want. Often a searcher doesn’t know how to start with a perfect query. Therefore, by using Google’s search filters, site links, featured snippets, carousls, PASF, etc…, they can get percise answers. For example, People Also Ask and Related Questions provides a list of questions related to the user’s initial search query.

We see new types and updated versions of expandable boxes being tested by both Google and Bing. In SGE, you get different results from tradition search. It is more efficient at helping the user refine their search. Conversely, it seeks to surface content that is truly helpful to Google’s client – the searcher.

What are the Characteristics of Helpful Content?

Top characteristics of quality content pieces include:

  • Clearity.
  • Credibility.
  • Consistency.
  • Connection.
  • Creativity.
  • Context.
  • Concise.

I’ll go into the specifics about each characteristic a bit further. We learn a lot from Google’s guidance in their helpful content documentation.

Clarity:

A foundational element of evergreen quality content is its level of focus. Not only does this mean that your content is easy to read, but also, schema markup essentially helps search engines understand your content. Search engines want to be confident of the results they surface. Clear, well-structured content performs better than vague, unstructured content that is harder to decipher.

Credibility:

Google exponds proficiently to its Quality Raters on how to identify helpful content and attribute scores to publications, domains, and authors. When evaluating E-E-A-T, optimizing at the document level includes introducing the article’s author or the main content creator. Both are evaluaotor’s “source entities” for quality considerations.

Consistency:

Understand content quality signal generation. This looks for consitent publications that are also consistent with popular consenes on a topic versus outlandish statements. The Google Patent US8442984B, granted on May, 14, 2013 clues us in to why and how consistent publications matter. “In some implementations, the model can be derived from the website signals and the website quality ratings using a machine learning subsystem that implements support vector regression.” [2]

We also know that Google’s classifier process is fully automated. It relies upon a machine-learning model that works globally across all languages.

Connection:

Onother word for this is “relevant content”. Does it connect what you say to real audience needs? Does your content resonate with readers? Does it compel them to take action? Everything that you publish should show that you listen to them, have a compatable tone, are a conversation builder (vs stiffler), are an empathetic human, and relate to them.

Creativity:

Always create unique content. There is already way too much duplicate content. The SGE is designed to help reduce duplication issues and surface what is original and helpful. Google assess the amount of original content versus copied content.

“Unless your content is utterly unique, it’s pretty hard to get stuff indexed.” – Gary Illyes, Google Search Analyst

Context:

Google bots now better understand words and sentences in contect with prior words and sentences in a document. This is where semantic SEO writing skills can boost your creation process. The content of an article is what we talk about. The context of its conversation is how it is talked about it. Context is the positioning of the content, storyline or the article’s purpose that provides value to the audience.

Once a searcher conducts a search, search engines also factor in other contextual assessments, like thier location, past Search history, and other personalized search qualities. Togehter, it encompasses contextual ontologies and contextual search. Google AI factors in different contexts for the same queries.

Concise:

If your content overlaps, gets off target from what user’s need, or strays from your Unique Value Proposition, it may be best to trim it. By trimming and redirecting unnecessary content, your site may become more focused, relevant, and finable. Google has tweeted recently about how “concise content” can improve how it views your domain and publications. Content must both capture and retain readers’ interest. Rambling on also risks losing your audience’s attention.

“Concise content” can also mean topics prepared for niche appeal. Google raters note broad appeal and niche-concise articles. In today’s proliferation of content, it is easier for a domain to become known for and rank for narrowed-down niche topics.

Once your content earns the above characteristics, your changes increase for display in Top Stories, Google Discover, Answer Boxes, and Google’s Knowledge Graph Question Answer Content.

Understanding the new Google Perspectives tabHow to adapt your content for the new Google Perspectives tab

Content strategy has become more central to SEO tasks. This means knowing how to adapt to new search perspectives. Google wrote in its Learn from others’ experiences with more perspectives on Search article, that it will display the article creator’s details. We’re all keen to see exactly how this will work once it is rolled out.

“In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images, and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites, and social media platforms. We’ll also show more details about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile photo, or information about the popularity of their content.” – Lauren Clark, Product Manager at Google Search

It reminds me a bit of how social media conversations can go back and forth. The SGE plans to offer more interactive conversational text experiences. Maybe it is seeking to be as intuitive as conversations on social channels.

More Adaptive Strategies for Generative AI Content Creation

It really is less about whether we like it or not, Generative AI content creation is here to stay. The question is who is prepared and skilled enough to use it. As we all adjust, prominent challenges for content creators will also adjust in the world of search.

It’s best to be a leader and explore the potential of AI in content creation and how it can revolutionize your approach to content crafting. From generating engaging ideas for writers to streamlining content workflows, AI has the ability to elevate your “effective” content publication abilities like never before.

Admidst a lot of discussion about the SGE currently being a form of Google plagiarism, what we can control is that we generate original, high-value content. Reports of examples where the SGE seems to have copied entire text passages directly from websites, with attribution that might need to be clarified to the average user. We do often see the source linked to if you click through.

Google says the following:

“Once you’re in, the new generative AI-powered Search experience will help you take some of the work out of searching, so you can understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily. So instead of asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself, Search now can do some of that heavy lifting for you.” – 3 new ways generative AI can help you search

I like this quote that suggests how to prepare your company for complex machine learning models.

“Generative AI models for businesses threaten to upend the world of content creation, with substantial impacts on marketing, software, design, entertainment, and interpersonal communications. These models are able to produce text and images: blog posts, program code, poetry, and artwork. The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images. Companies need to understand how these tools work, and how they can add value.” – How Generative AI Is Changing Creative Work, by Harvard Business Review [4]

For an in-depth reading on this subject, I recommend purchasing Marie Haynes Creating Helpful Content Workbook. Here is a snippet:

“Google uses an AI-driven system called the helpful content system to reward content that gives users a satisfying experience and demote content that is less likely to do so. This demotion is site-wide, which means that your mediocre content may be making it difficult for Google to want to rank your great content.”

Here are this article’s highlights:

  1. Content Quality is Essential: Google and Bing value quality over origin and over quantity. Edited AI-generated content is proving to rank well – if it’s informative, unique, and relevant.
  2. Avoid Content Duplication: This includes “content intent,” meaning each publication on the same domain should have a unique value and purpose before creating it. In our content audits, we find duplicate content is often an issue. A new writer comes along with an idea that sounds great. But first, check if the intent of the article has already been met by your current articles.
  3. Remember that Helpful Content + Relevance means gaining better organic search results. These are non-paid results that people find based on their relevance to the search query.

This sounds so simple, yet it is easy to forget. “If you don’t have words on a page, you are not going to rank for it.” – Google

SUMMARY: Reimagine Your Content in New Search Experiences

Overall, it’s challenging to say for sure how content creators need to revise their strategies for generative search. However, the tips above can prepare you for better chances of success in future Google content algorithm updates.

Take your content marketing to the next level with the right strategies. If SEO content strategies are a primary concern for you, attention to emergent AI technology for content implementation is important.

Update your content strategy that will align with people by Conducting Audience Research

References

[1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-bard-updates-io-2023/

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8442984B1/en

[3] https://mastodon.social/@johnmu/110649117057988111

[4] https://hbr.org/2022/11/how-generative-ai-is-changing-creative-work

[5] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/helpful-content-system