What Lawn, Landscape and Outdoor Living Businesses Need to Know About Google’s Helpful Content Update
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
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Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and Google changing its algorithms. In 2021 alone, Google reported making more than 5,000 algorithm changes to Search and ran more than 800,000 experiments. According to Google, there is one problem that is never solved, and that’s Search.
In less than half a second, Google sorts through hundreds of billions of webpages, searching for the most relevant and reliable results. The good news is with every algorithm change, you’ll potentially find the valuable content you’re looking for more quickly, so you don’t waste time viewing unhelpful content.
The Google Helpful Content Update (HCU) and How It Affects Landscape Industry Businesses
In August 2022, Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update (HCU). The largest update began in December 2022 and was completed 38 days later in January 2023. The purpose of this update is to improve the user experience, rewarding webpages with content created for people rather than content created to appeal to search engines.
Overall, the HCU helps users find high-quality content by lowering the rankings of sites with low-quality content. For landscape and outdoor living businesses that have prioritized the quality of their content, Google’s HCU is great news. For anyone that prioritized search engine rankings over producing helpful content, the outlook may look bleak.
There is hope for those negatively affected by this update, but only if you make immediate changes. Even so, it can take several months to recover. Since it’s a site-wide algorithm, even if you have some high-quality content, as long as you have primarily click-bait content written for search engines, all of your webpages will be negatively affected by the HCU. The goal is to create content that provides unique and in-depth content that is helpful to the reader—the kind of content that won’t be negatively affected by changing algorithms.
The Search Quality Rating Process: How Google Determines Page Quality
Google has approximately 16,000 Search Quality Raters who are employed by external vendors and are from different regions across the globe. Their job is to determine page quality using a common set of guidelines, which is over 170 pages long.
Search Quality Raters are one of the ways that Google tests and evaluates its search effectiveness using real people, but it is not feasible to rate every single page on the internet this way. This method, combined with quality and relevance signals, helps determine the Search Quality Ranking—ultimately measuring how well the algorithm is performing.
The process includes two parts, rating the Page Quality and Needs Met. Page Quality rates how well the page achieves its purpose and Needs Met determines how useful and relevant a result is for a given search. Overall, these rankings don’t impact how a particular landscape business firm’s page ranks on the search engine results page (SERP), it’s how Google tests the effectiveness of its algorithm changes.
What EEAT Is and Why Landscape and Outdoor Living Businesses Must Consider It
The set of guidelines Google uses to rank webpages provides insight that is helpful in determining what to keep in mind when creating digital content for your landscape design and build website. Prior to the HCU, Google created the concept of EAT to evaluate Search, which stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. With the HCU update, Google added another E for experience and updated the acronym to EEAT: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. These guidelines will help you create helpful, people-first content.
E: Sharing Your Experience in Your Green Industry Content
The primary goal for the HCU is to improve the experience of using Search by improving the quality of the results. Just as you ensure your customer has a great experience during their landscape design and build process, you want to ensure they have a wonderful experience during the research phase of the customer journey too.
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CONTENT THAT DEMONSTRATES YOUR FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE
Google values first-hand experience content, which is why it is essential that industry experts write your blog posts and website content. When the writer has first-hand experience, they will have original insights, photos, and videos that clearly show they know their subject matter.
Google recommends asking yourself if your intended audience would learn enough to achieve their goal or feel satisfied with their experience after reading your content. At HALSTEAD, our professional writers are industry experts who write helpful content for our clients. We also use client photos as much as possible to show actual work they have done, both of which help fulfill the “experience” guideline.
Successful landscape and outdoor living firms are clear on who their target audience is, which is essential to know what your audience will find useful. In fact, 47% of marketers reported that researching the audience was the number one factor that leads to success in content marketing.
Content written for your target customer will attract the right people, and they will feel satisfied with what they have learned. For example, if your target customer is an affluent woman in her mid-thirties with a family, you could feature content about family-friendly, luxurious resort-style poolscapes with built-in slides and waterfalls. You can explain how this outdoor space will help her spend more time outside with family, with some focus on the features and options she may want to include, including smart-tech options.
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CREATING A USER-FRIENDLY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ON YOUR WEBSITE
The user experience (UX) is a key component of SEO. For example, if someone performs a Google search and clicks on a webpage to immediately click off, the ranking for this page will likely be lowered. People click off a website for various reasons, but some common indicators increase the likelihood, including loading speed, appearance, navigation, and organization.
Top landscape industry businesses invest in a professional website design that ensures your site is aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. For longer content, consider including a table of contents where users can easily find the specific information they’re looking for. Navigation menus should be easy to find and easy to use.
Keep both mobile and desktop traffic in mind. Google offers a free tool to check if your webpage is mobile-friendly, which is essential since over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.
It’s important that your website loads quickly, considering the average page speed of a first-page Google result is only 1.65 seconds. A Google study found that the bounce rate increased by 32% when a page load time went from one second to three and by 90% when it went from one second to five. Since the mission is to create a smooth experience for the user, load time is paramount to keeping prospects from clicking away from your site.
Organizing your content in a way that’s easy to read can also help improve your SEO while enhancing the UX. Using headings and subheadings throughout your content makes it easier to consume. It helps inform Google what each section of your content is about to help improve SERP rankings, resulting in increased visibility.
E: How to Establish Expertise on Your Landscape Business Website
Expertise applies to the amount of effort, talent, or skill that goes into creating a particular piece of content. Originality and accuracy of information also play major factors. The word count does not have as much influence as the depth of the content. Long content can be thin content, still lacking in-depth analysis.
For this reason, HALSTEAD has a team of professional writers and experienced researchers who create in-depth content void of fluff (unnecessary words). Grammar, spelling, and typos all factor into expertise. If there are such issues, Google’s machine-learning algorithm will identify it as unhelpful content.
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HOW AI SUCH AS CHATGPT AFFECTS THE WAY GOOGLE RATES YOUR EXPERTISE
With AI writing capabilities, such as ChatGPT, landscape business owners may be tempted to rely on such tools for content creation. In order to establish expertise with Google, content needs to be thoroughly researched, link to real data, and offer unique insight rather than regurgitating information. This is where ChatGPT fails—AI cannot create original ideas but rather regurgitates ideas that have already been expressed and are found on the internet.
In an article featured by the Harvard Business Review the writer states, “[AI] is a consummate bullshitter” because it sounds convincing but can also make up its own set of facts. It’ll create fluffy content that imitates other content and may look impressive at first glance but lacks quality.
While ChatGPT may be useful in streamlining some parts of the content creation process, it is not a replacement for human thought and original insight. Because of this, it’s not the route you want to take if you want to establish expertise with Google. In fact, Google considers AI-generated content spam and can detect it, which can lead to losing organic visibility.
A: Demonstrate Your Influence with Authority
Authority involves how others view your expertise and influence. You can think of authority as your online reputation based on real users’ experience with your business. These experiences can be shared via reviews on Google, Yelp, or other platforms and your Better Business Bureau ranking.
Top landscape and outdoor living businesses know the importance of online reputation management, especially since 90% of consumers read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business. When your business is seen in high regard by other people, it helps build your authority. Taking control of how your business is viewed online will help ensure a positive perception.
When other reputable websites link to yours, it can help boost your authority and increase your rankings. For example, when a reputable industry resource such as Lawn & Landscape or the National Association of Landscape Professionals links to your website, it helps increase your authority.
T: How to Meet Google’s Trustworthiness Guidelines
Google’s trustworthiness guidelines refer to the extent to which your content is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable. Trust is seen as the center of the EEAT concept and the most important factor.
You can establish trust on your website with an About page with information about the owner and team members. Sharing your first-hand experience also helps your trustworthiness, according to Google’s standards. Social proof is also influential, so featuring real customer reviews on your website is also helpful.
When you follow Google’s long-standing best practices that are outlined in EEAT, you can’t go wrong. Since Search evolves over time, when you focus on the user experience, you don’t have to worry about algorithm changes affecting your ratings negatively.
