Creating helpful reliable people first content

Google's guidelines for writing great content are as follows:

What do the Google guidelines about content mean?

Let's have a look at some of these guidelines in turn and what you can deduce from them:

Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?

For most people, this may seem a bit daunting unless you really are doing cutting-edge research or conducting new analyses of existing data. However, on a practical level, we may all have our own take on our special subject and many businesses have what is called a unique selling point. Think about your own personal insights and experiences in your sphere of expertise and consider how to phrase those insights and experiences in a way that would appeal to a prospective client.

One thing this guideline suggests to me is being very very careful not to duplicate anyone else's work so the one word in the above that stands out to me is 'original'.

Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?

So how do you know if you have provided a substantial, complete or comprehensive description? Some topics may be quite short and others may be endless in their scope. This is reflected by the size of the text in different websites so the text on a builder's website may not be as long as the text on a therapist's website for example. It's a good idea to look at competitor websites and see what they are doing in terms of the scale of the articles they are writing.

Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?

Again think about whether your business has a unique selling point that none of your competitors has and find a way to write about that.

If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources, and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?

Another warning here against straightforward duplication or plagiarism. You need to think about what you are adding to the sum of knowledge or how you can help explain what the copied source material is trying to say. There's no harm in trying to explain a complicated subject in many different ways as people's brains are wired differently. People don't all understand things the same way so often appreciate being presented with information in ways that are more understandable to them.

Personally, I would steer clear of using AI to generate text for that reason. You may not know the source of the text and you may be unwittingly creating yet another copy of previously duplicated content.

I won't list them out again but the rest of the content and quality questions relate to the structure, grammar, spelling and general quality of the writing. The text should have proper headings, be free of spelling mistakes and be easy to read. As always 'content is king' when it comes to SEO. You should write your content in clear jargon-free text that an average high school pupil will understand and that way you will know that whoever browses your site and reads your content will have a good chance of understanding it.

If you are not sure about spelling and grammar then use a spell checker / grammar checker that automatically checks your writing and flags up errors as you write.

Expertise questions

These may seem a bit daunting too but ask yourself who would you rather deal with. Someone locally who you can meet face to face and establish a rapport with, or someone who might be the best expert in the world but who you never meet. Personally, I always find the personal no-bullshit approach works best. If I don't know the exact answer to a question I will say so to a client and usually I know enough to help them with their websites.

Keywords

So where do keywords fit into all this? Well, naturally is the answer. You can't write about anything without using keywords so the best thing to do is to let them naturally fall into the text you are writing. This is why Google call this people-first content. You are writing for people, not robots.

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