3 reasons why Google’s Helpful Content Update has given UGC sites like Reddit [+90 million organic traffic], TikTok & more massive traffic increases 👇🏽
🔑 The keyword is “search intent”.
1️⃣ There’s too much “SEO bs” on the internet that does not match search intent.
Theoretically Reddit and UGC sites are designed to give people what they want by cutting out the fluff.
People’s attention spans are decreasing, they want the answers to their questions, fast.
On a recent train to Valencia I looking for things to do in the city.. the top results were over optimized SEO nonsense. So i typed in “reddit” at the end of my Google search.
I came across a short post written by a local that gave me better information than any of the top 10 search results for “things to do in Valencia”.
2️⃣ There’s too much “SEO bs” on the internet that does not match search intent… continued.
After our research, TikTok, YouTube Shorts was the next place we went to… we just searched for the locations we found on reddit. There were also short videos that gave us a list of places to see and things to do.
If we searched for “Is the city of sciences worth visiting” or similar keywords… then the results on Google at the time presented us with 3000 word articles that no one had time to read.
3️⃣ Google is rewarding different perspectives and experiences to better match search intent.
For many queries the top 10 results are indirectly a clone of each other… Tiktok, YouTube Shorts, Reddits are less likely to repeat the same content in different words.
They provide unique experiences that is hard to replicate by the author of a travel blog that’s never been to a city.
Another example is “best comedy movies”. A few months ago the results were filled with random lists of the 25, 50, 100 best comedy movies. Users only saw the perspective of the author or the publication.
Now Reddit is on page 1, users can explore the the opinions of real people.
People can see what other people think the best comedy movies are.
So what’s next? If you’ve seen a traffic decrease how do you recover?
The update hasn’t finished rolling out yet. So wait for it to finish, but in the meantime:
🔻 The first step is figuring out why… take a deep look at your site and ask yourself if your content is actually helpful and useful.
🔻 Take a look at the pages that saw decreases and compare them with what’s ranking in the top results. How does yours differ?
🔻 As well as the HCU filter, we just saw a core algorithm update. Analyse your website through that lens – if it’s the core that did the bigger damage then you need to improve overall site quality.
🔻 Focus on revamping (or in extreme cases cutting) pages that were most hit.
Don’t create more content until you find out the root cause of your decreases.
