SEO for Google's Helpful Content Update

There have been a lot of discussions about Google’s latest Helpful Content Update(referred to as HCU later) and its impact on the SEO industry. Here we are going to share our viewpoints about HCU and the incoming change in the SEO industry.

The Beginning and the Beginning of the End of SEO

As Google was becoming more and more popular and driving a great amount of traffic to the websites decades ago, there emerged a question for the search engine giant. Facing the gigantic amount of web pages generated by the Internet, how could their content be digested? How could the main ideas be extracted from mountains of scrabbled HTML documents?
The search engine giant didn’t have such resources or human powers to do the content digestion work for every web page. The answer to the question by Google, or maybe by a collusion between Google and the website SEOers, is that Google will let the websites themselves do the digestion work and give the results to Google’s spiders. Google benefits from the free labor doing the summarizing work of generating titles, keywords, and descriptions by SEOers, and SEOers benefit from traffic rewarded for their work. SEOers want to take advantage of search engines for what they feed to them, that is the beginning of SEO.
As the title from HCU implies, Google always wants to direct traffic to websites that have helpful content to ensure the usefulness of Google itself. The purpose never changed since the launch of the search engine giant. What SEOers keep doing is to let Google think that a website is more helpful even if the website’s content is no more helpful than its competitors. The arms race between Google and SEOers may come to an end or the beginning of the end with the emergence of LLMs.
Understanding the articles is one thing all LLMs can do pretty well. An LLM can easily generate proper titles, keywords, and descriptions for any article, it can do better than most humans. The giant players of AI realized that they no longer needed the labors of SEOers, the LLMs could finish all the jobs SEOers used to do, and faithfully. The search engines need not read the TDKs or other metadata since they already know those things based on the embeddings of the web page content.

The debut of HCU is the beginning of a structural shift of labor for content marketing, the requirement for translating raw content into structured or semi-structured data like HTML meta tags or JSON is diminishing. So this is the beginning of the end of SEO.

SEO for HCU is actually LLMO

The traditional way of SEO as the work of human-powered article labeling is not the right way of SEO for HCU. SEO in the past was like building bridges for the machine’s understanding of text content, now that the machines have already crossed the bridge, the SEO for HCU is back to the text content itself at the other side of that bridge. This means SEO for HCU is actually LLMO(Large Language Model Optimization), you need to make LLMs consider your content helpful, or you could let LLMs learn something from your content.

Let’s have another metaphor. The traditional way of SEO is like packaging your content, and search engines love fitted and well-designed packages despite whatever content is inside. But LLMO, or SEO for HCU, is when a search engine is like an X-ray scanner that sees right through the package and scans the content directly, the real effort must be done on the quality of content itself.

Use LLMs for assessing and extending your content

For future content marketers, engaging in LLMO should also begin with the effective use of LLMs. The LLMs should not be used to do the search engine side works like metadata extracting by content marketers, just content itself matters.
We should let LLMs help with the content.
The first thing is to use LLMs to extend the content, this can be a great way to save time and improve the quality of your content. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as adding more detail to a topic, providing different perspectives on a topic, generating new ideas for content, and expanding the reach of your content to a wider audience.
The second thing is to use LLMs to access your content. It is pretty important to know how a LLM thinks, and what a LLM knows w.r.t. to your content. So consider LLMs as web moderators, and let them access your content’s usefulness.