What Is Helpful, People-First Content and Why Does Google Care?

Do you know what one of the most important parts of creating content that ranks on Google is? It’s to make sure that you’re not writing for the search engine. Instead, you should be writing for your intended audience. So what is people-first content and why does Google care so much about it?

Key Takeaways

• People-first content is content that is created for human readers, not to try and explicitly please search algorithms.
• Traditional search engine optimization efforts (like keywords) are still important.
• How to tell if your content is people-first.

Defining Helpful and People-First Content

We can easily define people-first content as content that has been written for a human audience with the intent of providing helpful and reliable information. It provides value to your readers and answers questions they have.

In more detail, helpful content:

• Is created with a specific audience in mind.
• Embodies EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
• Meets the needs/search intent of the searcher.

At GAVL, our in-house writing team thoughtfully crafts personalized people-first content for lawyers.

When Did Google Start Caring About Helpful Content?

Google first launched its helpful content update in August 2022. The goal was simple: to reduce the appearance of low-quality content written for search engines and increase the appearance of helpful content written for real people.

Since then, this system has received multiple updates (most recently in Sept. 2023). This further reduced the amount of spammy, unhelpful content ranking high on the search engine results page (SERP).

Google likes helpful content for the same reason that we all do. No one wants to perform a search only to find several pages showing results crammed with too many keywords and no real substance. Instead, what we all want is to find the actual answer for what we’re searching for.

Do We Still Need Search Engine Optimization if Our Content is Helpful?

Ranking your content on the SERP requires a multi-faceted approach. Good content never embodies just one thing. Google’s algorithm is complex and relies on a wide range of factors when determining what to show searchers.

People-first content is an important part of this equation, but it’s far from the only factor. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing different aspects of a website to help Google understand your content and website better. This can involve:

• Earning and maintaining high-quality backlinks.
• Optimizing schema markup.
• Improving and clarifying internal link structure.
• Fixing broken links.
• Removing and redirecting old, underperforming content.
• Performing competitor analysis.
• Conducting keyword research and optimization.

Writing and providing your target audience with content that they find helpful and reliable is important, but it needs to happen in conjunction with all of the other important SEO tasks.

Basing your SEO strategy off of nothing else but helpful content is the same thing as preparing to run a marathon by stretching, but forgoing any actual running practice.

How To Tell if Your Legal Content is Helpful, Reliable, and People-First

It’s important to evaluate if your content is actually providing the value that your intended audience is searching for. When deciding whether your content matches search intent by providing helpful, reliable, and people-first content, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why was this content created?
• Does it answer a question or meet a need?
• Does it provide unique information or meaningful analysis?
• Is it interesting and compelling to read?
• Are the titles and subtitles accurately descriptive?
• Does it avoid using shocking or misleading language?

And the most important question to ask: If I received this as a search recommendation, would I find it helpful?

If the answer is “no,” then you need to either revise, rewrite, or remove the content.

Elevating Helpful Legal Content With GAVL

GAVL helps attorneys and law firms reach clients through carefully crafted SEO approaches, which includes ensuring that all practice area pages and blogs are people-first and helpful.

Learn more today—fill out our easy online contact form to discover how GAVL can help elevate your legal website.