Helpful content needs a good page experience

Google has recently updated it’s helpful content guidelines to include a section about page experience. Last year, Google began rolling out new updates called “Helpful Content Updates”. These were designed to promote websites in the search results which were deemed to have, well, helpful content. It is worth reading what Google deems to be helpful content and why some websites may perform better than others in search when it comes to this criteria.

It is important to note that page experience isn’t necessarily a ranking factor on its own. It’s a combination of factors, such as website security, lack of ad intrusion, good core web vitals etc. This differs from helpful content which is more about the content itself.

Including page experience as part of the helpful content criteria is to guide website owners in ensuring that if their website does happen to have the best content, then just make sure a user can properly interact with it. Don’t make the content difficult to access, don’t plaster the page with too many ads, make sure the page works well on mobile, etc.

Although relevancy to the search query will likely trounce most other search ranking factors, if there are two listings that have similar helpful content, but one has a better user experience, then that website may just get to appear above the less usable result. It’s always a very good idea to create a great user experience…and it’s good that search engines are starting to take this into account!

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