Helpful content will be the thing buzzword by 2025 when it comes to online visibility. When do you help your audience with content and how do you create it? Most important tip: be relevant, create content that doesn’t exist yet. Journalists do this every day by making news. They know better than anyone how to add relevance to your story to help their audience.
As a journalist from regional and national newsrooms, I have listed 6 tips for you to create helpful content that adds value. For this article I also spoke with SEO experts and trailblazers Roy Huiskes and Chantal Smink. I recorded a podcast with them in the summer of 2024 that you can watch or listen to at the bottom of this article.
As a journalist you are used to working for your reader, listener and viewer. What do they gain from your story, why is this relevant now and what does it add to what we already know? Journalists know how to add value and that is exactly what helpful content is about: adding new high-quality content to the web.
So don’t rehash what is already online or known, because Google can now gather that together with AI itself. In 2024, Google will definitely change course, because they are in danger of missing the boat.
Why does the content direction need to change?
Websites attract less traffic from Google. In recent years, users have increasingly been disappointed with search results and no longer find the information they need.
The cause is the (too) perfectly sophisticated search engine optimization of texts. For years it was all about using the best scoring keywords in your texts to rank as high as possible. It was not important that this resulted in superficial texts with many sentences.
Roy Huiskes: “AI has made everything faster and that has changed searching on Google. Google sees how we behave on your site.”
With the arrival of AI, everything has accelerated: one computer rattles off content for another computer. Scores like a rocket, but your visitor? He or she does not find the desired information, becomes disappointed and stays away. For robots, by robots wrote the Volkskrant.
Google has thus destroyed its own revenue model. As a journalist, I think that is justified. Who benefited from this? Yes, Google and the SEO specialists, but you still want to help your visitor? Or do you just want to score high with your site?
It’s about the content again, but not necessarily on your site
Google therefore had to change and implemented many major updates, aimed at better serving its own visitors. Mind you, our own visitors. And this now applies to almost every platform that wants to retain its own visitors instead of sending them away. So it is important to be there where your audience is.
If you know that Generation Z hardly googles, but does social search on TikTok, then you want to be visible there. If your content is interesting enough and they want to know more, they will have found you via the web link in your profile.
What you should not do is spam with web links, TikTok (just like Google) does not like that. All social media channels want to retain their visitors and linking is ‘punished’ with a lower ranking in the algorithm.
So see social media primarily as the place where the public gets to know you. Even if it is with zero-click content, you are working on brand awareness and involvement. And the more places search engines see that your content helps people, including on your site, the higher Google will rank your content and site.
Or can you shut down the site if everything goes through social media?
Absolutely not! Your site is the only place where you are in charge of your own content. A social medium can disappear or go behind a paywall. Your website is your base, your home. Your visitor can find depth there, but will increasingly get to know you elsewhere first. On social media, for example, but also the importance of real life increases again by going to business networks, schools or festivals.
If you manage to retain the visitor longer on any medium, because you really offer them added value, search engines will see your organization as relevant. In the United States, where Google works with AI overviews, they are leading the way, says Chantal Smink, creator of the popular SEO podcast SEO & Organic Marketing:
Thanks to AI, Google can answer search questions itself. They also show social videos with helpful content. So you want to be there soon. – Chantal Smink
6 tips to create helpful content as a journalist
1. Is the story relevant to your audience?
Ask yourself if this story is relevant to your audience. A journalist always thinks: why is this story relevant to my reader, viewer or listener? Editors meet about this every day. Brainstorming about stories is important. As an organization you can also apply this. Talk to your colleagues in field services, ask what they hear from customers:
- What do they want to know? What do they encounter, what concerns and frustrations do they have?
- What do they need to know, what information do they need to use your service or product?
- What’s nice to know? Are there interesting trends and developments, what is happening behind the scenes?
- Find the newsworthiness of your story
2. Journalistic news criteria make your stories more relevant
Journalistic news criteria make your stories more relevant and therefore more ‘helpful’. The most important criterion is deviation, or the extent to which ‘the information deviates from what is already known’. So the newer and more unknown the information, the bigger the news. Another important criterion is the scope of the topic: the greater the impact on your audience, the higher the news value.
The distance to your audience is also important; can your viewer recognize themselves in your subject? There are a total of 10 news criteria that you can watch in this video from our e-learning. Published especially for the readers of Frankwatching:
3. Brainstorm your stories like an editor
Discuss with your colleagues about the stories you come up with. Once you know which stories you are going to tell, you can divide them into regularly recurring sections. Make a monthly or quarterly plan and, if necessary, make a distinction between short- and long-term topics. You then start this cycle again based on testimonials, expert interviews or show what happens behind the scenes.
4. Be reliable, check your facts
If anything is important to your brand in this age of misinformation, it is be reliable. Don’t make your story more beautiful than it is, smooth marketing talk has become transparent and no one believes it anymore.
5. You are unique as an expert, we like that!
Journalists always look for experts who can explain a current situation. Whether this is a car mechanic who gives tips about freezing temperatures or a professor of Middle Eastern Studies who has to explain the situation in Syria. They have specific knowledge that the journalist does not have, but that the public needs when it is current. This kind of expert content is typical helpful content. The restorers of the Mauritshuis will also use this to take their audience through the restoration of Potter’s De Stier with vlogs:
6. People have long been used to informal communication, be yourself!
A development that we have been seeing for a while (see my Frankwatching article from 2019) is the need for authenticity: real people in whom we can recognize ourselves. Now that AI can do more and more, the need for real people is only increasing. Moreover, everyone has long been accustomed to informal communication in private. According to British mobile journalist Caroline Scott, it is strange when companies suddenly start talking to you formally: “It feels like you are watching a commercial.”
Takeaways
- Find your audience where they are! Young people on TikTok, older people via Facebook and if you have a business audience, Linkedin.
- The more AI, the more important real contact in real life becomes. Show yourself with networking and depending on your audience, company and school visits or festivals. That all helps with your visibility.
- Create zero-click content that fits the platform: someone asks a question and gets the answer in a video on your YouTube channel. You don’t have to click through to your site, but you have helped someone. Good for your reach and therefore brand awareness!
- Social search is becoming more important, young people prefer to ask their search questions on a platform like TikTok. There they will find exactly what they need: with the right atmosphere in image and audio. So you want your video to be there.
- Your audience gets to know you on social media. Have they become curious enough? Then they can always go to your own website, because…. Where social media come and go, your website will always exist!
Why does Google want you to create helpful content now?
Interview with Roy Huiskes
What is helpful content and how do you create it?
Interview met Chantal Smink
Source: www.frankwatching.com
