Back in 2022, Google rolled out its ‘Helpful Content Update’. The core purpose driving the update was to improve search results for humans by prioritising content that was genuinely useful to users rather than content created purely for SEO purposes.
The update aimed to reduce the visibility of low-quality, unoriginal, and unhelpful content written primarily for search engines rather than people, an objective they’ve stood by ever since.
Indeed, starting last week, Google initiated the rollout of its March 2025 Core Update, marking the first core algorithm update of the year, again part of its ongoing efforts to enhance search result quality by giving priority to relevant and satisfying content from a diverse range of websites.
What's new about Google's March 2025 core update?
Google is staying tight-lipped, and has not provided specific guidance for this update but reiterates its general advice for sites affected by core updates: focus on creating helpful, reliable, and people-first content. There are no specific actions required for this update, provided that sites have been producing content aimed at satisfying user needs. You can read more about the update directly on Google, here: https://developers.google.com/search/updates/core-updates
The rollout is expected to take up to two weeks to complete, during which website rankings and search visibility may experience fluctuations.
Do I need to take action because of this update?
There’s no particular action to recommend at this stage, BUT website owners should monitor their analytics and search performance over the coming weeks to check if there has been any impact on their rankings:
- If only a small drop in rankings, continue to monitor and assess.
- If your analytics suddenly drop off a cliff, then adjustments to content strategies should be considered based on these observations to align with Google’s emphasis on high-quality, user-centric content.
If you’re a blogger, or website manager, you can test your content by following Google’s guiding principles* below to ensure you’re delivering valuable content to your website visitors:
Ensure you answer ‘yes’ to the questions below:
- Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
- Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service?)
- Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
- After reading your content, will someone leave your site feeling they’ve learnt enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone reading your content leave your site feeling that they’ve had a satisfying experience?
You should be answering 'no' to the following:
- Is the content designed to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
- Are you producing lots of content on different topics in the hope that some of it may perform well in search engine results?
- Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics? (we’re looking at you, Chat GPT!!)
- Are you mainly summarising what others have to say without adding much value?
- Are you writing about things simply because they seem ‘trending’, and not because you’d write about them anyway for your existing audience?
- Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
- Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (Google deny this to be the case!)
- Did you decide to write about a niche topic without any real expertise, and are just writing in the hope you’d get search traffic?
- Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, move, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?
Thoughts to conclude:
It may seem counterintuitive, but writing content that isn’t designed for search engines is often the best way to appeal to them!
My advice would always be to write an article that is authentic, helpful and makes it worth the reader’s time and attention. There’s little point in adding an article to your website that somebody takes the time to read, but leaves your site still feeling unsure of the correct answer.
Take the time to make sure that your article is speaking from your knowledge and experience of the subject matter, or it could very well be damaging to your brand and reputation.
I can help you with your content strategy. Please do contact me for a no-obligation chat.
* Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content#people-first