All SEO knows that having good content is important. According to Google, “Google’s Automated Ranking Systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results. This page is designed to help creators evaluate if they’re producing such content.”

But, what is really considered Good Content?

Reading Google’s “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” page, many website owners would realize that their version of good content doesn’t really match what Google considers as good content. While Google says to focus on people-first content and avoid creating search-engine-first content, the reality is that creating your website’s target audience-first content may not be what Google’s AI has decided as good content for the topic. This is probably one of the main reasons why websites (unwillingly) have to create search-engine-first content to be visible in the search results.

Especially when you search for popular shorter queries, you often see the top 10-15 results with very similar content. In English and some other languages, you can definitely go after longtail keywords, but in some languages including Japanese, people aren’t using longtail keywords as much. So either you are stuck with queries that won’t give you much visibility, or go after broader queries. I’m not sure if that is good for the search user experience…

In order to create quality content that your target users would appreciate, I recommend that you consider below two points:

1. Provide the information in different formats including video, images, and guidebook.
2. Provide different information that is not covered by top-ranking websites.

The idea is to make your content as unique as possible. News-worthy content is good. Evergreen content is really good, but for your business’s sake, the content needs to talk to your target audience.