eCom SEO in a post-HCU world

This morning my 5-year old daughter asked me how I’m thinking about writing blog content in a post-HCU world.

That’s a lie — I don’t have any kids.

Nonetheless, it’s a question I get quite a bit these days.

So here’s my answer…

First, the Helpful Content Updates (HCU) that Google has rolled out over the last few months were clearly aimed at niche sites.

Your eCommerce brand is practically immune to this type of update.

In over 80% of the cases I’ve seen, the HCU has not targeted eCommerce brands.

The exception is brands that have 1) published a ton of AI blog content (think hundreds of blogs in a matter of days) and 2) have an egregious amount of blog content compared to the number of product & category pages they have.

Basically, the HCU only affected eCom brands that were “top heavy” on blog content.

Why?

I can’t be sure, but my guess is that Google treated these similarly to niche sites.

Perhaps big G thought that these sites were masquerading as eCom sites when in reality they were just niche sites with a few fake products to keep up appearances.

Fine by me, fewer competitors for the brands I work with.

In any case, I’d be an irresponsible SEO if I didn’t continually improve our processes & results.

And coincidentally, I was in the process of upgrading our content systems as the HCU rolled out.

I wanted to streamline the processes initially, but after the update, I expanded my focus to both speed & quality.

As far as speed is concerned, I firmly believe you should use AI to draft content. It’d be dumb not to.

“B-B-But it takes me 4+ hours to edit the AI content. I’m better off writing it from scratch.”

Relax.

If you want to write content from scratch, be my guest. I told you what I think you should do, it’s entirely your own prerogative to spend hours in research and writing.

Say hello to carpal tunnel in a few years.

Now, onto the quality.

First, let me say that I am not naive enough to think that unedited AI content will rank on the first page of Google.

Second, every single brand I work with would fire me instantly if I posted unedited, surface level AI content.

So how am I able to improve the content quality?

With our new 4-step content process:

1. We use Cuppa to generate content, and we create an SOP for every single brand that has certain presets that tailors the output to the brand’s authority & style.
   

2. Before our Head of Content even glimpses at the AI draft, she runs a custom GPT that I built. In short, the GPT reads the content from the top 3 results for the target keyword, then extracts the “10 most important points or pieces of information that only a subject matter expert would know” into a numbered list.
   
   The goal is to extract the most important, niche points that the AI content will likely not contain. The AI draft is surface level stuff, this GPT helps us go deeper. She uses this as a reference as she edits the AI content into its final, more valuable form.
   

3. She then runs another GPT which compares the structure of our draft to the structure of the three competitors, offering analysis & insight if we need to adjust our headings or content order based on the competitors.
   
   {she makes her first round of edits}
   

4. She runs a third GPT where the input is the 10 most important points that were extracted from the competitor articles AND the first edited draft. This GPT then reads both sets of inputs and analyzes each point against the draft, letting her know if she sufficiently covered each point or if more context is needed.
   
   {she makes her second round of edits}
   
   If more is needed, it suggests in great detail what she should add. If the draft sufficiently covers that particular expert point, no more context or edits are needed.

Since we’ve upgraded our workflow to this, our content quality has improved significantly — I’ve had several clients point this out to me, which has been great.

Here’s the deal — AI content is not good by itself.

You know it and I know it.

But it makes things so much faster & easier — you just need get creative with it.

Catch y’all next week.

Kai