Author: Mordy Oberstein
Google’s core updates can be anxious, frustrating times. But, they’re also filled with hidden gems about how search has changed.
Analyzing the fallout of a core update helps us better understand:
What Google can do algorithmically
What Google is looking for from our content
While I love analyzing Google algorithm updates in aggregate (and have written dozens of articles on this), diving deep at the page level can offer a more qualitative look at what drives visibility changes on the SERP.
Below are two cases that make me think Google has turned another corner in how it deciphers quality and “helpfulness.” Yes, they are just two cases, but they really stood out to me in my analysis of over 300 SERPs (and diving deep into more than a dozen “ranking cases”).
Both cases present a very similar and substantial theme. They show how Google is looking to move past sterile content and instead present the user with content that accounts for the context of the query—as in, the user’s particular situation.
Let’s see how these varied content approaches played out as Google’s March 2024 core update reshaped the search results.
Table of contents:
01. Bankrate moves past topic-centric content for ranking wins
Let’s start with Bankrate. I noticed the site improved for the keyword [payday loan fees] and it took me down an entire rabbit hole.
Prior to the March 2024 Google core update, this page ranked at position 7 but jumped up the SERP to position 3 by the time the update finished rolling out.
Looking at this page (and then the wider performance of similar content) led me to revisit situational content.
Why brands and SEOs should adopt situational writing
To be honest, when I looked at Bankrate’s page relative to similar ranking pages (such as the one from LendingTree) I didn’t see much differentiation.
I couldn’t quite understand why Google didn’t reward Bankrate’s page with a top-three position prior to the update, but suddenly did post-update.
That’s why I went to the Wayback Machine (Internet Archives) to see if the page had been updated since the previous Google core update back in November 2023—sure enough, it had and the improvements were significant.
Two noticeable changes were:
1. A new key takeaways section to summarize the main points of the page
2. An expert insight section (which, in this case, was written by the author of the content)
While these changes are “nice,” I don’t think they qualify as “extensive,” and I don’t think they fundamentally make the page substantially more valuable.
So what then? What changes did Bankrate make to the page that significantly increased quality (and rankings)?
For starters, Bankrate reorganized a good bit of the content. For example, the old version of the page had separate headers for “What is a payday loan?” and for “How payday loans work,” whereas the updated version combines them into “What are payday loans and how do they work?”
In and of itself, that isn’t a big deal. The difference in approach that perhaps led to this change, however, is a big deal.
Here’s how the old version broke down the section on how payday loans work:
It’s entirely topic-first, which is typical. If I had to speculate, some SEO tool told the Bankrate’s team that if they want to rank for the keyword [how payday loans work], they need to have both a separate H2 and must include content on credit checks, repayment, and fees (as shown above).
This looks and feels very much like “SEO-first content.” It’s both sterile and predictable.
Compare that to the updated section:
This updated content is far more user-first (and far less topic-first). For example, the paragraph that immediately follows the main summary of what a payday loan is (highlighted in yellow) explains to site visitors what they can expect to happen if they take out such a loan.
The old version had none of this:
And that’s the real story with this page.
The updated page adopts what I’ve been calling “situational writing.” It takes the context and situation of the user into account.
Fundamentally, it means predicting what the user will experience at some level. So while both pages cover the risks of payday loans, only the new version has a section about when payday loans are a logical option:
Why? Because discussing if they are worthwhile (unless some SEO tool told you to do so) only becomes relevant when you start thinking about the end user’s situation and when that situation may call for taking out a payday loan.
This also means realizing that you need to emphasize the human considerations inherent to your particular topic as well as the implicit intent that drives users to your content. In the example above, the creators of the page predicted that (unless there was reinforcement around how to pay the loan back) readers might possibly end up in a tight spot.
That’s why the section ends with a warning about repaying the loan in full and offering some surface-level ideas of how to do that (considering the financial constants already implied in the loan type).
The search visibility improvement here was for the entire folder that the payday loans page belongs to. Bankrate has an entire corpus of content dedicated to loan information and that section of the site saw huge ranking gains with the update (shown above).
I had a look at about a dozen or so pages within the folder and all of them had been rewritten since the last core update in November.
To that point, the domain overall did not see the same increase:
Further investigation is needed, but this could signal the value of the content overhaul we’ve examined above.
02. Yale Medicine’s situational content pushes past keyword-specific pages on the SERP
In the opening of this blog post, I referenced “sterile content.”
Sterile content: Content that doesn’t live within the confines of the user’s experience. It simply presents a topic.
Sterile content is topic-centric—not person-centric. It presents topics as topics, instead of presenting them through the lens of fulfilling a need.
I think we might be seeing Google beginning to understand this. Momentous.
Let’s have a look at the ranking trends for the keyword [labrum hip surgery] and two URLs with opposite rank trajectories. As you can see below, a URL from yalemedicine.org went from position 9 (before the update) to position 6 after its conclusion:
At the same time, a URL from mymosh.com (an orthopedic hospital in Wisconsin) went from flirting with a top-ten ranking to being removed from the top 20 results altogether by the time the March 2024 core update completed.
So, what happened here?
What I think occurred with these two pages is very similar to the example I shared earlier with Bankrate’s content: the Yale Medicine site (which I do not believe is a subsidiary of the ivy league school) took a far more situational approach than most of the other sites on the SERP.
Look at how the page addressed how labral tears are diagnosed:
Like the Bankrate page, this page does not take a purely sterile topical approach. It offers information in the context of what the reader will likely experience.
The page doesn’t just tell you how tears are diagnosed, but what happens to the user as they undergo the diagnosis.
In addition to the page being topically comprehensive, it speaks to the site visitor on a deeper level and, in doing so, transcends the topic itself.
At multiple steps along the way, the page tries to consider its audience’s situation. Another quick example is how it discusses treatment. It essentially considers a scenario where the treatment is not 100% linear, and where multiple repairs might occur during one surgery:
It’s very simple and subtle, but this example is a case where the content tries to understand (by predicting) the reader’s life situation.
I want to contextualize the rankings on this SERP a bit to show you how powerful I think this approach is. The top of the SERP is dominated by the super-authorities of the health space:
I don’t expect a “regular” site to compete here. If we look a bit further down, where the Yale Medicine page does rank, the results are pretty much filled with your typical, sterile sort of content:
How does this bode well for my argument that the Yale Medicine page is strong? Shouldn’t it rank above some of these more “old school” pages?
Yes, except to me, the Yale Medicine page is strong despite only covering surgery on a limited basis. It ranks among pages where all they talk about is hip surgery.
In fact, you can see the power of user-centric, situational content when you look at the performance of the mymosh.com page that lost rankings. For starters, the content here isn’t bad:
The problem (to me) is that it doesn’t have much going for it (aside from bulleted lists). For example, the UX here is not great. There’s a lack of proper spacing and so forth that just makes the content hard to consume.
At the same time, while some of the information is good, other tidbits of content are too thin (too many bulleted lists without much context, if any):
This page is a pretty good example of what I consider “typical web content”—it’s a bit on the thin side in some areas, lacks a user-first focus, perhaps tries too hard to rank for keywords, and as a result, has absolutely zero flow to it.
Pro tip: A good way to see whether your content is user- or topic-centric is to ask yourself if it flows. Does one subject or section flow easily into the next? If so, you might be on the right track.
You really see this shine through when you look at the overall ranking changes for both sites.
With the March 2024 core update, the Yale Medicine site not only saw an overall ranking boost, it now also ranks well for some serious and competitive keywords:
Google likes the site and (as I mentioned above) ranks it for keywords even when the page’s content isn’t entirely dedicated to the keyword per se. In fact it ranks for 19.7K featured snippets!
While the mymosh.com sites does have some interesting keywords, they are not only far fewer but mostly uncompetitive:
When you start looking at what else ranks for some of the keywords I reviewed, it’s not a testament to the site that they rank well as much it is a knock at the web overall. (For the record, the mymosh.com site only pulls in 30 featured snippets).
The bottom line is having strong, situation-centric content can open up the possibility of ranking on SERPs when the competitors are ranking with keyword-specific pages. That’s a lot more bang for your buck.
The move past sterile content—we’re getting there
No, I am not 100% convinced the move past sterile content is pervasive across the web.
What I think we’re seeing here is not the conclusion of the process, but the very start of it. Google is doing the equivalent of dipping its toe in the “moving past sterile content” waters.
But isn’t that why we look to analyze Google algorithm updates? To see what Google is beginning to do—to see what Google is starting to become capable of?
For all the criticism around the Google SERP these days, seeing a move to limit sterile SEO content is almost momentous. It’s also a reminder that getting the SERP right is a process that ebbs and flows for Google.
