There’s a persistent fantasy in content marketing that you can write your way to the first page of Google by simply mentioning your target keyword fourteen times and hoping for the best. This approach worked around 2009. It stopped working shortly after Google hired actual engineers.
The businesses still ranking well in 2025 have figured out something their competitors haven’t: Google isn’t counting keywords. It’s measuring whether your content actually helps anyone.
How Google Evaluates SEO Content Depth in 2026
When Google’s December 2025 Core Update finished rolling out, the message was clear. Content that demonstrates genuine experience and expertise outperforms content that merely covers a topic.
This isn’t marketing speak. Google’s own documentation states that their systems aim to identify content demonstrating aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – the E-E-A-T framework. Of these aspects, trust is most important. You can have experience, expertise, and authority, but if users can’t trust your content, Google won’t rank it highly.
The practical implication is uncomfortable for anyone who outsourced their blog to the lowest bidder: content quality isn’t negotiable anymore. Google’s 2025 algorithm updates have significantly tightened E-E-A-T requirements, making it harder for mediocre content to slip through. The days of lightly editing ChatGPT output and expecting it to rank are over.
Experience Premium
Google added “Experience” to E-A-T in December 2022, creating the expanded E-E-A-T framework. This wasn’t bureaucratic shuffling. It was Google acknowledging that first-hand knowledge matters.
Consider the difference between two articles about starting a restaurant. One is written by a content mill worker who researched the topic for an hour. The other is written by someone who actually opened a restaurant, made the mistakes, and learned what the business blogs never mention. Google’s systems are increasingly capable of distinguishing between these two pieces.
The first-person voice matters here. Not in a self-indulgent way, but because it signals genuine experience. “When we implemented this strategy for a B2B client” carries more weight than “Experts suggest implementing this strategy.” Specificity signals credibility.
According to First Page Sage’s Q1 2025 analysis, consistent publication of satisfying content remains the top ranking factor at 23%. The word “satisfying” does heavy lifting here. Google tests newly published content to see if it responds well to searcher intent. Content that sends visitors back to the search results fails this test, regardless of how many keywords it contains.
Technical Foundation For Good Content
Great content on a technically broken website ranks poorly. This is obvious, yet routinely ignored.
A page that takes five seconds to load loses visitors before they read a word. A site that Google can’t properly crawl has content that effectively doesn’t exist for search purposes. Mobile usability issues, missing schema markup, and security problems all erode rankings, no matter how brilliant your prose.
Google’s Core Web Vitals – Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint – aren’t optional metrics anymore. They’re ranking factors. Content strategy that ignores technical SEO is like hiring a brilliant chef for a restaurant with no functioning kitchen.
The December 2025 Core Update expanded these requirements. Pages with Core Web Vitals issues or mobile usability problems might not be indexed with mobile-first indexing. Your content can’t rank if Google won’t index it.
What Quality Content Means
Quality isn’t word count. Google’s documentation explicitly states that high-quality content doesn’t have to be long – it has to resolve the searcher’s need effectively.
For some queries, that resolution requires 3,000 words of detailed analysis. For others, it requires a clear, direct answer in 300 words. The businesses ranking well understand this distinction. They match content depth to query complexity rather than applying a one-size-fits-all template.
The psychological principle at work here is task completion. When someone searches “how to write a business proposal,” they have a specific task they’re trying to accomplish. Content that helps them complete that task gets engagement signals that improve rankings. Content that forces them to search again fails.
This means structure matters enormously. Headings that accurately describe what follows, logical progression from problem to solution, clear calls to action – these aren’t formatting preferences. They’re usability features that affect how Google evaluates your content.
Entity-Based SEO
Google’s algorithm has evolved from matching keywords to understanding entities and relationships. This technical shift has practical consequences for content creators.
An entity is a distinct, well-defined thing – a person, place, company, concept, or product. When Google understands that your content discusses specific entities and how they relate to each other, it can match that content to relevant searches more intelligently.
The practical application: when writing about “email marketing,” also discuss related entities like “subscriber segmentation,” “deliverability,” “automated sequences,” and “conversion tracking.” This semantic coverage signals topical authority more effectively than keyword repetition ever did.
Google’s Knowledge Graph has transformed how content is evaluated, prioritising entities over exact-match keywords. Content demonstrating comprehensive knowledge of related concepts ranks better than content that obsessively repeats target phrases.
Human Element Google Can’t Fake
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about AI-generated content: Google can identify it, and users don’t trust it.
Google’s 2025 systems can identify content that lacks human insight, personal experience, or original thinking. This doesn’t mean AI tools are prohibited – Google’s guidance says all content should be helpful, reliable, and people-first, regardless of how it’s created. But AI-assisted content that doesn’t add genuine human expertise tends to perform poorly.
The businesses ranking well use AI as a tool, not a replacement. They might use AI to outline content, research topics, or handle repetitive formatting tasks. But the insights, the experience, the specific examples from actual client work – these come from humans who’ve done the work.
Content that feels authentic performs better because it earns trust, and trust is what Google’s E-E-A-T framework ultimately measures.
Building Ranking Content
The formula isn’t complicated, though it’s more difficult than keyword stuffing:
Start with genuine expertise. Write about what you actually know, from experience, with specific details that demonstrate you’ve done this work. Generic advice that could apply to any business doesn’t differentiate you.
Match content depth to search intent. Some queries need comprehensive guides. Others need quick answers. Understanding what your target searcher actually needs determines how much content is enough.
Invest in technical SEO. Your content needs a functioning technical foundation. Site speed, mobile usability, proper indexation, clean architecture – these aren’t optional.
Build topical authority progressively. One article doesn’t establish expertise. A cluster of related content, each piece linking to others and building on previous work, signals to Google that you genuinely understand your subject.
Cite credible sources. Original research, industry studies, expert perspectives – these build the authority and trust that Google’s systems are designed to identify.
What This Means for Your Business
Content marketing that ignores these principles is expensive and ineffective. Content marketing that embraces them is an asset that compounds over time.
The businesses outperforming their competitors in search results have typically made a strategic choice: they invest in fewer, better pieces of content rather than flooding their blogs with thin, undifferentiated material. They write from experience, structure for users, and build technical foundations that support their content strategy.
For businesses ready to move beyond content that exists just to exist, a marketing audit that evaluates content strategy against current Google requirements is the logical starting point. The questions it raises tend to be productive ones.
