All of us ask google a lot of things and trust the list of displayed answers to be correct. Was it easy for google to earn this trust? Or how is it possible for google’s query to be met?
What’s Google Needs Met? In simple term – It’s a rating about the user satisfaction in search result based on mobile devices. Rating range from “fully meet” to “fails to meet”
Now let us dwell into Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines to understand how Google’s Needs Met and Google is a search genie.
Google’s Search Quality Raters General Guidelines
Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines latest copy published on October 14, 2020 is segmented into 3 parts and 2 appendices totaling to 175 pages, with Part 3 extensively covering about Needs Met Rating. The main concept of these 175 pages can be mainly classified into two major concepts: E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life). Understanding these two concepts will help us comprehend how Google’s Needs Met works.
Page Quality
In order to know about how Needs Met works, we must first understand about the Page Quality. Page Quality estimates about the quality of a page. This is done using a Page Quality Rater.
The Page Quality Rater analyzes how well a page is performing. The page quality cannot be zeroed into a single factor. The purpose of the pages may differ. Every page is created with a purpose(s). The main purpose of the page is to satisfy the users queries. However, how will we know the purpose of the users are met? How will we know that web pages meet its serving purpose?
This is where Page Quality Rating comes into play.
Webpages are user help links that mainly consist of main content, a few supplementary content, and advertisement.
* Main Content: This section contains the core content of the page and helps achieve the page meet its purpose.
* Supplementary Content: These are useful content that add more meaning to the page. Generally they are interactive parts such as links to other pages. They do not directly contribute to the page meeting its purpose but are add-ons.
* Advertisement: These ads help monetizing the page. They help the page financially to be up and running. But, the presence of ads does not contribute to the effectiveness of the page.
A Page Quality Rating of High to Low determines the page quality. Achieving a High page quality shows that the purpose of the page is met.
Your Money or Your Life pages (YMYL)
A few pages are targeted to attack the audience emotionally. The content on these pages could plausibly influence a person’s future activities. These pages are termed as “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL. Your money or your life pages include:
- News: This section covers world wide current events.
- Government and Law: This section deals about the important matters relating to politics.
- Finance: This section covers the economy and the various other factors related to it.
- Shopping: This section covers about the current fashion affairs that are prevailing world wide.
- Health: This section covers about health – nutrition related sectors. Also, covers about new medicines and diseases.
- People: This section deals with the diversity of people. The segmentation of people into groups based on their into cultural, regional, race, sex baskets
- Others: A few other general topics such as education, locale specific topics, pets, etc., come under this section.
These pages have a very high page quality rating.
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)
The true purpose of a page can be comprehended when scaled with Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness scales. This is also an important factor in measuring the Page Quality rating.
Contents can be created to be helpful to the user and the content can be deceiving to the users. It is important to choose content wisely and it is more important for a search engine to be able to differentiate these two content types. This is where E-A-T SEO comes into play.
Needs Met
This type of rating focuses mainly on mobile users. The content reaching the audience through mobile is far faster than any other gadget. Mobile has become an evident part of everyone’s life. Half the time of one’s day is spent on the phone. Hence, the content consumption rate from hand gadgets is an important rate to be measured. This will be helpful for optimizing the SEO results. Similar to Page Quality Rating, Needs Met can also be measured using the Needs Met Rating scale. The Needs Met scale will be available on the Google’s Search Quality Raters General Guidelines.
The Relationship between Page Quality and Needs Met
Page Quality and Needs Met are both ratings used by google to qualify a page. Through the backend operational functionality of these two pages are different, they both are ratings to determine a page’s purpose. Needs Met takes into account the query used as well whereas the page quality rating mainly depends on the content available on the webpage. Needs Met targets mainly on mobile audiences.
The role of providing the best search results for all the queries is thus met by Google. And that is the reason how Google’s Needs Met in SEO rating plays an important role.
