What Is Quality Content?
Users are attacked by thousands of Content every day.
Just think about Facebook. It is impossible to consume all the Content in your newsfeed every day, even if you have hundreds or thousands of friends on social networks.
However, even with this onslaught, we are still encouraged to create high-quality content, so you can stand out from the crowd.
Over the years, high-quality content has evolved and carried many different meanings.
The current consensus is generally high-quality content when there are over 1,000 words like that is what Google loves.
But is creating 1,000 words on a topic a real mark of high-quality Content?
Of course not.
What Is Quality Content?
If you ask SEO experts and other marketers this question, you’ll get mixed and sometimes false answers. Or worse, take back what you’ve heard or seen elsewhere (for example, using content length to determine content quality).
So Quality Content is mostly content that reaches its marketing goals. For you, it could be:
[+] Increase brand awareness.
[+] Rank well on search engines.
[+] Improve click-through rate.
[+] Create leads.
[+] Increase the number of social shares.
Part of content that achieves any (or all) of these marketing goals is quality content.
Quality content is the foundation of a solid content marketing strategy. It is arguably the most important factor for getting your website ranked in the SERPs and attracting your target audience.
Quality Content According To Google
Over the past 15 years, Google has improved its ability to identify valuable content, dramatically altering the perception of search engine optimization. They use a combination of website crawlers and human reviewers to review websites, evaluate their quality and thus determine their position in the SERPS.
First, Google bots crawl websites using AI and semantic technology to identify the topic of a page and match that topic to the intent of the search term. Years ago, they stopped matching a search term to a keyword on a page. With a complex topic model, Google can understand the topic of your page.
They also collect information linking to related content on your website and backlinks from other websites. If they find lots of good links, that’s a positive sign.
Google’s ranking algorithms aren’t perfect, and that’s where people judging people come up with the picture. Their ratings are used to train and refine Google’s algorithms.
Google has a 164-page document called the Search Quality Raters Guidelines, and it sounds exactly like it sounds like. It’s a set of rules given to their reviewers so they can determine which sites contain quality content and which don’t.
Google’s definition of high-quality content varies by site type. In their guide, they explain:
“The purpose of the page will help you determine what high-quality Content means for that page.
For example, high-quality information pages should be factually accurate and well written, and comprehensive. High-quality shopping content will allow users to find the product they want and buy the product easily. High-quality humor or satire should be entertaining, while practical accuracy is not a requirement as long as the user understands the page as satire. “
Google uses a five-point rating system to evaluate the quality of a page: Lowest, Low, Medium, High, and High.
There are several technical standards that your website must meet in order to be ranked high quality, like the information available about the site owner and the site’s reputation or the site owner. But there are also some important Content standards.
You have to put those standards together from their reviewer ratings, support pages, and webmaster blog. I went through the sources and put together those benchmarks.
Purpose Of The Page
Reviewers first look at the real purpose of the page. If it does not benefit the user or assist, or if it spreads hatred or attempts to harm, it will be rated Lowest.
Expertise, Authority, Reliability
Pages must exhibit these characteristics in order to be ranked well for page quality. Content must demonstrate credibility through content written by experts or citing expert sources.
Note that everyday people can be considered professionals through their life experiences. For example, if you have a travel blog, your own travel-based descriptions and tips are considered expert content.
Original Content
Google is looking for Content that doesn’t copy anything else on your website or on any other website. Note that duplicate content is inherently “bad”. There are valid reasons for its existence – content syndication is one of them. It’s just that Google isn’t interested in showing duplicate content in its search results.
So, if your marketing strategy is to rely on other people’s content, consider spending extra budget on your content creation efforts. It does magic for organic traffic!
Content Is Well Written And Well Edited
Content must be clear and grammatically correct, with no syntax or spelling errors. It will give the reader the impression that it has been carefully written and edited.
Content Refers To The User’s Interests And The User’s Purpose
Content should be relevant to your audience. It should address their pain points, their questions, and their needs as a consumer.
Solid Backlink And Internal Links
Google looks for quality backlinks from other sites. That means trustworthy websites are linking to you and your content. You should also link to relevant content that will help satisfy the user’s intent. That will also help Google crawl your website and recognize the quantity and quality of your website content).
Note that there is no mention of lengthy content. Good content is not determined by its word count. Essentially, Google is looking for content that is meaningful and useful to its target audience.
So consider the types of content your audience would consider quality.
So How Can You Create Quality Content?
Research Good Content And Always Go Hand In Hand With Ideas
Your content ideas will determine whether your content will be great or forgettable. As you develop the right content idea, your audience will devour it and help spread it to you.
To get relevant content ideas, you can check out your competitor’s websites to see what kind of content is working for them.
If you’re like me and you think it’s amazing, a tool like BuzzSumo can help you see what’s popular on any website of your choice. Whichever path you take, you will likely have lots of ideas that you can save for later dates on your editorial calendar.
When you do content research, you don’t necessarily have to use the same idea or address the same topic directly.
Conduct Research On The Selected Topic
It doesn’t matter if the content you create is images, sounds, or text – research is required. Even if you plan to write based solely on your personal experience, you still need to research your topic.
I know some writers who, after researching topics similar to them, finally sound like the posts they researched on the first page of Google, even though they have their own insights to share.
Don’t be like them. Do research to see what you can improve based on the existing content you find.
If your ideas differ from what you discovered during research, don’t be afraid to include them in your content. If not, you will look like the others. Want to make your content more trustworthy? Citing current studies or data at authorized sources.
Here’s an easy way to do this with Google Alerts:
Choose Your Own Unique Perspective
Creating content similar to what others have created is sometimes unavoidable. But that usually means you can stand out in many ways with careful thought and planning. Let’s use the title of this article as an example.
You can separate your content just by changing the title to something else, such as:
- How to create high-quality content.
- Guidelines for creating high-quality content based on data.
- Why creating high-quality content doesn’t work.
Here are some examples that show what is possible and you can apply this to a wide range of other topics.
Apply Your Own Data Or Experience
Do you have any data or experience related to your topic if? If you have any experience and/or data supporting or declining a common opinion, you should probably use them. Your experience is not necessarily a separate case.
Create Content On Subtopic
Technically, most of the topics we write are sub-topics, but in a different context.
In a world where the titles are clickbait and only produce quality content, all of which is the rage, I discovered this compelling article about compelling introductions. Or this one about writing a sentence.
Think about a sub-topic in your niche that is frequently discussed and researched to see if it will resonate with your audience. Then create content about it.
Use Different Content Forms
You can supplement written content with other means, such as:
- Pictures
- Screenshots
- Memes
- Infographic
- Chart
- Video
Visual content can often include text, while videos can contain charts, images, screenshots, and text.
The point is, to use multimedia to enhance your content. Don’t skip adding different forms of content to your work.
Review The Final Work
One major problem with creating quality content is the lack of time.
When you’re under pressure to publish content at a fixed date after your editorial calendar, sometimes you can produce less than excellent content. That’s why you should always create content ahead of time so that you have enough time to review and determine if it’s good enough for publishing.
If it’s written content and you just need to write and post right away, what you publish is a rough or first draft. And most writers agree that the first draft is crappy.
Let the article stay for a day or two, then come back to it. It will be easy for you to identify areas you can improve or areas you should remove for clarity as they don’t add much to the discussion.
I’m not a video or audio maker, but I know they need editing to make them more subtle to be consumed by your audience.
The way you look at your content will vary between different content formats but do it, by all means, to ensure that what you will publish is the best possible.
Measure Your Content Performance
After creating and publishing what you think is high-quality content, you cannot know what it really is until you look at the post-published numbers. What is your goal to create content? How does content stack against these goals?
For example, general marketing goals for Content may include, but are not limited to:
- Ranking on Google.
- Increase customer engagement.
- Raise brand awareness.
- Increase conversions.
Let’s say you are trying to increase customer engagement. You’ll see metrics like time spent on-page, and social shares, and for the written content, you can use heat mapping software to check how people are reading your content, or are rolling to the end. It’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the point.
