We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: content is king. It’s the lifeblood of your marketing and your online presence, and you need it to be high quality. If you’re churning out content that feels lacklustre and like it has been created for its own sake, you’re not going to earn the engagement you want.
But you can’t just put ‘high quality’ on a brief—how do we define quality content and ensure our content falls comfortably within that camp?
What is quality content and how do you create it?
When we’re thinking of quality content, it can help to split down how we’re going to perceive ‘quality’ from two perspectives:
- The User – the person conducting searches online and hunting for a business, product, or service. These are the people ultimately consuming your content, and they’re the ones you’re talking to, whether you’re selling to them, trying to educate them, or entertaining them.
- The Machine – the nickname ascribed to Google by our founder and guru of all things marketing, Jonathan Guy. Google has its own metrics and requirements to satisfy when it comes to what it would deem quality content, and knowing how to satisfy—or, at least, avoid offending—these metrics is key.
Satisfying the user is more important than satisfying the machine. However, you can’t focus on that alone. While Google overtly pushes the importance of ‘people-first content‘, note that ‘first’ does not mean ‘only’.
In other words, you still need to respect the search engine and its rules. That means avoiding black hat SEO, which involves practices like keyword stuffing, link farming, and generating content purely through automation.
To generate quality content that satisfies both, you need to marry originality and creativity with the technical practices that allow the content to rank fairly and speak for itself in the SERPs.
What defines content quality?
Google has an aforementioned focus on people-first content, which boils down to one thing: you should be writing, recording, and speaking to people, not search engines.
This means researching your market and your keywords to identify the things your audience are searching. Once you know the questions and terms you want to answer, you can create your content with these in mind.
So, we can establish that one aspect of quality content is how accurately and effectively you satisfy your audience’s curiosity or resolve their problems. However, we still have to bear creativity in mind.
It’s an unfortunate truth that a lot of content online is copied and repeated. You may often find in your own searches that multiple sites have similar or even identical copy. While this is common, you should avoid it as much as you possibly can.
Just because another site is doing well with its content, that doesn’t mean you should copy it for easy engagement and high rankings. Google is always watching for duplicate content, and it knows what came first. There’s also the risk that your users will realise that you’ve copied from another site, and make the conclusion that you have nothing original to say and have no knowledge of your own to share.
This is one of the complexities of seeking to have quality content. Even if you use something that both Google and its users have deemed high-quality—evidenced by its high ranking and widespread sharing—the fact that you’ve taken it and added nothing original yourself makes it, in a sense, low-quality.
Additionally, you risk punishment from Google, which will set you back further than when you started.