How to improve the quality of your content

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.

What are the benefits of high-quality content?

High-quality content has a wealth of benefits, both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, short term and long term.

One of the immediate benefits of quality content is that it’s rewarded by high placement on Google’s SERPs, which places you in the most advantageous and oft-visited position whenever a search term returns your pages.

This doesn’t happen instantly, but persisting with quality SEO content will see you slowly but surely climbing the rankings and being rewarded for your efforts.

A softer benefit to this is the positive perception you’ll garner. Being highly ranked implies positive qualities like expertise and trustworthiness, and Google keys in on these closely. Even if a user interacts financially with your business rarely, they might grow to have a high regard based on the quality of your content and end up recommending you to others (word of mouth will always be a powerful marketing tool!).

Having high-quality content also gives visitors to your site more reason to stay and explore. Simply having an ‘about us’ page and a digital store front might work for those who want to purchase and leave, but it doesn’t impart anything extra to your customers.

Having high-quality content shows customers that you want to impart extra value and give them something beyond the products and services you sell. It signals an interest in forming a relationship with your audience, one in which they can come to you for information and insight which you give willingly.

Having high-quality content is essential for an online presence that furthers your business’s reach and grows your audience. It helps you to capture your audience in a specific area: targeting your SEO in Liverpool will help you capture business in the North West, focusing your operations and allowing word of mouth to spread easier.

How to get quality content

If you want quality content and don’t know where to start, reach out to our team at Aqueous Digital.

Content is a massive part of what we do, and we’ve been using originally written content to help our customers succeed for years. We take the time to understand your business and your audience before producing SEO optimised content that will boost your visibility and bring in fresh new business.

To talk to us about our services, simply get in touch with us today.