Content is one of the key elements which will drive traffic to your website. Content can be classed as many different forms, from blogs, infographics, images, videos, pdf’s and much more.
When it comes to the quality of website content, there are many factors that need to be considered.
This can include trustworthiness, authority, and legitimacy of the content. Most of the time, writing or creating content will be fine just as long as you ensure that your content intends to provide users with useful and informative information.
However, there are some cases in which websites distribute low-quality content, which results in lower traffic, and may even cause more negative implications for your website, such as lowering search engine rankings.
Identifying Low-Quality Content
Looking for low-quality content on a website can start off as easily as reading it. However, the more content that you have to go through on a website, the harder it is to find low-quality content.
Recently, Google has submitted an updated set of guidelines that help users identify low-quality content. Here are the newly-revised guidelines that determine a low rating for your content:
- An inadequate level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
- The quality of the main content is low
- There is an unsatisfying amount of main content for the purpose of the page
- The title of the main content is exaggerated or shocking
- The Ads or Supplementary Content distract from the main content
- There is an unsatisfying amount of website information or information about the creator of the main content for the purpose of the page
To make things simpler, your content will be considered low quality if the information contains factual errors, along with poorly-explained sections that do not satisfy the reader.
Titles that are clickbait are also a red flag, as it means that you are misleading the users into reading your article, instead of having them access it organically.
With the right tools and knowledge, you will be able to avoid creating low quality with ease. In the next section, we’ll show you the most important factors that determine high-quality content.
Creating high-quality content
Creating high-quality content requires a good amount of time and effort to ensure that what you publish to the rest of the world will be something beneficial and relevant for your intended users.
Like most things, putting the effort in to create high-quality content, will drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some of these key ingredients of good content that will help you avoid bad and poorly-made content:
Wordcount
Creating lengthy and detailed content means that you will be writing blogs that are over 800 words long, sometimes longer for some topics. This is not a bad thing, as it provides detailed content that is very useful.
However, your content needs to be pleasing to the eye. You might have a well-worded and detailed article, but if it does not contain relevant images or a structured layout then you are in danger of a visitor skimming through rather than reading.
Adding relevant, detailed, or informative images help make the reading experience much more interesting, as you are giving the reader something that helps them visualise your idea.
Blogs containing charts, infographics, and images help to keep readers invested in the content that you have created. Visual quality is just as important as quality writing and should not be overlooked.
Timing
When it comes to the question of whether your content should be timely or timeless, there are often opportunities to do both.
You CAN create content that is not only relevant today, but also something that will be useful for future reference. For example, a blog post about website hosting was not only relevant at that time, but it is still relevant to people who want to understand the website hosting today.
Timeless and timely content are best when they address some of the most important needs and concerns of the users and creating something that is evergreen will help to ensure that you will continually be receiving traffic to your website.
Engagement / Conversion
Content must not only contain useful and relevant information, but there must be a reason why you have created it. You would normally want your content to bring in conversions and engagement from the users who are reading it.
This means that your content must be in line with what your website is all about. While it might feel that this can limit the content that you would be able to write about (which it naturally does), but this actually brings a familiarity that your users would know what to expect when they engage with your website. You wouldn’t expect to find an article about politics on a football website.
When it comes to engagement, social media is key. This platform is where you will find most of your followers. Social media allows you to interact with your users instantly, allowing you to share content which in turn will drive users to your website.
Some of the more viral posts on social media begin with relevant and timely content, but this is also a mark that the content quality is high. Ultimately, content that generates engagement is of good quality.
In Summary
Quality content can come in many forms but contains a similar set of factors that help drive more traffic and conversions.
By identifying the factors that identify what is low-quality content, you can ensure that you will be able to avoid these and create your own quality content that will be relevant and useful for your users and create engagement and conversions for your website.
