What Is Quality Content?
Creating quality content
Content that offers information to the users, surpasses the competition and ranks higher in the SERPs is called quality content. Quality content should be better than the one that exists and readers should find it useful and valuable. The readers are likely to share this type of content.
SEO is usually writing about what people are searching for. This makes the content useful though all the top-ranking websites will say the same thing. You need to create 10x content or Skyscraper content which is better than what already exists. While creating content you should check the existing content that ranks and try to exceed it.
Quality content creation
Creating quality content requires hard work and expertise. SEOs have access to data like the things people search for through keyword research, things the top content ranks for and things that the existing content should tell about.
Many people type in queries to find information in an easy format and quickly. Therefore the content you create should be simple, organized and easy to read and scan. You should create content for the search engines as well as the users.
The content should cover what the users are searching for and answer their questions about the topic. For many readers, it will become an introduction to the topic. Creating quality content needs expertise.
You can differentiate your content from others as follows:
- By sharing your experience, stories and insights.
- By including data only available to you.
- By having an opinion or a different viewpoint or a unique take.
The pages that are ranking well currently may have been ranking for a long time and may have been updated and refined to make them even better. The existing content may have many relevant links. If the content keeps on getting more links then it will be difficult to beat.
Your content should be better than that and you will have to put in enough effort to overcome such content. You will require a team of people to achieve it like an SEO for research, a story writer or a great writer, an expert for unique insights and an editor.
Creating quality content requires effort and valuable skills. Most companies create content as a one-off task rather than making it an iterative process. You will be able to quickly improve your content if you find more resources.
For example, If you have written an article on a topic like ‘Quality content’ before then you can update the content now as you have more experience and expertise.
Measuring the quality of content
It is difficult to measure the quality of the content as it is subjective. SEOs may look for word count or keyword density which is a bad practice. Some queries can be answered in a simple manner rather than the entire life story. There is no right way to measure the quality of the content.
SEOs will look for rankings, traffic, links, mentions and social shares. Whereas the businesses will look for conversions, qualified leads and revenue. Another thing to look at is user satisfaction.
Different people have different wants and needs and the search engine has a difficult job of finding good results for these different users. In general, search engines show results that meet different user intents. Each user may find something useful for them.
Guidelines for creating quality content
Google has created many algorithms to determine which content is best for users. It also offers guidance on what it looks for in the content.
The terms that are used to describe the content it is looking for are:
- Expertise
- Authoritative
- Trustworthiness
- Highly Relevant
- Helpful & Useful
- Original
- High-quality
- Interesting
- Comprehensive
- Factual
- Insightful
- Engaging & Detailed
- Valuable
- Informative
- Credible
- Authentic
- User-centric
These are subjective adjectives and are very difficult to measure. But they do answer the questions asked by the quality raters.
Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines
The different Google quality guidelines are as follows:
Basic principles
- Create pages specifically for the users and not the search engines.
- You should never deceive your users.
- You should not use any tricks to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is to check if you feel comfortable with the content that you have created for a website that competes with you or a Google employee. Another test is to ask ‘Does the content help my users? Would I be doing this if the search engines did not exist at all?’
- You can find out what makes your website valuable, unique or interesting. You should make your website stand out from the other websites.
Specific guidelines
You should avoid the following techniques:
- Automatically generate content to manipulate the search engine rankings.
- Participating in link schemes.
- Creating pages with little or no content.
- Cloaking.
- Using sneaky redirects.
- Using hidden texts or links.
- Doorway pages.
- Scraped content.
- Participating in affiliate programs and not adding enough value.
- Loading pages with relevant keywords.
- Creating pages with malicious practices like phishing, installing viruses, trojans and others.
- Abusing structured data markup.
- Send automated queries to Google.
Follow good practices
- Monitor your website for hacking and remove the hacked content as soon as it appears.
- Prevent and remove the user-generated spam on your website.
Creating valuable content
Google guides how to create valuable content. When you start creating the content make sure your website is:
Useful and informative
For example, if you are launching the website for a restaurant then you can include information like the location, hours of operation, contact details, menu and a blog to share the upcoming events.
More valuable and useful than other websites
If you are writing an article about how to train a dog then you should make sure it provides more value or a different perspective than the other articles available on the web.
Credible
You should show your website’s credibility by using original research, citations, links, reviews and testimonials. Reviews and testimonials from real customers can help to boost your website’s reputation and trustworthiness.
High-quality
Your website content should be unique, to the point and of high quality. You should not mass-produce or outsource your content to other websites. The main aim of creating content should be to give a good user experience and not to rank higher in search engines.
Engaging
To make your content engaging add images of your products, yourself or your team. You should make sure your visitors are not distracted by any stylistic and spelling mistakes and factual errors. Using too many ads can also distract visitors. You should engage with your users by interacting with them through updates, comments and social media.
Google quality rater guidelines
Some of the important parts of Google quality rater guidelines are as follows:
- High-quality pages exist for beneficial purposes or giving information or expressing oneself artistically for purchasing products or services online. The content should achieve this purpose well.
- A high-quality page should have Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T).
- It should have a good amount of high-quality main content and a descriptive or relevant title.
- It should have the right information about who is responsible for the website. If the page is mainly for online shopping and also covers financial transactions then it should have the right customer service information.
- A positive website can be developed with responsible main content on the pages and the positive reputation of the writer/creator of the main content if it is different than that on the website.
- The quality of the main content is the most important criterion in Page Quality rating and is the E-A-T of the page. Creating high-quality content requires time, expertise, effort and talent/skill. All new articles of high-quality main content should be factually correct and the topic must be supported by an expert consensus wherever required.
- Examining your main content for some time and then writing a conclusion about it. The main content includes the page and functionality so test the page. Test the page by reading the article, examining the pictures, watching the video, using the calculator, playing the online game and more.
For example, if you are developing the product pages for a website then add at least one product to the cart to make sure the shopping cart is functioning right.
- The purpose of the page will help to determine what high-quality means for your page. The high-quality information pages should be factually correct and written clearly and comprehensively.
High-quality shopping content should allow the user to find and purchase the products easily. High-quality humour if used should be entertaining and factual accuracy is not required for it as long as the users understand it as humour. - The amount of content required to decide the good amount depends on the topic and the purpose of the page. The high-quality content on a broad topic will have more content than the one on a narrower topic.
Quality content creation for Bing
Microsoft Bing considers content to be of high quality if it has three pillars: Authority, Utility and Presentation.
- Authority means can we trust this content?
- Utility means the content is useful and has enough details.
- Presentation means the content is well-presented and easy to find.
To create quality content you need time, expertise, effort and resources. If you need any assistance with quality content writing then consider Supramind.com, we are an SEO company.
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