Quality content is a term used frequently to describe a video, sales letter, email, blog, podcast, or social post that provides great entertainment or information for a specific consumer.
The term quality content is now thrown around quite frequently, yet is rarely defined. “Just 10X your content”, say many content “gurus”. In this article, you’ll learn a better way to understand and create quality content.
Good User Experience
Regardless of the platform, the user experience has risen to the top of importance for content creators. A quality user experience would include fast loading pages, lack of pop-ups, ads, and other interruptions, great visuals, great audio if applicable, and most of all provides the content the user was looking for.
Good Grammar
Honestly, this has always been one of my challenges as a blogger and content creator. I move fast and rarely read completely through my work. Fortunately, there are WordPress Plugins and software that cross-check most of the grammar for me. I use Grammarly (premium) and am grateful for the spelling fixes, grammatical error catches, readability suggestions, and plagiarism checker (for my ghostwriters).
Covering the topic in-depth
When you hear me teach, you’ll often hear me use the phrase long-form content. I sometimes explain it by using word count examples (such as 2000 words +). Yet, it’s not truly about the word count. I only share the count to create a visual of the long piece of content.
Long-form content refers to content that is covered in -depth. Other than the intro and conclusion, most long-form blogs have many paragraphs and headings covering subtopics or smaller thoughts.
While it’s true that many consumers don’t want to sit and read a long blog post, the more content there is to consume, the more likely you are to have covered the topic in-depth, answered their question, and helped them learn something.
Youtube videos are expanding in both long-form style videos and short videos, called “Youtube Shorts”“. Videos that are more than 8 minutes long, can now benefit from another ad placement.
This bonus ad space will have creators making longer videos to make more money on ads. Podcasts are often around an hour, and live streams are favoring longer stream times as well.
To win in the content marketing game, you will likely be creating long-form, in-depth content rather than thin content that rarely satisfies the user intent.
Visually Pleasing
High-quality content includes high-quality images, audio, and other rich media. If you are blogging on a WordPress Platform, you can embed images, videos, pins from Pinterest, sound files, slideshows, reviews, social media posts, TikTok videos, and more.
While large media files can slow down a website, decreasing the quality of the user experience, using them sparingly and correctly can be a win for the visitor.
Internal and External Links
When you link from one of your web pages to another web page, on the same website, you are creating an internal link. It’s beneficial to refer to other articles on your website that might benefit the user.
Internal links typically guide the visitor to a more detailed page related to specific keywords in the section they are reading.
By creating an internal link, you are suggesting that they click the link to learn more, without actually typing those words.
Check out the tool I use for automatic internal linking. It’s called Thirsty Affiliates. Link Whisper is a great tool for suggesting internal links, and Yoast premium has a cornerstone content link suggester.
External links are along the same idea, yet they link to a page that is not on your website. You can win with the visitor and with google when you link to authoritative, quality websites that offer the visitor more specific information about an idea related to your blog post.
Less Scrolling
In a mobile-focused world, we need to improve the user experience by providing more options that can reduce scrolling. When we create long-form content that is sometimes thousands of words long, a visitor will tire of scrolling very quickly.
I like to include a table of contents on my long-form blogs. Using Yoast’s table of contents or a WordPress Plugin such as Easy Table of Contents, the table of contents is created automatically out of the paragraph heading tags (H2/H3).
Whitespace
When you create a blog on a desktop computer, especially when using a large screen, it’s easy to miss how bunched up it might be on a mobile device.
Avoid large blocks of content without spacing. Nobody wants to look at a wall of text. I usually put a space between the 2nd and 3rd, or 3rd and 4th sentences to create a new paragraph.
I use the Essence Pro theme on my WordPress website which is hosted by Flywheel [WP Engine]. It’s a clean theme with a great amount of white space and offers wide themes as well as a sidebar.
Expertise
Google is now using EAT in its quality rating guidelines. It’s evaluating the expertise of the author, the authority of the website, and trust of the website. Quality content includes being part of a quality website.
Having an SSL certificate for security is important, especially if you are collecting information. A cookie disclosure should be used to clearly indicate how you are using data.
A bio of the author is important to help display the expertise related to the content. Backlinks from other authority websites can help create authority.
YMYL articles are especially tricky when it comes to search engines. YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. These are articles that are deemed to be very important topics such as finance or health.
If you dare to take on “advice” style topics in key areas of life, that could sometimes literally mean life or death, you should be an expert, or bring in an expert.
If you bring in an expert, be sure to include a bio.
Original Content
Content should have a purpose. It should be original and not scraped from another website or re-written from another blog. Google understands clearly when content has been “spun” through a machine to make it look original.
Quality content offers an original opinion. If you are using video or excerpts from the web, be sure to add your commentary, takeaways, and opinions.
If there are 10 page-one articles on Google, or 10 top ranking videos or podcasts all on one particular topic, how are you going to offer unique value?
Ultimately, that’s the key to creating great, unique, quality content. I use Semrush for Topic research as well as reverse engineering what my competitors are doing well.
Engagement
Using calculators and other tools on your blog can help increase engagement. When the visitor is interacting with your web page, and it’s working well, they are having a quality experience.
For example, if someone is reading a blog about selling their home, they might be interested in using an automatic home value estimate.
If someone is starting the KETO Diet, and are learning how to use MACROS as part of their plan, a macro calculator could be very valuable.
Galleries, products, videos, slideshows, etc. can also create actions or engagement. Quizzes are also very popular for creating website interaction.
