What Is ‘Quality Website Content’ & 6 Steps To Get It

User experience has become a much more important element in the ranking algorithms and search engines measure a good user experience by how much time they spend on your site, how many pages they visit and whether they think your content deserves recommending on social media or linking to. This all boils down to providing your website visitors with quality content. So how do you go about doing this?

It’s obvious that the days of just writing some text about what you do and posting it on your site are gone. In today’s competitive marketplace, if you want to see your website rank well and bring in more business, you should follow these 6 steps to creating quality website content.

Our 6 Steps To Creating Quality Content:

1. Content should be unique: This applies to all your pages – duplicated content will get penalised by search engines. So don’t lift content from other sites or pages on your own site. Try and produce unique content for each of your pages so that each is offering a different user experience compared to competitor sites. Remember that page content includes sidebars, ads, headers, footers etc., which often get copied across pages, as well as the actual words written on a page.
2. Content should be relevant: Your content needs to be relevant to the search queries that are used to find businesses or products like yours. This might sound obvious, but it is surprising how much difference it makes to rankings if you can demonstrate to search engines that you are providing the most useful and relevant information for a search query – they are looking for the subject matter ‘experts’ to put in the highest ranking positions. So ask yourself what’s the detail and thoroughness of the information that’s actually provided? What tools can you give that will help the user answer their query? Are you providing the next steps they should take?
3. Content should be recent: Generally search engines will want to show their users the freshest content. Posting blogs is a great way to make sure that your site is seen as having fresh content. Depending on your industry you may need to look at updating more of your page content on a regular basis. The inception date of any webpage is when it first came to the attention of search engines – after that your page content gets older every day. If it is still getting fresh back links then it may be regarded as still being timely but you should review your pages regularly to make sure they are still fulfilling their purpose.
4. Content should be spelt correctly: Google will check your page content for grammatical and spelling errors and they do count this as part of an overall content quality score which will effect ranking positions. So make sure you spell check and get someone else to carefully read through your content to double check there are no mistakes or grammatical errors.
5. Content should be engaging:  You may not be a professional copywriter but you can still produce content that will grab your users’ attention and keep them reading by bearing these basic rules in mind:

1. • The ‘fear factor’ – you only have a few seconds to get the users attention so use headlines, images and facts to appeal to your potential markets biggest fear to gain their initial interest.
   • The ‘so what’ question should be applied to anything you post online. If your content is not answering this basic question from your users’ point of view – so what does that mean for me – then they will be likely to click away quickly, which is not good for your rankings.
   • The ’KISS’ principle is another good one to use. If you haven’t heard of this it stands for ‘keep it short & simple’. There is no need to produce heavy and long-winded rhetoric and don’t repeat yourself. Clean and concise text explaining the benefits of your goods or services is best.

6. And most importantly …. Your content has to be better than your competitors: You have followed steps 1 to 5 and worked hard on producing good quality content – it’s useful, accurate, interesting, it answers the searcher’s query, it’s unique. But, the problem is everyone can take these steps. What you need to do next is make sure is that yours is the best! If you can be sure that your site is the best result that a searcher could find for a relevant search then you are going to gain the best rankings. So, do a thorough check of competitor sites for your chosen search query and ask yourself “what is missing?” or “what content do they have that is getting shared on social media?” Then brainstorm and try to answer the question “what could I provide my users with that my competitors aren’t.” Don’t just think about content in terms of words on a webpage. Bear in mind that content can be visual, video, downloads, infographics, competitions, survey results and much more.

If you can produce the best quality content you will have the best chance of high rankings, more website visibility… and ultimately more customers or conversions. It really is worth the effort! If you would like more advice on creating unique and valuable content for your site then please get in touch with us today.

Article by: Tom, CEO of Varn More articles by Tom

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