Where is our go-to place when looking for expert advice or an answer to our burning query?
Guess it’s Google (or your preferred search engine)!
Google alone resolves queries of over four billion search queries every day.
When we enter our query into the search bar, the links that come up in your search engine result pages (SERPs) are “content.”
Whether we are aware of it or not, we consume content daily.
In 2016, Bill Gates rightly said, ” Content is King.”
Today, in 2022, it’s no secret that to gain a competitive edge over the digital world, content is always an accelerant.
However, on the flip side, low-quality content doesn’t rank well in search engines.
We need to publish relevant and high-quality content across our website to have any chance at ranking.
This post will explore why high-quality content is essential for search engines and audiences alike.
We’ll also look at the challenges of creating high-quality content and how you can create quality content for SEO that impresses your audience.
What Changed in Content over the years?
In the initial days of digital content, posting lots of content would have been enough to earn us a place at the table.
Since then, search engines have evolved and have become intelligent about these tactics.
Today, the algorithms used to rank pages have become increasingly refined; everything is an ongoing endeavor to filter the content wheat from the chaff.
Simply put, search engine algorithms are increasingly becoming more human-like in their understanding of what comprises high-quality content and what doesn’t – and pages are ranked accordingly.
What Is Quality Content?
Content isn’t just about a blog/article post or web page content we post to your website.
It’s the information we present to search engines to be provided to searchers.
Therefore, quality content is anything that search engine decides is worth enough to be shared.
It’s basically the real answers to real people’s search queries.
It’s content that the audience wants to digest, so it helps or entertains them and informs them “how to do something” or “where to find something.”
It’s the information the audience talks about in their own blog posts or the stories they pass along to their own circles or mention on social media.
Then it gets mentioned, linked to, and shared.
That’s what we call “quality content.”
We have listed some of the most common characteristics of quality content here:
- Error-free and grammatically correct
- Fresh, authentic, engaging, and original
- Factual information associated with topics that are helpful for audiences
- Supports arguments with authentic facts
- Good engagement level for readers
- Readable and easy to understand for anyone
- Complements visual display well
- Contains in-text citations to authentic and reputable sources
- Doesn’t include citations from market competitors
Benefits of Creating High-quality Content
Boosts your SEO and Organic Traffic
Having quality content implies that we are already setting up a good base for our website. With high quality content comes better SEO results.
Increases Visibility
Upon regularly creating optimized and valuable content for your audience, your rankings will increase in search engines, indicating that we’re improving our chances of being found when people search for our niche query.
Generates a High Click-through Rate (CTR)
CTR is essential for our website to rank in the search results. The more audience clicks on our website, the more the chances of getting better rankings on search engines.
Generate More Backlinks
Backlinks or one-way links or inbound links are the links that take us from one website to another website or web page.
Google sees high-quality backlinks in a website as votes for originality, trust, credibility, and uniqueness.
The more high-quality links you build, the better your chances of ranking in the search engines.
While also attracting other websites to link to your content if it’s useful, this is a critical part content plays in your SEO strategy.
Helps Target Keywords
High-quality content strategically and naturally includes our targeted keywords.
This allows the search engine’s algorithm to go through and identify your work, which increases the chances of ranking higher on the SERPs for that particular keyword.
Content is the only way to incorporate crucial keywords onto your website and ensure you’re found when audiences search for your products or services online.
Improves User Experience
SEO strategies involve writing high-quality content, creating a good number of backlinks, and incorporating relevant keywords.
This implies you’ll create a website that is easy to navigate, well structured, user-friendly, and visually appealing.
It also involves writing optimized meta tags, bots, and .txt files.
These combined, attract audiences to your website and keep them hooked.
The challenge of creating quality content
Quality is a subjective goal
Who knows what it is until you hit it? Is it short, long, amusing, or serious? It can be anything. It can also be none of them.
So, an essential part of your content strategy must be defining the word “Quality” for your brand.
Direct conflict with your profit goals
Most businesses don’t want to pay their content writers to write materials that aren’t promotional.
From our perspective, this is one of the greatest challenges marketers faces—delivering profit-building content to satisfy the C-Suite and readable, informative, valuable content for users.
Quality implies trust
Therefore, Google only shares the content they see other people sharing. They consider that as a vote of confidence, a tick on the quality scoreboard.
So, while you’re creating the quality of your content, it’s necessary to put energy into building trust too.
Research on the topic takes too much time
Creating content is one thing but doing enough research can be pretty time-consuming and tedious for a writer.
When the writers exhaust themselves because of too much research, it can be difficult for them to create the expected quality output.
Quality content requires larger investment
To create quality content, we’ll have to invest heavily in better content writers and graphic artists. You might also require programming help to produce interactive content.
The ROI on quality content might not be instantly evident
As we already know, building a reputation as the go-to resource takes time. We may also have to invest time, effort, and money, trusting that we’ll reap the rewards in the future.
This is also why we need a written content strategy that depicts “quality” for our business or brand, outlines the tactics we want to pursue, and details of our expected results.
How to Create High-Quality Content
Perform Keyword Research and Determine the Topic
When we’ve already determined that our primary goal is to produce content for the audience, keyword research is essential to make sure that the resulting content can be discovered through search engines.
Here are some things we must remember when deciding our keywords and topic:
- Use a Proven Keyword Research Tool
- Utilize more and more Long-Tail Keywords
- Avoid Extremely Competitive Keywords with huge Search Volume
- Match Your Topic to Your Keyword
Create Outline and Format to Ensure Optimal Readability
As we create our content outline, we must ensure that we format our core content into small chunks.
Online audiences have very short attention spans. They’ll not stick around your article if it’s just one enormous paragraph.
It’s best to write paragraphs with 1-2 sentences in length, although it’s ok if they stretch to 3-4 short sentences.
We must also ensure to include sub-headers and/or visuals every 150-300 words to break the content even further.
The author can quickly increase visitors’ average time spent on site with better formatting.
Be Loyal to the Topic/Niche & Target Keyword
While writing our content, we should remember the significance of sticking to our topic and the chosen target keyword.
However, we shouldn’t write everything and anything within a single piece of content. And also not target dozens of keywords.
It will not only waste a lot of time but also prevent us from producing “useful and relevant” content on our topic.
We must focus on what we’ve chosen as our topic and stay super-relevant to the topic and the keyword that supports it.
Include Backlinks Throughout The Content
Backlinks are a Must Across All Content
Since credibility is an important SEO factor (as mentioned by Google), linking to authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant websites can make sure that search engines see our content as credible.
We must also ensure that the words we use for the link are relevant to the website to which the audience will be sent.
Mostly, it’s recommended to keep the links to a maximum of six words and include multiple links to external sites.
Ensure Appropriate Interlinking to all the Related Pages
Interlinking is a powerful tool for structuring and organizing content. When used effectively, it helps readers quickly navigate your web pages and find the information they need, making their experience with your content more enticing. Interlinking also builds relationships between pages within your website, improving the overall quality of your content.
When creating interlinks, there are several best practices to keep in mind.
- Ensure that your links are connected to relevant content and provide value to the reader
- Avoid “link spamming” or overusing your internal links
- Use descriptive anchor text when creating interlinks, so readers know what they are clicking on before they click it
It is important to note that not all internal links are equal; some carry more weight than others. Links from higher-ranked pages carry more authority and should be given priority over weaker ones. Ultimately, your goal should be to create a seamless user experience.
Strong Governance
We must ensure to maintain a system, a set of guidelines, that help us determine how our content gets created and published.
It’s a system of procedures that helps us systemize our content priorities and provides guidelines on how our content should look, feel, and behave.
When done right, it can help create more opportunities and make the content discoverable everywhere the audience looks for information around your niche.
Consistent, Comprehensive, and Structured Research
The content research process is time consuming. Therefore, we must figure out a process of getting consistent, well-researched, in-depth, and rightly structured content outlines.
This helps create well-researched content while also enabling the writers to save time on manual research and create more quality content at scale.
Document to Reach a Common Ground for Multiple Teams
Content outlines that are well-documented, can be distributed across the entire organization, so that the content is consistent across teams working on the SEO program.
Final Thoughts
Finally, post all this; if you need a competitive edge in the overcrowded SEO landscape, then high quality content really helps.
It is a logical initiative to create high quality content and proper content strategies.
After all, this tactic helps improve ranks, acquire clients, and increase organic leads.
At ALPS, we pride ourselves on our high-quality, well-researched content briefs and content optimization.
If you want to know more about how to write quality content at scale, Sign Up for a Free Demo here!
