“Quality and Unique content” is far more than just a buzzword marketers throw around for fun.
While the definition of “quality” changes depending on niche, industry, type, or target audience, there are many common elements that are reliable, consistent indicators of quality. Following is a checklist you can use to determine whether your content is ‘quality’ or not.
You can use this checklist to determine how Google and your visitors perceive and evaluate your content, or to determine how reliable and authoritative someone else’s content is.
Sources used for this post include Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google’s leaked Quality Rating Guide.
Authors Matter
Written content doesn’t exist without authors, whether constructing 140-character posts or 1000-word articles. Not only do you want people who can write well (e.g., clear points, proper spelling and grammar, active voice), you need writers and team members who can think strategically about the content that will resonate most with your audience.
Curate Selected Content
In the past couple of years, content curation has become more mainstream as businesses of all sizes and industries have started to adopt the practice.
Content curation is defined as “the process of finding, organizing and sharing online content.”
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Email and Social Media Work Hand in Hand
Do you think of email and social media as separate entities? Do you favor one more than the other? The fact is, email and social media complement each other quite well. They leverage one another. Help the other to be seen by an audience that may not have otherwise come across the message.
Are You Supplementing with Images, Video Embeds, Infographics or Other Media?
It’s possible to have high-quality content without using images or other forms of media, but we know that visual content outperforms text-only content in terms of attracting inbound links, social media shares, time spent on page, and engagement. In fact, we know that 40% of people will respond better to visual information than to plain text. It’s likely that Google factors in the use of multimedia when scoring pages for its ranking algorithm. Even if that’s not the case, it’s a fact that Google considers inbound links to a page as one of the heaviest factors in its ranking algorithm, and multimedia-based content has been shown to be shared up to 12X more than text content.
Some questions to ask yourself about your use of media include:
- Do my images or videos support claims or facts within the content?
- Do they meet quality standards from a technical perspective?
- Are they aesthetically pleasing?
- Are my info graphics or other original visual content of the quality that others will want to share them or link to them?
Is Proper Page and Text Formatting being followed on the page?
High quality content is aesthetically attractive, easy to read, and suitable for scanning and skimming (which is how the majority of your website visitors will consume your content). Google’s algorithm has become sophisticated enough that it can detect page and content layout, and you may be penalized in the rankings for poor content formatting. Again, even if Google doesn’t penalize you for it, your human readers will.
