Visit any SEO services or Internet marketing related site or forum nowadays and I guarantee you’ll find a post on the virtues of quality content. Just as in the old days, all they could talk about was links, now quality content is the new panacea.
If you ever wondered what exactly made up quality content, here are four key attributes.
Correctness
Quality content should be grammatically correct and free from typos and spelling mistakes. Other than clouding the message, such errors ruin your credibility. Visitors will conclude that if you don’t care enough to write correctly, the rest of your offerings can’t be up to much.
Relevance
The best content in the world is useless if it’s not what the person is searching for. Google relies on keywords to determine relevance but nowadays it takes far more than simply repeating some keyphrase at strategic points throughout the page.
Keywords should reflect the desires and interests of the searcher and must contain helpful solutions and not just fodder to attract the search spiders. Anyway, the spiders are much smarter nowadays and are unlikely to be fooled by a clumsy keyphrase repeated throughout a piece of rehashed fluff.
It’s also important you write in the language of your target market. If you’re targeting teenagers looking for remedies for their pimples, it would be more effective to use phrases such as “how do I get rid of my spots” than “effective acne solutions”. The latter might be more appropriate for pharmacists.
Engagement
You often read about the desirability of offering ‘engaging content’ but what does it mean? Other than being interesting and attention holding, it should also lead to some kind of interaction whether it’s a sale, asking for more information, or adding a comment
You can check your bounce rates and time spend on page metrics to see how engaging your content is along with your sales and newsletter sign ups of course.
Freshness
It’s beneficial to publish content regularly and also update any pages that are showing their age. However, this should be done to cater for your visitors, not to satisfy some algorithm.
Remember if you publish trending topics and news, Google does have a Query Deserved Freshness feature which actively seeks out new content on any topic that becomes suddenly popular.
Content Rules
Creating good content is hard but well worth it. You get an online resource working for you 24 hours to persuade and inform prospects, build your authority, and tell the world about your brand.
One of the most important services you can get from your SEO firm is that of having the right content on your websites. Get in touch with Smart SEO today to find out how we can provide the words and images to power your online marketing efforts.
