What is the difference between creating high-quality content for your blog and an ordinary PR? No, it’s not just about character count.
In 2016, many companies were playing with content marketing. We can watch how company blogs are created and how websites form magazines where new articles are added.
However, creating high-quality content to produce it because it’s trendy and should work is a waste of money and your employees’ time.
However, if you make good content, the results will come sooner or later.
And here comes the question:
“What does such quality content look like?”
The answer is difficult to find because “quality” is very subjective. What is valuable to one person may not be valuable to another.
In this article, I will share how I determine content quality myself. I have three basic principles for this. If you follow them, you’ll create great content for your blog or magazine.
The three principles are as follows:
- Your content is relevant and useful to your audience
- Content helps you achieve your own set goals
- Your content complies with webmaster guidelines
Let’s take a closer look at the individual points and tell ourselves how to evaluate the quality of the content but also how to achieve the required quality through these principles.
1. Your content is relevant and useful to your audience
We come across the words “relevant” and “useful” again. What do we even mean by these adjectives? They mean something different to each company because each has its target group of customers that solves a different problem.
So if you want your content to be relevant and useful to your readers, you should follow the following principles.
· Know your readers
You’ve largely won if you know who you’re writing for and the type of people reading your articles. The ideal scenario is a situation where you can completely empathize with your target group. Or you even belong to it yourself.
I think some of the best content creators out there are modern bloggers. Many have never studied marketing and may not have even read a book about it.
They follow common sense and write texts for their target audience. They belong to it themselves, so they write about what they would like to read about. Simple as a slap in the face.
· Solve a problem for your audience
Relief can be anything. At first glance, it seems that articles like “How to build a wardrobe,” “How to properly maintain furniture,” or “How to choose a computer” solve this.
Yes, that too. However, some problems can be difficult to define at first glance, so think carefully about what bothers your customers.
For example, the portal entrepreneur.com has been solving the problems of online entrepreneurs for a long time.
It helps them to educate themselves, motivates them, and moves them forward with every article or video. For example, my problem is that I have no idea how other entrepreneurs and freelancers operate and work.
At first glance, it may seem not easy to define, but the entrepreneur.com portal helps me decipher it with its content.
· Write to the point and leave out the sauces
Think of yourself as writing an article on the Internet. And you are not the only one who creates such text. So there is no room for sauces and poetic phrases. Get straight to the point.
· Write in the language of your target audience
If you need to explain something to your audience in a very simple and layman’s way, you should also write your articles in this style.
- If your target audience is experts, use an expert style.
- If you are a young blogger, write in the language of your peers.
- If your target group includes endless haters, create witty and ironic texts.
- If you have a target audience of, for example, young entrepreneurs, you need to motivate and write stimulatingly and positively.
- Follow a certain text structure
- Bullets, numbering, subheadings, bold text, or white space.
- Use anything in the text that breaks it up more and makes it more readable.
- Write shorter sentences and shorten paragraphs as well.
- Leave space for the user to scan the text and not have to read it “in one go.”
· Add value to your content
This point is often a stumbling block for many companies. Most want to save as much as possible when creating content marketing and do not realize the added value of high-quality content.
Your content will never have anything extra if you paste it from texts you found somewhere on the Internet or abroad.
There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from elsewhere. But you don’t create value-added content that way. Your own experience or the experience of your employees gives added value to the content.
For example, if I wrote this article based only on what I found abroad, it would not make sense to you. But by putting my thoughts into the article and writing it based on my own experiences, it should (hopefully) be a comfortable read, and you should get something out of it.
· Write for people first and search engines second
If you’re creating content because you want to get Traffic from search engines, that’s perfectly fine. But it won’t be like that when you write it only and only for search engines.
Of course, when writing any text, be inspired by keywords first so that you know what people are most interested in and what they are searching for.
Then write content as if search engines don’t exist. And when you are satisfied enough with your text, add a few keywords or easy words and phrases naturally so that the search engine understands them.
· Link internally and externally
You will please your customers (as well as search engines) when you link. Either internally or externally. Internal referencing means you have more to say about the topic and refer the reader to relevant articles.
External referencing shows that you have done your homework and that the texts you write are not written off your thumb but have something to back them up. This is a sign of quality content.
· Don’t use hard sales techniques
Do not press the saw on the article. If it is not appropriate, do not use links and banners unnecessarily.
Think hard about what stage of the buying process the person reading your article is in.
· Citations will increase the credibility
Citations from experts will give your article the stamp of expertise. Find them, write to them or call them and thus gain new insight into the issue.
At the same time, you will strengthen the credibility of the article both in human eyes and with search engine robots.
With all that information, links, citations, and subtopics, you’re likely to run out of space – while PR articles are recommended to be around one standard page long, you’ll need more space for high-quality content.
There is no length recommendation, but I don’t think longer is better. Try to avoid unnecessary ballast in the text and keep it alive and readable.
In the case of an article longer than three standard pages, create content immediately below the per that will help the reader in orientation.
· Text is not everything
Don’t just focus on the text – readers love nice design, easy-to-understand infographics, presentations, videos, photo galleries, and other interactive stuff. If possible, direct readers to the discussion under the article/post on social networks.
Ask what they think about the topic and if they have other recommendations or experiences. You can further engage with them and spark another channel about the article. Do not forget the call-to-action buttons (“Register here,” “Buy the product now,” “Book an appointment,” etc.).
The HQ article also includes a meta description that appears in search results. It should contain the article summary, call to action, and keywords – all in very limited character space.
If the web administrator does not fill it in when deploying the article, the search engine will complete it with an excerpt from the text. However, a complete text with SEO principles always looks and works better.
Good. But if I follow all this, how can I be sure that my content is relevant and useful to my audience?
Article traffic -> Traffic alone may not say much about the quality of the content. You can write it for a very narrow or, on the contrary, a very broad target group.
In any case, you already have a rough idea of the Traffic you get to your website and your articles. This can be something you recoil from.
Time spent on the page -> This metric already has a slightly higher informative value than Traffic. If the visitor stays on a particular page for a few minutes, your text catches their attention.
The exception, of course, can be short content that solves a customer’s problem in a few seconds. So you have to determine for yourself how long time on the page means a certain quality of the text.
Article Comments -> If people leave comments under your article, they have read it. And somehow, he got them interested enough to respond to him.
But it may happen that you have only negative reactions under the article. That is fine if there are comments indicating that a person has read the article but does not agree with it. It also speaks to a certain quality of the content.
Emails in your inbox -> Not everyone likes public speaking. Some people prefer to write you an email instead of leaving a comment under the article.
They will ask other questions based on reading the article or show interest in your services or products. Some will “just” praise you.
Social Media Shares -> When your article gets talked about, and your visitors share it on social media, you win. This indicates that the article was valuable enough for your users to share on social networks.
New Facebook likes or newsletter signups -> If someone is interested enough in your content to follow you on Facebook or sign up for a newsletter, you’re doing well. You offer your readers quality content that they want to keep reading.
2. Content helps you achieve your own set goal
In order to be able to follow and evaluate this principle, you need to set some goals in the first place.
When you start content marketing, you have a reason for it. This reason should align with your long-term goals.
If you have multiple intentions, deciding on one that will be primary for you is good. And then the goals that will be secondary.
Content marketing goals should also overlap with your marketing and business direction.
What can your goals be, and how to evaluate them?
- Increase Traffic from organic search.
- Increase awareness of your company on social networks.
- Increase the number of emails in your email list and keep your email audience.
- Build a community around your brand/persona.
- Increase sales of your products and services.
Note: The most common primary goal and why companies start with content marketing is to increase Traffic from natural searches.
After you’ve determined your primary and secondary goals, choosing the metrics you’ll use is a good idea. It’s up to you which metrics you choose for each goal. It is then a good idea to evaluate the results, for example, once a quarter, as the creation of content does not manifest itself immediately. Of course, you can also monitor your results every month. It’s up to you.
- If the numbers in the goals you set are increasing, you can be satisfied. You are probably doing something right.
- If your goals numbers are falling or stagnating, try to reevaluate the content you’re creating. Maybe it’s not as good as it might seem at first glance.
Set a goal even for a specific article
Evaluating goals quarterly will give you broad awareness of your content and its quality.
If you also set a goal for individual texts, you can easily determine the quality of your articles, and in the future, you can better eliminate those that do not meet them.
But in general, you write each text with a slightly different intention, and each article has a different primary goal:
- You can make content that covers different keywords and whose primary goal is to get Traffic from search engines.
- You can write a great article that you expect to be shared on social media.
- You can create text that will attract interesting links to you.
Set a goal for each article you create and evaluate whether you are meeting your goals.
If so, you are creating quality content.
3. Your content complies with webmaster guidelines
You have probably already noticed that in this article, we are mainly talking about articles and textual content.
The reason is simple. The vast majority of businesses start content marketing for SEO. No wonder. It is the most easily grasped and most measurable primary goal that a business can set. I recommend reading our guide on “The best SEO for Search Engine Optimization”
So, if you’re creating textual content, you need to be damned careful to comply with the webmaster rules. None of us wants to anger the search engines. Am I right?
So how do you ensure your content complies with webmaster guidelines?
Instructions from Google can be found directly on the Google support pages. The list also has its own rules. I recommend reading the prohibited optimization techniques, which can be understood as a guide on what not to do if you want to create quality content.
4. Maintaining the quality of your content
In short, let’s summarize a few rules that I consider the most important if you want to maintain the quality of your content in line with search engines:
- Avoid the “keyword stuffing” method, i.e., overoptimized text, where you write the keyword you want to appear several times in the article.
- Avoid the “cloaking” method, i.e., creating different text for search engines and not for people.
- Make pages for users and not for search engines. Ask yourself, “Would I be doing it this way if search engines didn’t exist?”
- Do not use automatically generated content generated by, for example, a program.
- Don’t create landing pages that have no or minimal content.
- Do not steal texts from other sites.
Conclusion
It does not end with the publication of the article but rather begins. Find out how the text is doing. Compare the available data and find out what works for your readers and what you could improve next time.
A blog article should interest the individual, offer him a solution or insight into the issue and bring him in as a potential customer in a non-violent way and comply with the webmaster’s guidelines.
Well, that’s it. I think you are already prepared enough to start creating quality content. Go for it.
