Why is high quality content important?
High quality content is a digital asset that keeps on giving. The better your content, the more effective it will be in terms of search engine optimization (SEO) and everything that optimization means--improved website authority, better communication with customers, increased brand awareness, more traffic, and, of course, more sales of products or services. Everybody wants content quality, but not everyone’s got it.
Why? Because creating high quality content requires a comprehensive content plan, original content, keyword research, and experienced content marketing pros who can help you create content that’s tailored to your business’s marketing goals. Creating content takes time and talent as well as ongoing commitment to maintaining SEO. Oh, yeah--it takes some fiscal investment too. World class content doesn’t have to break your budget; but these days, you won’t find cheap content on top ranking websites either.
Today, if you want to improve your search engine ranking, attract more customers, and sell more of your stuff, you’ll need to produce quality content that complements your SEO. Content plays a key role in your marketing success, which is why quality content creation is a must. We’ll tell you how to produce it with our practical tips.
What is high quality content?
Content refers to all the text on your website as well as images, whitepapers, press releases, blogs, reviews, testimonials, case studies, infographics, and videos. All this content helps you to communicate useful information to your customers and prospective customers about your brand, its business culture, its products and services, relevant industry news, special incentives and events, and more. But what makes it high quality?
You can consider your content the cat’s meow if it meets Google’s thresholds. Google established EAT to refer to its criteria for quality websites. EAT stands for: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Your high quality content is what helps your website meet or, ideally, exceed the EAT thresholds. Unoriginal content? These days--that’s unacceptable and could get your site penalized. At the very least, you need original content, but you must do better than that to score points with Google. And you want to score points with Google because you want to get to that first page rank in the search results. To do less would mean handing over business to your competitors. That’s a drag in anyone’s pocketbook. Nothing less than publishing high quality content will do.
Keep it snackable
The way you present your content is also important in terms of SEO--and that’s because it’s important to your audience too. Huge blocks of dense text (with small font, no less) are unappealing to readers and often fail to answer search intent. Although its usage and grammar may all be correct, it may still be low quality content if it’s not engaging your specific audience. Your content copywriters should shoot for snackable content that’s clear, relevant, and brimming (but not overstuffed) with keywords and keyword phrases that are aligned with your SEO strategy.
What are the benefits of quality content?
Investing in a content strategy and content development comes with all sorts of advantages. The main benefit that most people think of when they hear SEO, is that improved page rank position. If your website isn’t found on page one of Google search results, it’s not getting found as often as it could be. Searchers often never get to the second page of a Google search--and rarely to a third, fourth, or fifth. In most cases, their queries will find a useful ‘answer’ on that first page that Google provides. If you want to get to that first page, you’ve got to convince Google’s algorithms to give you a boost--and quality content (along with technical SEO) helps.
You’ll also want to create high quality content (that fits your SEO strategy) because it will improve your website’s usability, improve the experience of your customers when they visit your website, and even help you to attract your target audience. Low quality content will not help you improve your standing in the digital sphere and it isn’t likely to provide your business with a good return on investment.
Search engines value quality over quantity
Creating quality content takes time and money, but don’t let that turn you off. If you’re working with a small marketing budget, just focus on creating the best content you can; it’s what the search engines want. Yes, over time, a substantial body of high quality content will support your website’s authority in its field, but a lot of low quality content will not impress savvy search engine algorithms. Many have tried to fool Google; many have been banished to page five of search results and seen their website traffic dry up like an Arizona creek in July too.
According to Forbes, quality surpasses quantity content because “consumers crave authenticity.” Think about it from a customer’s point of view. How likely are they to engage with a lot of cr--er...irrelevant, poorly produced content? In fact, even when the content of your blogs, landing pages, ads, etc...is superior, the average consumer only has so much time to spare. It’s more in their interest and, therefore, in yours to create snackable content that offers extremely relevant information that’s optimized (with keywords) for search engines. You don’t have to give customers a library’s worth of content, in other words; you need to give them valuable content that they’re likely to engage with.
High quality content is NOT just for search engine rankings
Although it may seem like you have to develop great content to satisfy Google (and you do), that's not all. Ultimately, and why Google cares so much about content, is that you have to be relevant to consumers. Otherwise, Google doesn’t want to match you to queries. After all, if the search engines continually present searchers with irrelevant, poorly written content, searchers will stop using them. Google wants to be everybody’s digital buddy, helping them navigate the World Wide Web day in and day out--and in the evenings too. It wants credible sites that satisfy search intent.
Searchers are what has driven Google to develop its crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. EAT is not for Google; it’s for searchers. When your business keeps that in mind, it’s actually much easier to create content. You can develop content that’s genuinely important to your target audience and, as Forbes suggests, is “relevant, current, and specific.”
How do I create quality content?
We were hoping you’d ask! You deliver quality content by developing a content strategy and contracting with Stretch Creative to enlist the help of our experienced content specialists. We can partner with you to create dynamic content that does everything the search engines expect and more. Our writers routinely create results-driven content for a wide range of business types, organizations, and industries that do business on a global or local scale.
We rely on our proven and trusted content creation process to produce high quality content designed to help our clients achieve their ranking goals and all that improved rank typically means--more keyword research, more web traffic, more customer engagement, more leads, and more sales. We’re a boutique content marketing firm that features professional writers who will deliver the goods--and we’re talking first page search results! We know exactly what you need when it comes to quality SEO copywriting as well as how to avoid a frustrating user experience. We deliver the content expected--engaging content for enterprise brands, SEO agencies, content marketing teams, and publishers. Whether it's for Google ads, writing converting product descriptions, city pages, gated content that helps you achieve your marketing goals.
FAQs
Why is quality content important?
High quality content is important because it helps businesses and organizations achieve their marketing goals. It’s the key to your site's SEO, improved search engine rank, more customer interactions, more leads, and more sales and revenue. Quality content satisfies search intent, features keywords and related keywords, displays no broken links, boasts appropriate word count, and grabs the readers' attention. Higher quality content does these things and will avoid marketing tricks intended to fool search engines and do not, ultimately, improve search engine rankings.
How does Google determine quality content?
Google’s recent mission in life is to develop the most tech-savvy algorithms for determining quality content. Gone--long gone--are the days of poorly written content that trips over clunky keyword usage strung together with wretched sentence constructions that have ‘English as a second language’ written all over them. Hey, we’re not knocking writers whose first language is something other than English; we’re knocking the practice of hiring non-native English speakers who write English poorly. English-speaking natives produce bad content too, but they don’t work for Stretch Creative.
Today, Google and other search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms that know how to spot websites that live up to those EAT standards and will penalize those sites that don’t. Trying to fool Google with keyword stuffing and inferior content will only lead to a negative result and prevent your website from achieving its digital marketing goals.
Should I update old articles to improve their quality?
Enthusiastically, yes! You should update your site's content and improve it with more value for readers. This may mean improving the writing or updating the same content to ensure that it’s current. Of course, if it’s beyond redemption, dump it and start fresh. Poor content can hurt your SEO. Search Engine Journal believes that old content could “drag down” your SEO. Refreshed and improved content is definitely a content development strategy to rely on along with the development of new content that's in keeping with marketing objectives and is likely to be relevant for user intent in search queries.
Should I hire an agency to create quality content?
A professional content marketing agency has all the tools and resources, including professional writers, at the ready to help you create rich SEO-friendly high quality content. While many larger corporations and companies may have in-house marketing teams who can create EAT-worthy content, many small and mid-sized businesses do not. Working with an agency is a no-nonsense way to write high quality content quickly so that you can start enjoying all the benefits associated with it. Our writers are accustomed to writing quality content each day. They factor in important elements like user intent to produce relevant content for web pages, blog post copy, social media platforms, and more.