Identifying Low Quality (and High Quality) Content in 2019

Content is one of the most essential elements needed to drive traffic to any type of website. Content comes in many forms, from blogs, infographics, announcements, images, video, and much more. Our team ensures that the websites we handle only have content that is of the best quality, making sure that we help boost traffic, and generate more conversions.

When it comes to quality content, there are many factors that help determine if one is such. This can include trustworthiness, authority, and legitimacy of the content. Most of the time, writing or creating content will turn out fine just as long as you ensure that your content intends to distribute informative and useful information to the users. However, there are cases in which websites distribute low-quality content, which results to lower traffic, and may even cause more negative implications for your website.

Low-quality content is definitely one thing you’d want to steer clear away from as much as possible. However, there are times that you would encounter a website that contains these types of content, which you would need to optimize. It takes a good amount of time and effort to look for these contents, and here’s how you can spot them that much easier.

Identifying Low-Quality Content

Looking for low-quality content can start off as easy or simple at a glance. However, the more content that you have to go through a website, the harder it is to find low-quality content. Recently, Google has submitted an updated set of guidelines that help users identify low-quality content. Here are the newly-revised guidelines that determine a low rating for your content:

• An inadequate level of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
• The quality of the MC is low
• There is an unsatisfying amount of MC for the purpose of the page
• The title of the MC is exaggerated or shocking
• The Ads or SC distracts from the MC
• There is an unsatisfying amount of website information or information about the creator of the MC for the purpose of the page
• A mildly negative population for a website or creator of the MC, based on extensive reputation research. If a page has multiple low-quality attributes, a rating lower than low may be appropriate.

*Legend:

MC – Main content: Refers to the main article that drives traffic into a website, providing trustworthy and authoritative information.

SC – Supplementary Content: Provides additional information regarding the main content, improving the quality of the content.

To make things much simpler, your content will be considered low quality if the information contains factual errors, along with poorly-explained sections that do not satisfy the reader. Titles that are clickbait is also a red flag, as it means that you are misleading the users into reading your article, instead of having them access it organically. With the right tools and knowledge, you will be able to avoid creating low quality with ease. In the next section, we’ll show you the most important factors that determine high-quality content.

The ingredients of high-quality content

Creating high-quality content requires a good amount of time and effort to ensure that what you will be publishing to the rest of the world will be something beneficial and relevant for a lot of users. While this might be easier said than done, these factors help shape up content that will drive more traffic to your website. Here are some of these key ingredients of good content that will help you avoid bad and poorly-made content:

More than words

Creating lengthy and detailed content means that you will be writing blogs that are over 800 words long, sometimes even reaching 2000 for some topics. This is not a bad thing, as it provides meaty content that is very useful. However, your content must also be pleasing to the eye. You may have a well-worded and detailed article, but if it does not contain relevant images that help give users an impression, most of them would rather skim through and not finish reading.

Adding relevant, detailed, or informative images help make the reading experience much livelier and more interesting, as you give them something that helps them visualize your idea. Blogs containing charts, infographics, and colorful images help keep the readers invested in the idea that you are presenting to them. Visual quality is just as important as quality writing and should not be overlooked.

Timely/timeless

When it comes to the question of whether content should be timely or timeless, there are times that you can hit two birds with one stone. You CAN create content that is not only relevant to the status quo but also something that will be useful for future reference. For example, a blog post about YouTube SEO was not only relevant for content creators at that time, but it is still relevant to people who want to publish content on the platform today.

Timeless and timely content are at their best when they address some of the most important needs and concerns of the users and creating something that is evergreen will surely ensure that you will be receiving constant traffic to your website.

Engagement and Conversion

Content must not only contain useful and relevant information, but it must also help bring in conversions and engagement from the users themselves. This, of course, means that your content must always be in line with what your website is all about. While it may feel that this can limit the content that you would be able to write about (which it naturally does), but this helps to ensure that your users would know what to expect when they engage with your website.

When it comes to engagement, social media is key, as this is the platform in which you will find most of your followers. Social media allows you to interact with your users instantly, allowing you to invite more users into your website. Some of the most viral posts on social media begin with relevant and timely content and is also a mark that your content is of high quality. Content that generates engagement is content that has good quality.

Key Takeaway

Quality content comes in many forms but contains a similar set of ingredients that help drive more traffic and conversions. By identifying the factors that identify low quality content, you would ensure that you will be able to avoid these and craft your own set of quality content that will be constantly relevant and useful for your users.

If you have questions and inquiries about content marketing and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.