What is content quality?
Simply put, content quality is the measure of how successful a piece of content is with respect to your goals. It is usually measured in terms of metrics such as engagement, conversion rate, SEO rankings, and click-through rate.
If you wish to learn more about this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: Isn’t content quality about how well-made your content is?
In terms of digital marketing and SEO, content marketing is more about how much a piece of content does for your brand than how well-made it is.
This, however, does not at all mean you can get away with publishing mediocre or downright terrible content. After all, the only way a piece of content can help you achieve your goals is if people consume, share, and engage with it. And for that to happen, it needs to actually be well made, relevant, interesting, and valuable to your target audience.
Also, publishing great content is only the first step. You also need to have a proper content distribution strategy in place to ensure your content reaches the right people.
Question #2: How do I measure content quality?
As we have seen earlier, you measure content quality using metrics such as:
- Engagement
- Conversion rate
- SEO rankings
- Click-through rate
Let us take a closer look at each one:
First, engagement refers to how many people react to, comment, and share your content. The more engagement you get, the higher the quality of your content because it not only improves your brand visibility and awareness, but also helps you build and retain relationships with both your prospects and existing customers.
Second, conversion rate refers to how many people took the action you needed them to take—such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a report, registering for a webinar, or making a purchase—because of a piece of content you published.
Third, SEO rankings, as the name suggests, refers to how high a piece of content ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher it ranks, the more visible it is to your target audience and the more traffic you get.
Finally, click-through rate refers to how many of the people who see your content actually click on it. The higher this number is, the more interesting, relevant, valuable, and accurately targeted your content is—and the cheaper it becomes to advertise it using Google Ads if you ever decide to explore paid content promotion methods.
Question #3: How do I improve my content quality?
As we have seen earlier, the first step to improving your content quality is by making sure your content is well made, relevant, interesting, valuable, and targeted. Let us take a look at each one in more details:
First, ‘well made’ means your content has to be clear, properly structured, grammatically correct, and easy to read, watch, or listen to. People will just not stick around for poorly made content that is virtually impossible to understand.
Second, ‘relevant’ means your content must either address a concern (or set of concerns) your target audience has or talk about a topic (or set of topics) your target audience is interested in. Otherwise, there would be no reason for them to pay attention to it, no matter how well-made it is.
Third, ‘interesting’ means you need to present your content in a way that is engaging to your target audience. If, for example, your target audience are kids, then you can use loud colors, simple language, cute visuals, funny sound effects, and playful music to keep them hooked.
Fourth, ‘valuable’ means your content should either provide useful information to your target audience or solve a problem they have.
Finally, ‘targeted’ simply means your content should be crafted specifically for the audience you want to reach to ensure it resonates with them. Publishing content meant for everyone usually results in that content not actually reaching anyone.
Once you have got all of this down, the next step is to actively get your content in front of your target audience using unpaid, paid, or a combination of both content promotion methods.