How to analyze your content quality and improve your rankings
Site Audit IssuesIt’s not a secret that with the development of AI, the Internet is flooded with mediocre content that doesn't provide value and confuses users. According to Moz, by the end of 2024, more than half of the web’s content will be AI-generated. Can you just imagine how much generic content we will consume?
However, there is one thing AI can’t replicate - a unique human experience. That’s what high-quality content in 2024 will be about: first-hand experience and industry authority. Let’s dive deeper into what will make quality content in the near future.
What Is Quality Content?
Let’s start by explaining the EAT guidelines. Google uses them to evaluate the content quality. The acronym E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
- Expertise: Original research, based on the deep-level knowledge of the author
- Authoritativeness: Content by a resource that has proved authority in the niche (for example, a site with many quality backlinks). Also, Google will recognize and analyze the authority of the authors who created the content.
- Trustworthiness: Content that is timely, updated, and relevant
In 2022, Google has introduced the new “E,” which stands for “Experience”. It means that Google will add extra points to the content based on real-life human experience.
So now, quality content has to provide unique insights from people who are experts in a certain industry. For example, if you have a blog about website quality SEO optimization, content written or contributed by an SEO expert will rank higher than generic content on an SEO topic.
To sum up, quality content meaning is all about creating human-first, detailed, and original content that provides unique insights, not just generic information.
Why Is Quality Content Important?
According to Prashant Puri, CEO at AdLift Inc., if brands want to connect with their audience and generate quality leads, AI can assist with 45 to 50% of the job. However, only human-written content will be essential for impact, connection, and conversion.
How to create good content? Google constantly analyzes user experience signals and user behavior on different websites to rank the content. Nowadays, with the abundance of AI-generated content, users crave authentic and original information that meets their needs. As a result, Google constantly updates its algorithms to help people easily find such content.
That’s why if you want your website to rank high on SERPs, there is no other way than to create unique content that addresses knowledge gaps and provides something other websites do not.
7 Ways to Create Quality Content
Creating relevant and high-quality content marketing strategy should be the main focus now. Here are seven tips that will guide you throughout this process.
Address Your Customers’ Needs
There is one golden rule to remember: you are creating content for people, not for search engine bots. That’s why, before getting to writing, you need to understand who you write it for and what needs you address.
Buyer persona method is a great way to understand customer challenges, frustrations, and motivations at each stage of the buyer journey and create content accordingly. Here’s why:
- During customer research, you can get a lot of audience insights and formulate your content to meet the real needs of your readers, not your assumptions
- The buyer persona method will help you segment your audience according to their buyer journey and create content that is relevant to the funnel stage they’re in
Align Content with Your Business Goals
You can’t create content just for the sake of creating content. You need to know the objective and purpose of each piece of content you create and how it will help you implement your company’s plans. Here is how you can align content with your business goals:
- Analyze your target audience
- Create your tone of voice
- Identify your primary business goals (increase brand awareness, generate new leads, generate sales, educate on the product, etc.)
- Decide how you will measure these goals and set metrics that will help you track your progress
- Create SMART content marketing goals
- Create a content calendar
Showcase Your Expertise
Let’s refer to the famous quote by Gary Vaynerchuk - “Document, don’t create.”
The best way to create content that showcases your expertise is not to create content from scratch but to document what you are already doing and share your experience. Your experience is unique, and such content will stand out as it reveals the topic from a different angle.
If you don’t have significant experience yet, don’t worry; you can always create content in collaboration with some expert in your niche. The most important thing here is to identify the gaps in the existing content and fill in these gaps with something that was not mentioned before.
Here is what you can do to showcase that you have expertise to share your opinion:
- Fill in your author bio and provide information about your experience
- Ask other experts to contribute to your content
- Ask other experts to review your content
- Work on getting high-quality backlinks from other trustworthy websites
Find the Right Formats
Don’t narrow yourself to one type of content. The more content formats you create, the more competitive you become. It also helps you to reach a wider audience. Try different types of content, such as infographics, videos, quizzes, and podcasts, and analyze what works for your business best.
Ensure Content Readability
Useful and in-depth content will not work if it’s difficult to digest. Here is how you can make your content more readable:
- Use active voice
- Mix up long and short sentences
- Don’t start every sentence with the same word
- Avoid jargon and cliches
- Write in a conversational tone, like you talk to your friend
- Explain difficult things in simple words, so even a child can understand it
- Use bullet points and subheadings
- Read your content out loud
Update Your Content
If you want to improve the performance of your content, you have to update it regularly. Create an inventory of your content and sort it out by different criteria. It may seem like a daunting job, but it will really save you time in the future. Here are the main metrics to analyze:
- Page traffic
- Page engagement
- Number of backlinks
- Page ranking
- Main keywords
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
Creating quality content for SEO also matters. A content audit will help you find underperforming, old, or generic content that brings no value to your website visitors. Based on the audit results, you will decide what content to keep, repurpose, delete, or update.
Learn from Content Performance
How to create high quality content? Create a schedule for monitoring your content metrics and regularly review them. Understand what content performs best and double down on its creation. We all make mistakes. However, winners are those who learn from them and analyze what they do. Here are the main content marketing metrics to track:
- Organic search traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Backlinks
- Traffic sources
- Conversion rate
- ROI of content marketing
How to Create Quality Content With Netpeak Spider?
As we have already mentioned, Google has become an expert in defining low-quality content. That’s why it’s time to review and improve your content if you don't rank on search engines. Here’s how you can do it with Netpeak Spider:
- Crawl your website to find duplicate content
- Identify low-word content that brings no value
- Analyze the performance of your content by integrating Netpeak Spider with Google Analytics. Get helpful insights on traffic, goals, conversions, and even e-commerce parameters for any target website.
- Analyze what queries your content ranks for and optimize it even better
Netpeak Spider is a great tool that will help you run an in-depth technical site audit and detect broken links, duplicate pages, faulty meta tags, and other issues that may influence your rankings.
Conclusion
To cut the long story short, content is still the king. It will continue to be. With the adoption of AI, Google now puts all the effort into differentiating quality content from mediocre.
To win this game, you need to focus on creating authentic, unique content that meets people’s intent. Now you know the importance of quality content for SEO. Make sure you create content with your target audience in mind and do your best to create the best possible experience for your website visitors.