What Truly Defines High-Quality Content?

In a world where tons of content is published every second, the need for high-quality content can never be understated. Businesses creating content shouldn’t settle for merely good material. Otherwise, you’ll risk producing content that gets lost in all the noise. It’s the premium quality blog posts or ads that matter most if you want to rise above your competition. High-quality content development secures an exceptional conversion rate and makes your brand the saving grace for search queries. Think of it this way: High-quality content is your diamond in the rough. The boat in a swarm of gators. The Mufasa in a pack of hyenas. You will have confidence in the success of your content strategy when you consistently produce high-quality content. That said, what are the factors that make you say “Eureka! This is the quality post I’m looking for!”?Check them out below.

Quality Content Defined

The definition of quality content can be traced back to Jeff Cannon’s interpretation of content. According to him: “In content marketing, content is created to provide consumers with the information they seek.” Any high-quality material answers the public’s most pressing queries on a particular niche. The problem is that it’s a low bar to entry in today’s content marketing landscape. After Google’s Panda update, low-quality sites were de-ranked and only high-quality pages are left to rule the roost. In other words, you’re competing with brands creating content that already answers consumer questions. You’ll need to step up your game to claim Google’s top spot. Unfortunately, nowadays many marketers still give in to the delusion that high-quality content is simply attributed to these aspects:

• The overall content value
• Number of words
• Visual appeal
• Spelling and grammar
• Formatting and readability
• Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT)

If that’s the case, publishing quality content should be a walk in the park. Moreover, finding success with your content marketing efforts must come easy, but why isn’t this the case? Don’t get me wrong, these are all necessary attributes of quality content. All I’m saying is that they’re not enough metrics to describe what quality content is. Targeting these markers is already second nature to all content creators. Therefore, if everyone does the same things, how do we now segregate high-quality content from obscurity? There are 6 benchmarks. High-quality content is hard to come by, but with expert guidance, it’s within reach. Wizard of Ads® vows to help residential home service businesses with their content marketing endeavors. Book a call.

How to Measure High-Quality Content?

The attributes I’ve mentioned above matter. Quality posts still abide by those standards. In measuring high-quality content, you must also consider the statistics on top of the non-negotiable attributes. Here are they:

1. KPIs and Data

At all costs, avoid measuring the perceived quality of your content based on how much time and money you poured into making it. Always base your definition of quality content on measurable data and statistics, otherwise, your view will be biased. Remember that content marketing is all about audiences and search engines. They’re the ONLY objective judge of good quality. Using data will help you segregate high-quality content from plain garbage a.k.a. your diamonds among the coal. KPIs, or key performance indicators, are measurable elements that are used to help companies understand how they’re progressing towards achieving their marketing and business objectives. In the case of content marketing, your KPIs may fall into these 4 categories:

• SERP ranking position
• Amount of traffic
• Number of engagements
• Number of leads generated

Diamond content is your array of the best-performing content among your archives. They hover between positions 1-3 in SERPs, drive a majority of your traffic, boast a consistently high engagement rate, and yield most of your leads. High-quality content usually comprises only 3% of your entire artillery. On the other hand, coal is your average (or even sub-standard) material that takes up 97% of your collection. Inferior traffic. Lousy SERP ranking. Little to no leads. Segregating your content into these two clusters will give you actionable insights into what went right on the diamonds, to help you refine your coal. If you completely rely on gutfeel when describing quality content, you’ll have no clear direction on what content to follow.

2. Marketing Objectives

The cornerstone of every high-quality content is how well they achieve your business’ marketing objectives. It doesn’t matter whether that goal is to generate traffic, win in SERP rankings, or increase engagement or conversions. As long as your content meets or exceeds the standard you’ve set for it, they’re considered high-quality. Think of it this way. NBA teams don’t draft new ballers based on looks, social media following, or eloquence. It always boils down to stats: Points Per Game, Field Goal Percentage, Free-Throw Percentage, and Assist-To-Turnover Ratio, among others. The same principle applies to quality content. Even if diamond content fails in some of the important attributes, like spelling or grammar, it can still be high-quality as long as they help achieve your marketing goals.

3. Search Engine Rankings

Top search engine results pages are saturated with high-quality content. But retaining a position in the top spots is still as fickle as those in latter SERPs and we’ll explain how below: After Google carried out its RankBrain algorithm, the search engine implemented machine learning to identify the most relevant results for queries. Here’s the catch: machine learning rewards results that incur high engagements. The more people click on your result, albeit possibly lower in SERPs, you will observe rank improvement thanks to RankBrain. Google measures engagement via two factors:

• Click-through rate or CTR (The rate of people clicking on your results)
• Time on page (The length of time users spend or engage with your content)

Naturally, higher CTR means enticing content at face value while a longer time on page suggests engaging content. They’re two peas in a pod, why? A high SERP CTR but low time on page signals Google of misleading content which can then penalize your page by ranking down. What does this mean for residential home service businesses? Work on crafting winning meta-titles and meta descriptions to make your content enticing. Your content should then follow through with a high-quality, engaging post.

4. Remarkable Ad CTR

Your content and RankBrain’s machine learning technology are not limited to helping you dominate SERP ranks. As a matter of fact, before being one of the SERP ranking signals, Google ads benefited from machine learning. Google and other social advertising sites like Facebook and Twitter reward high-quality content with lower costs for ad boosts. How do these platforms measure quality content? Click-through rates. Getting the coveted clicks on your ads indicates that you’ve produced high-quality content. While promoting low engagement ads punishes you with more expensive boosting costs and lower impression share. Once you craft the killer ad that gives you all the clicks, replicate the same success by following a similar route in your succeeding advertising efforts.

5. Conversion Rate

A remarkable engagement rate normally leads to desirable conversion rates as well. You know you harbor quality material if you can get people to click through your content and convert thereafter. However, there are instances when CTRs and conversion rates are incongruent. In this case, you may want to give your content a hard look to see which areas need renovation or CRO (conversion rate optimization). Always remember that quality content gets admirable conversion rates.

6. Promising Facebook Engagement

Do you know why fake news proliferated on Facebook? Well, at least before the Facebook fact-checkers hunted down and purged fake news peddlers. It’s for one simple reason: Facebook’s machine learning algorithm prioritizes content popularity over authority (unlike Google). What this means is that the more people clicked, commented, reacted, or shared a post, the more likely Facebook spread the post on users’ news feeds. Let me illustrate their algorithm: As a user browses their feed, Facebook occasionally displays posts it thinks the user will find interesting or appealing. Facebook then acts depending on the user’s behavior in light of the post. If a user scrolls past your post, Facebook won’t bother showing updates to the user. On the other hand, engagement suggests interest and Facebook will act on the interest to show the user similar updates in the future. Then why did I use fake news as an example earlier? Making rounds on Facebook leans more on publishing content that triggers emotional responses among users. On social media platforms like Facebook, the quality content are the ones that achieve high engagement. The main idea in defining high-quality content is not input-centric. It also taps into information once the content is deployed into the world. This must be the focus of content marketing. Here’s a thing that I noticed among diamond contents: they do well on all marketing channels. If they do well in social media, they’ll likely rank positively in SERPs and have high conversion rates. In the same way, content that bags organic search results tend to do well on social media and other channels. A good rule of thumb to remember is that diamonds are excellent performers for search engine optimization, paid and organic social media, emails, conversion rate optimization, etc.

Final Thoughts

Of course, defining high-quality content from output performance comes second to a well-thought and inspiring concept, along with the implementation of good content attributes. Unbiased statistics are primarily used to refine and further improve an already engaging idea. Needless to say, if you want to be more successful, brainstorm a better vision. Once you find your diamond among your long list of coal, capitalize, leverage, and maximize its reach to squeeze the highest possible ROI you can muster. Moreover, replicate the same success by understanding what makes your diamonds precious. This will help you improve your existing citrines and serve as a blueprint to follow for your succeeding content. Finding your super rare diamonds can be daunting, sometimes, you may not even have them in the first place. If you need support, Wizard of Ads® can help materialize your high-quality content. Book a call.