Crafting Quality Content for Successful Online Marketing in 2023 and Beyond

One of the biggest cornerstones for success in the online world of SEO is wrapped in a two-word phrase: quality content. Even if you’re new to rewriting content and attracting visitors to your site, the push for quality content is something you’ve likely encountered. While it’s talked about on pretty much every forum and thousands of blog posts regarding best practices, it’s essential to understand what quality content is in today’s world. In this guide, we’ll dive into the key aspects of what quality content is and how it can elevate your online presence for your target audience.

Quality Content: A Deeper Dive

Originality and Beyond

One of the core foundations of quality content is originality. Whether it’s a blog post or a new webpage, when you publish content online, it’s important that it’s original. Search engines, Google especially, weigh content pretty heavily, and they love original content. 

It’s not just about duplicate content or plagiarism that Google is looking for, it’s about providing a fresh perspective or unique insights to a topic. Think of it this way; If the content that you present is the same or similar to that of another site, why should Google rank your site?

While original content is a good starting point, that’s not automatically enough for it to be classified as quality content. In order to hit that mark, there are a few additional factors you need to keep in mind. 

Relevance To Your Audience

Understanding your target audience and reader is fundamental to creating the quality content that Google and readers want to read. What is it that matters most to your audience? What problems are they encountering? Are they looking for solutions or just a resource so they know they’re not alone? Put your readers first and offer them value; whether it educates, entertains, or solves a problem, you must speak directly to them.

The user experience plays a big role in determining the quality of content. Google and other search engines have focused on satisfying user intent. This means that the content you write must match the search intent. If someone is looking for “gardening tips”, they’re not necessarily looking for a “landscaping company”. Recognize what your audience seeks, and provide the content or resources they crave.

Focus on Clarity and Conciseness

In today’s day, online readers prefer concise, focused content. But how do you do that and still get ranked in Google? The answer is creating skimable content or providing a Table of Contents so users can jump to the areas they need.

Long articles that focus on word count rather than information are going to make your readers mad. Quality content should cover a topic as in-depth as possible without excessive rambling. Tell your story; just make sure you’re driving home the article’s point.

Break up the article in various subheadings, interspersed with images, quotes, or videos if relevant. Don’t be afraid to break everything up into multiple paragraphs. Not everyone wants to read a wall of text, so spice it up for how your readers perceive and respond to your content.

Consider the following to help with your writing;

• Subheadings: Just like chapters in a book, break up the content into easily digestible sections. Not only will subheadings improve readability, but it allows a user to skim through an article and find what they need. This is especially true on mobile devices.
• Bullet lists and numbered lists: People love lists. Use bullet point lists where appropriate to present information in an easily scannable and structured format. If your readers only read the bullet points, can they grasp the full topic of the article?
• In-Depth Analysis: This is the one I personally enjoy. When someone covers a topic and leaves me with few additional questions, they’ve truly provided an in-depth article. In-depth articles also can help demonstrate authority on a topic, but their goal is to provide the most valuable information to your readers.
• Graphic Components: Incorporate images, infographics, and videos into your content. This will enhance the overall reading experience and provide a visual break between text segments.

Proper Formatting

Most readers have a hard time with what we call the “wall of text” approach in articles. Too much text can be hard to read and at the end of the day, we need to be providing quality content that people can digest easily. When it comes to proper formatting, we have a handful of suggestions on how to approach this:

• Subheadings: We have already outlined the importance of subheadings, but it’s worth restating it again. Quality content must be easy to read, and this means breaking up the content to make it more scannable and quicker to navigate.
• Paragraph Length: The rule of thumb on paragraphs is to keep them less than 100 words. On average, each word contains 5 or 6 characters. Keep the sentence to no more than 20 words, and you’ll hit your target in just 5 sentences. Shorter paragraphs create white space and can appear less overwhelming.
• Images and Multimedia: Intersperse images, infographics, and videos when possible. Visual content is much easier to digest for most people and will help with the reading experience.
• Consistent Styling: These may already be set for you within your website, but adhering to a consistent style of fonts, font sizes, and text formatting (bold, italics, underlining) will all help make your content appear more professional and readable. While color is a great option on websites, generally, different color words in content are not easy to read.

The Significance of Quality Content in 2023

As online competition continues to intensify, maintaining a website to rank for certain terms can be a challenge. Over the past few years, Google has expanded on what they expect from business websites, and writing a few brief paragraphs on products or services no longer cuts it. 

In order to gain the trust of Google and increase the rankings in search engine positions, quality content is a must. The algorithms favor websites with lots of content, or at least content that answers the questions that users are searching for. A technique called “Siloing” has become a bigger focus. 

A content silo is a method of SEO that interlinks several articles on the same topic or related topics.  If you can dominate a topic, you will stand a much better chance of getting high-quality traffic to your site than if you covered several different niches or industries. Using a content silo method builds trust with Google because you know what you’re talking about. 

Anyone can talk about a topic for 30 seconds, but if you can talk about it for 5, 10, or 30 minutes, people often attribute authority to that person as a result. The same goes for Google. A few paragraphs of content used to work in the past, but these days, it generally doesn’t work.

The SEO Benefits of Quality Content

Providing value to your visitors is great, but quality content offers a huge benefit regarding search engine optimization (SEO). Here are some of the ways that your rewritten content will impact your SEO efforts:

1. Improved Search Engine Rankings: Search engines have hundreds of ranking factors, but content quality is a big portion of it. The better quality content you produce can be directly correlated to ranking higher for relevant keywords and thus driving organic traffic.
2. Enhanced User Experience: Keep your visitors engaged and satisfied through quality content. A positive user experience is evident when analytics show increased user engagement and longer page visit durations. We’re not strictly focusing on bounce rates, but if users are not spending time on your page reading, that’s a good indication that you have a problem with content.
3. Internal and External Links: Quality content is something that other websites want to link to, and it makes it easier to link even within your own site. People want to share information they discovered, so providing better quality content makes it easier to share, increasing the likelihood and earning external backlinks. Backlinks will definitely help your SEO goals.
4. Improved Mobile Ranking: Google focuses strongly on the mobile experience for users. Content properly formatted for mobile devices gains an extra boost, especially in mobile search results.
5. More Frequent Indexing: While this is less about quality content and more about fresh new content, they are related. Quality content is often something that you don’t delete from your website and instead update it from time to time. The new or updated content has a direct impact on how frequently search engines visit your site to index pages.

Tips for Consistently Producing Quality Content in 2023

Here are a few ways to ensure a consistent flow of quality content on your website:

1. Spend Time on Keyword Research: The time spent reviewing or having someone perform keyword research to identify relevant keywords for your business is priceless. Those keywords often inspire new content ideas and help you optimize your content for search engines. Check out our video on UberSuggest if you want to give it a try yourself.
2.  FAQ and Customers’ Questions: This is a goldmine that many leave untapped. Write down those questions that you get asked regularly and write a blog post around them. You can write a comprehensive FAQ page, split it into multiple articles, and then cross-link the information within your website.
3. Write Great Titles and Subheadings: There is so much information online that you really have to work on standing out and getting people’s attention. Putting effort into writing great titles and subheadings for your content can ensure it receives the attention it deserves. On some social platforms, people only read the title before sharing it with others, so ensure you have your best foot forward regarding titles.
4. Enlist a Second Pair of Eyes: If possible, have someone else read and edit a post before it’s published. You’ll be amazed at how many little issues someone with a fresh pair of eyes can catch that you didn’t notice when you read over your writing.
5. Review Google Analytics Regularly: Pay Attention to Your Analytics: Once you start publishing a consistent stream of new content, look at your Google Analytics data regularly. This will help you see which content is working the best, which will help guide your future efforts. Pay attention to key metrics such as traffic source, page views, time on page, and conversion rates.

Content Promotion: Extending Your Reach

Producing quality content is just one part of the equation; next comes a potentially expensive part of things – advertising. To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you must also concentrate on content promotion. Here are some strategies for extending the reach of your content:

• Social Media Promotion: Share your content on various social media platforms where your target audience is active. You will need to ensure you have a captivating image, and headline text and make use of hashtags when relevant.
•  Email Marketing: Send out newsletters featuring your latest quality content to your subscribers. Email marketing is one of the easiest ways to engage your existing audience and drive repeat traffic to your website.
• Influencer Collaboration: Partner with influencers in your industry to promote your content. It could be someone running a podcast, a business owner wanting to share a collaboration story or a purchased section of someone else’s newsletter. The collaboration can amplify your message and help you reach a wider audience.
• Guest Posting: This used to be really popular in SEO, but it does still carry some weight, especially if you’re not focused on SEO and just focused on eyeballs. Contribute guest posts to other websites in your niche. This not only helps you establish authority but also drives traffic to your site.
• Repurposing Content: Don’t limit your content to a single format. Repurpose blog posts into videos, infographics, or podcasts to reach different audience segments.

Measuring Content Success

This is an area that a lot of people forget to do. It’s great to get all the traffic and generate sales, but you need to use Google Analytics and measure just how effective your particular marketing efforts are for a given medium.  Here are a few different things that we measure when we’re looking at our analytics for a website:

1. Organic Traffic: Monitor your organic traffic to your website. Increases in organic traffic can signify improved search engine rankings and content quality. Once you can isolate a timeframe, it’s time to use Google Search Console to see what keywords changed.
2. Conversion Rates: If you’re selling products online, it’s all about the sale. Track the conversion rates from within your content. You can isolate the path a user took and see if they read content, signed up for a newsletter, or what task they took before purchasing your product. Set goals in Google Analytics and track contact forms, newsletter signups, click-to-call, internal website searches, video watching, and other segments of your website.
3. Social Engagement: Social media is huge. Many of our ecommerce customers see more interaction in their social accounts than they do on other mediums. Review the various engagement levels such as likes, shares, comments, and clicks. These are all valuable indicators of audience interest.
4. Backlinks: Measure the number and quality of backlinks your content earns. Receiving quality backlinks from other websites shows that your content is reaching them and their audience. It also can significantly boost your search engine rankings.
5. User Behavior: Using Google Analytics to gain insights into user behavior and understanding how they interact with your content. Time on page, pages per session, searches, and to an extent, bounce rate, can all help you understand your audience better.
6. Brand Visibility: Monitor your brand’s online visibility. High-quality content helps enhance your brand’s authority and reputation in your industry.

The Role of Consistency

Producing a quality content article is a chore and something that can take several hours to several days. But it can’t stop with just one piece of content, your audience wants more! 

Producing quality content consistently not only keeps your audience engaged but can signal to search engines that you’re active in your niche and can be relied upon to get information.  

Here are a few tips on helping to maintain consistency with content creation:

1. Content Calendars: Create a content calendar outlining when you’re going to publish. It’s all about organization. We often designate time to write the article, when we’ll publish it, and then what days it needs to be posted to social media.
2. Team Collaboration: If you have a team, you’re ahead of most people! You can work with freelancers to help lessen the burden of creating regular content, but be sure that what you post is of the highest quality.
3. Repurpose and Update: Updating older content is one of the easiest ways to create new or fresh content. We have articles on our site from over 10 years ago. We’re constantly rewriting content and updating articles into new articles, or creating short YouTube videos.
4. Delegate Tasks: If you’re stretched for time, consider outsourcing some of your content creation or other marketing tasks to experts in the field. Let others do the heavy lifting, and then allow you to give the final stamp of approval when you’re satisfied with it.

The Role of Content Creators and Marketing Companies

Producing quality content is a time-consuming task and not all businesses have the resources to dedicate to it. This is where freelancers or agencies come into play. 

While Big Red SEO is not an agency, we are a two-person husband and wife team, we are experts in creating excellent content. Whether writing, enhancing, or providing guidance, hiring another company to help can relieve some of the stress of producing content. Companies like ours stay up to date with the latest SEO trends and guidelines released by search engines. As SEO experts, we constantly have an eye on what particular content will have an impact and when things need to be ramped up.

In addition to writing content, we can assist in creating a content strategy, keyword research, and analytics monitoring. This allows you to focus on your business and enjoy the rewards of knowing that someone else is in your corner fighting for those top-ranking positions.

If you want to have a chat, fill out our online contact form, or pick up the phone and call to talk to either Kim or Conor at (402) 522-6468 and we’ll be happy to chat about what you need.

The Power of Quality Content in 2023 and Beyond

Quality content is not something that is going to disappear. With the advancements in AI, we see original content being even more of a focus from Google and Bing. But it’s not just about producing original content, it’s about providing value too. Content must not only engage your audience, but it must also earn the trust of search engines in order to gain better rankings and more visibility.

If you stay consistent in your content marketing efforts, you can drive organic traffic and establish your brand as the authority in your industry, and this all leads to more sales and conversions.

In an era where there are more than 600 million blog websites, and more than 6 million posts per day, Google has a lot of content to sift through. If you want to stand out from the crowd, the content has to be of the highest quality. This is something that cannot be overstated!