It’s been almost 3 decades since Bill Gates coined the phrase “Content is King”, and yet it is still applicable. Of course in a different context and circumstances, especially for online advertising industry.
The content is undoubtedly king, but it has to be up to the mark to be entitled to it. In the content marketing world, it is usually the quality behind audiences (traffic) resonating with it, rather than the overall number of visits.
Why less could be more?
The length of content published on sites will of course influence the Search Engine Optimization, but it is not the key to success anymore. In the world where reader comfort is becoming more and more important, the content that ranks best is the one that provides most value to the user.
The readers (so namely, traffic) coming to your website are not interested in how lengthy you have written your blog post or provides additional information.
Contrarily, visitors land on your page to find valuable information that is unique and well-written. You can satisfy them and build engagement by offering them informative and high-quality content.
Let’s focus on how to create posts and entries to maximize user engagement and retention.
What really is “High-Quality Content“
High-quality content refers to informative, original, and appropriately written content that provides value to the audience. It contains in-depth information about the topic that is authentic and well-written. Apart from information and authenticity, the quality of the content also involves how well it is organized and expressed. This includes the formatting, structure, readability, and grammatical accuracy. Hence, the quality of the content also involves expressing the information in an engaging and appealing way.
Google’s Helpful Content Updates on Publishers and Website Owners
The role of content has never been more critical. Google’s Helpful Content Updates, introduced to refine the way content is evaluated, are a game-changer for publishers and website owners. These updates aim to prioritize content that provides genuine value to users, ensuring that the content seen on search results is informative, reliable, and created with the audience in mind.
From a publisher’s perspective, these updates underscore the importance of focusing on user experience over mere SEO tactics. Previously, it was not uncommon to see content created primarily to game the search algorithm—stuffed with keywords, but lacking substance.
Google’s recent updates, however, have shifted the paradigm. Content that fails to meet user needs, even if it’s SEO-optimized, may now find itself demoted in search rankings.
This means that for website owners, the strategy needs to pivot from quantity to quality. It’s not just about publishing more content; it’s about creating content that is insightful, well-researched, and tailored to your audience’s needs.
Google’s algorithms are now better at recognizing content that is written primarily for search engines rather than human readers, and the consequences for such content are becoming increasingly severe.
The implications for digital advertising are significant. High-quality content that ranks well under these new guidelines is likely to attract more organic traffic, leading to better engagement and, ultimately, higher conversion rates. This alignment between content quality and search visibility encourages website owners to invest in content that is both relevant and valuable to their audience, fostering a more trustworthy digital environment.
For those in the digital advertising space, these updates offer an opportunity to reassess content strategies. By focusing on delivering real value through content, publishers can not only improve their search engine rankings but also enhance their reputation and credibility, which are essential in building long-term relationships with both their audience and advertisers.
Top 5 factors that define the content quality
- Helpful
High-quality content is helpful and satisfies the audience’s requirements. It resolves their query and provides effective solutions to their problems.
Always try to think of questions that audience members may ask in order to find the answer you are providing. From the SEO standpoint this boosts how high your content is positioned, and it also should be more captivating for your visitors.
- Engaging
High-quality content catches the audience’s attention and keeps them engaged throughout the reading process. Furthermore, it is influential in driving the audience to proceed with the included CTA or explore other included internal links, also affiliate ones.
- Well Written and Structured
Quality content is always precisely written to appeal to the readers. It is written in an easily readable and digestible way in shorter sentences and paragraphs. Quality content comprises a well-structured outline, smooth transitions, strategic formatting, and appropriate intervals to break the walls of text.
- Polished
High-quality content offers accurate language and grammatical use. It abides by all grammar rules and fulfils language criteria with precision.
- Up-to-Date
Quality content shall always relevant and up to date. Content that offers outdated information and irrelevant details isn’t entitled to high quality.
How Quality Content Drives Better Engagement?
Quality content is the ultimate precursor to attract users and drive engagement. You can foster a deeper connection with your readers by enticing them with influential words and valuable and relevant insights.
When your content appeals to the readers, and they find it worthy, it drives different forms of interaction like social sharing, following on multiple channels, subscribing to email newsletters, mentioning it in discussion platforms, giving testimonials or reviews, etc.
- Rank Better on Search Engines
Search engines like Google and others always prefer high-quality content in order to rank on their top pages. You will always find unique, helpful, original, and well-written content on the first page of search engines.
The more useful and worthy audiences consider your content, the more likely they will spend time reading it and ultimately building engagement. This sends positive signals to search engines that your site is helpful for the users.
As a result, the ranking algorithms position you well in the SERPs. This creates a positive feedback loop and provides high visibility to your site. Therefore, quality content should be your top priority if you are striving to get on the top result pages.
- Consumers Love High-Quality Content
Engagement is derived as a result of user interest. You will be able to determine if your audience is happy with your content by looking at the engagement metrics such as bounce rate, average time on page, and by seeing the number of events that occur on your lander.
The engagement involves visitor interaction by exploring other site pages, clicking on the CTA, following you on social platforms, or subscribing to newsletters.
Or, as most importantly in online advertising and monetizing: by interacting with ads on your site and converting.
To achieve your desired objectives through content, your entire focus should be on ensuring it’s high-quality. For this purpose, your content must not contain clarity, readability, and originality issues. If you have worked on creating content but it still contains such blunders, you can consider paraphrasing it.
Manual paraphrasing can retrieve desired results, but not everyone has these skills. Fortunately, a paraphrasing tool is available for your assistance. A paraphraser is designed to help you overcome common content errors, as it is based on advanced language processing techniques. From ensuring uniqueness in content to adding variety and improving sentence structure, a paraphrasing tool can prove to be a valuable resource in this journey.
- Increase Social Shares
In this digital era, the power of social media and the ability to share content across them can’t be denied. Audiences sharing your content on their accounts are advocates of your content quality.
They, in turn, bring considerable traffic from multiple channels back to your platform. But first, the content needs to be valuable and persuasive enough to appeal to your readers and compel them to share with others.
When your audience finds your content relevant, insightful, and compelling, they share it with others and discuss it on multiple platforms. This drives referral traffic to your site, creating a ripple effect and expanding the website’s reach far beyond its direct audience.
- Enhance Conversion Rates
Publishing high-quality content can significantly increase your conversion rates. Well-written and quality content not only catches the attention of readers but also leads them to convert either as customers, followers, subscribers, etc.
By creating valuable and well-crafted content that resonates with your audience’s pain points and needs, you can assist the users through the converting process. Offer them valuable information and help them make well-informed decisions regarding the desired action.
For instance, you can assist them through the newsletter subscription process by captivating them with useful content and enticing them to subscribe to learn more in the future.
- Reduce Bounce-Back Rate
Offering your audience high-quality content can significantly reduce the bounce rate by driving better engagement. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that click through your site from SERPs and leave without taking any action.
This represents no engagement from the user and is taken as a negative impression by search engines. The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of unengaged sessions by the total number of sessions.
Valuable content that resonates with your corresponding audience needs to encourage them to stay for longer periods and explore other pages of your site as well, ultimately increasing their stay and refraining them from bouncing back without any considerable action.
- Improve Dwell Time
User engagement is also evaluated in terms of dwell time, which is the length of time the user spends on your site. Some individuals confuse it with the bounce rate or its antagonist, which isn’t true at all.
Dwell time calculates the total session time between clicking one of the search results and heading back to them. The audience can quickly run away from your site, seeing a huge block of text and irrelevant information, significantly reducing dwell time.
However, you can captivate them with easy-to-read structure and captivating words. The audience tends to show interest in reading easily skimmable and digestible posts. Therefore, write well-structured and well-written content that retains the audience’s interest.
Conclusion
Every website owner wants to receive engagement from their audience in order to monetize it efficiently and effortlessly.
To achieve this goal, some consider publishing lengthy posts to help entertain users for longer periods and engage them, which isn’t true at all.
They have to work on their quality rather than quantity to get considerable engagement. A detailed take on this is provided in the article above.
Łukasz Pośpiech
