Intro: What Is Quality Content and How SEO Plays a Role

The oft-quoted phrase “Content is King” has long been a tenet of marketing strategy, and it remains so today. However, how can you create content that will effectively achieve this regal status? The answer is found at the junction of quality and SEO optimisation. Whether you’re creating product copy, blog pieces, page descriptions, or lead magnets, offering relevant, valuable, and engaging content is a critical step towards success. Build on that with targeted content optimisations that match the intent of user searches, and you’ll be well-positioned in the search engine results. Read on for general guidance and tactical recommendations on how to achieve this within your content.

How To Build Quality Content

Building quality content on your website is crucial to creating a strategic SEO strategy. However, understanding what resonates with your target audience may change your strategy over time, so in the meantime, stick to these three simple steps when you first start building out content to set yourself up for success:

1. Develop brand voice guidelines and stay consistent with them. Establishing brand voice, style and value guidelines is an important step in creating unique, quality content. Sticking to these guidelines throughout your content strategy will help you stand out amongst your competitors and build brand awareness for your website.

2. Keep your audience’s interest in mind when writing your content. If you have a good idea of who your target audience is and what they’re interested in reading, ensure you tailor your content to them. The quality of your content is ultimately determined by your audience, so conduct keyword research before developing your content strategy to better understand what topics and keywords users are searching for and implement them into your strategy.

3. Ensure your headline and first paragraph are compelling. For readers to be interested in your content and prevent a high bounce rate, you need to grab their attention within the first 50 words of your content. Utilize your brand voice guidelines to do this to ensure you’re staying consistent with your verbiage.

Quality Content: Do’s and Don’ts

Quality content is when SEO tactics and customer-focused content consolidate. It’s the perfect marriage of analytical and creative and can result in increased search ranking and increased organic traffic. Google defines quality content as focusing on the user rather than the algorithm itself. When it comes to creating quality content, there are must-have features you’ll want to include in your content as well as some things you’ll want to avoid.

Quality content do’s:

• Follow E-A-T guidelines: EAT stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness
• Use keyword research to find topics your target audience is interested in
• Make sure your content is primarily for users, not the search engine
• Make sure your content is truthful and not deceiving: If your metadata describes content focused on how to wash curly hair, make sure the bulk of the article is focused on how to wash curly hair.

Quality Content Don’ts:

• Avoid copying content or taking content from another site, since this will be reported.
• Avoid keyword stuffing and ensure the text sounds natural and original.
• Don’t add content merely to add content; make sure it’s intentional and helpful to the user.
• Avoid including any sneaky redirects.

Ultimately, don’t try to fool Google. Search engines can tell the difference between quality material designed for customers and content crammed with out-of-date methods.

Modern SEO Best Practices

Search Engine Optimization is constantly evolving and marketers should expect that Google will continue to roll out algorithm changes. It’s your job to account for these changes, reassess and refine. Now, that being said, it can often still feel daunting to keep up with the latest best practices. However, we’ve consolidated some modern SEO best practices to help keep your content strategy strong.

1. Create a meaningful FAQ page. This is key for prioritizing the user experience by answering questions in a concise manner that’s easy for the user to digest and understand. Plus, you’ll get bonus points from Google for showing customers that you care.
2. Make sure to organize your content by topic. And, it all circles back to the user experience. This is another way to create a seamless experience for users to get the information they’re looking for quickly. It’s important to note that as your website architecture changes, you’ll want to update how your content is organized as well.
3. Focus on building relationships and providing value with link building. Link building is an incredibly effective SEO tactic that takes time. However, the immediate focus for link-building success goes back to the basics: building meaningful relationships. You’ll want to be selective and develop relationships with domains that support your audience. During this process, make sure to take advantage of Google Search Console to guide who to reach out to.

Building authority takes time, and Google will continue to alter in unpredictable ways, so as with any SEO technique, you must be aware of this. However, you will reap rewards as long as you keep the customer experience as your priority.

How To Create Quality Content

As you can see, creating quality content is a multifaceted process… But a very important one! Our list of dos and don’ts will help keep even the most confused on the right track. But if you’re still unsure, put yourself in the shoes of the user and consider whether you’re just writing for rankings or if you’re truly writing to provide an answer to someone’s question. If you choose he latter, you’ll always come out on top!