What Is Good Content?
What Is Good Content?
Content is king. That’s what they say, anyway. And it is true unless it is the Court Jester of content. Ok, enough with the dumb royal metaphors. The simple fact is that content will make or break your website. While Google looks at many factors when accessing your website, it is the content and how it is written that is going to help them decide how authoritative your webpage is and how highly it should be ranked.
So, what makes up good content?
That’s a question with many answers. To start, in terms of SEO, there is what one should consider “required” content. This is content that makes up most websites. In fact, Google looks for this content when it crawls your website. Google may not move you up in the rankings for having it, but if you don’t, they may not be very kind to your site.
Essential Web Content:
Home Page
About
Contact
FAQ’s
Privacy Policy
Terms and Conditions
404 Page
These should be separate pages and in the site’s navigation. And yes, you really do need Privacy and Terms pages. If you don’t Google might just skip right by your site. Not to mention it is technically illegal to use some of Google’s tools without them.
If your business has more than just you, consider putting up a Team Page that introduces everyone on your team.
Then there is on page content.
There are still the same basic writing rules that apply to web content.
Start by defining the purpose and topic of the content.
Define your audience. Who are you writing to?
Write clearly and in short sentences
Make the text easy to scan – use headings, lists, etc.
Don’t use jargon
Don’t keep using the same words
Include multimedia
Following these basic principles will help you develop content that is clear and easy to read. This is something that Google does pay attention to.
Length
Over time the average blog post has grown to over 1200 words. It sounds like a lot, and if you are not a natural writer or face writer’s block (as I often do) it can seem impossible. I’m currently at 194 words in this article and wondering where the next 1,000 are going to come from.
There are several studies that suggest quite heavily that the longer the content, the higher it will eventually rank. Some models say that longer content will rank higher and faster than shorter.
But here’s the thing, the words must be worth the space they take up. But we will get to that in a bit.
Does everything have to be over 1,000 words? No. But it should definitely be over 300. More importantly, it should be well written, easy to read, and flow in a natural voice.
Topic
The entire goal of creating content for your website, at least most of the time, is to improve your website. This is done through creating informative pieces for users. The more the topic of each page is in tune with the keyword that it should be optimized for, the better it will look to Google.
So, what does Google look for? Let’s take a quick look into authority scores.
Page Authority and Domain Authority are two factors they good content and SEO work towards building. They are both scores that are used to rate your pages and site on a scale from 1 – 100.
Google develops your domain score and a company called Moz created the Page Authority metric to show how well an individual page within a domain will rank. The higher these scores, there better the domain/page will perform.
This is where topical writing comes into play. Keywords are still important, but what Google is working towards is finding, analyzing, and ranking for content that applies to and answers the user’s query. It’s not just about getting keywords shoved into the text anymore. Google expects more nuance.
Your content must be good. Not just exist.
What Is Not Good Content?
Writing just to write. Putting words on the page just to have words on the page is counterproductive.
How many internet search results have you clicked and read that didn’t give you anything close to the answer you were looking for?
The content that you include on your website must be purposeful and focused. Putting information on pricing, scheduling, processes, Instagram feeds, blog articles, etc., all on the same page is confusing. It is confusing for Google and for the users of the website. For the most part, it should be one page, one topic.
As far as Google is concerned, the content on your site, and in fact your entire website, is supposed to deliver a good user experience. This includes the website structure, speed, technical aspects, and the content on the pages. Adding words to page text and blog articles to boost word count without adding additional or substantive material will lower your authority score with Google.
While it is a topic for another article, User Experience, or UX, is pretty much all Google cares about when evaluating your website. This thing is, that evaluation is split up into a few hundred things which make up a complete and inclusive SEO strategy.
Content is vitally important to your website. Many sites that I see have hardly any. Make sure that your content is strong. Make it purposeful. Make it easy to read. Make it rank!