What Goes Into Making ‘Good Content’?

Making up a vital part of any successful online marketing strategy is the presence of good content, but what exactly does that entail? And how can you distinguish between a good piece of content and a bad one?

While there are some obvious signs, such as spelling and grammar, other things you must consider are; who the content is aimed at, whether it is serving a purpose and if the content has been properly optimised. There is a lot more that goes into making a good piece of content than you might realise, which is why having the ability to create something that is equally as attractive to an audience and search engines is arguably the most valuable commodity of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

Research

As with anything, research comes first. A good piece of content simply isn’t created from thin air – there has to be a certain amount of preparation that happens before even a single word is written. Just like constructing a building, you would not lay a brick without any designs in place.

Depending on the purpose of your content, your research needs to focus on what your competitors are doing and what your customers are searching for. By marrying these up, not only will you ensure that your content covers all points, but will hopefully highlight a gap that hasn’t yet been fulfilled – this should help to set your page apart, giving you an advantage in the eyes of search engines and potential customers.

Finding out what customers are asking for is the most important part of producing good content for SEO. You can have one of the most compelling and well-written articles on your website but, unless it is optimised correctly, it probably won’t rank well in the search results…at least not for what you would want it to, anyway. By finding and identifying any queries and/or keywords relevant to your content that have a good volume of searches (and, hopefully, little competition), these can and should feature (sparingly) in your content.

Planning

Once the research has been completed, the next step is to plan your piece of content. Here, you should decide on a format and, ideally, a rough word count. This will help you to ensure that the content not only fits on the page but looks good whilst doing so – this is important if you are considering adding any additional videos and/or images to provide extra value (more on this later).

Devising a plan or, in this case, a content brief will help to ensure that no key parts are missed out. Could you imagine spending all that time conducting research, only to realise that much of it was not used? That would be annoying. This is especially important if the person conducting research is not going to be the one writing it, meaning that creating a detailed brief is key.

A content brief should include:

• Title/Topic
• Word count
• Keywords
• Purpose (such as whether it is promotional, informational, or designed to drive engagement)
• Linked pages (other pages on the website you want to be linked in the post)
• Key points to cover
• Any additional information that will help the writer

If possible, the brief should also include a design layout consisting of any key features and/or buttons and where on the page that these will be. This can help to visualise how the content will look on the page, as well as helping to ensure that passages of text are not abruptly broken up which can harm user experience, which is one of Google’s key ranking factors.

Writing

So, here we are. Now that we have conducted research and created a detailed plan, we can get started on creating the content. If you are guilty of sitting down at your keyboard and starting a piece of content by typing a few words and seeing where they take you, we hope that this post has already been an eye-opener for you – and has highlighted some of the reasons why your content has not been performing well up until now.

With all the key information to include in a post, all that is left is to bring it all together in a neatly gift-wrapped article. Pretty simple because, after all, all the hard work has already been done, right? Wrong!

The work of a talented writer should never be underestimated. To be able to write a piece of content that not only informs but holds the audience’s attention is an art that is so often disregarded. You can have the best business in the world but poor content on your website will see you miss out on sales to your competitors, all of whom have websites with beautifully written content that educates and entertains, along with correct spelling and grammar in all the right places.

If you would not consider yourself to be a strong writer, you should seek out the services of someone who is. This is the part where we tell you that Siteminders have a team of fantastic writers (if you have read up until now, we have proven our point) that can transform your website’s content.

Images and Video

Just as there is more than one way to crack an egg, there is more than one type of content that will rank on Google. To accompany your eloquently written passages, the careful use of images and videos that add value to the text (as well as to break up longer pieces into smaller, more digestible chunks of text) can also help your website to climb the search rankings.

We have already mentioned that search engines such as Google consider user experience as a ranking factor, so if you are worried about retaining the attention of your audience with an extra-long article, you might want to break that up with an image or video. It is important to consider what content you choose to use, meaning that any image or video should be relevant to the rest of the page.

For example, if you are producing a how-to guide, you can utilise any images or video to bring your text to life. Remember, not every user of your website learns best by reading, so this is your opportunity to appeal to other learning styles by offering visuals such as diagrams, infographics, pictures of what something should look like and step-by-step videos.

Not only can images and videos help the page in which they are on to rank, but they can rank in their own right. Image and video searches are also hugely popular amongst users and, when associated with relevant keywords, your images and videos can act as another channel in which to bring potential customers to your business.

Don’t Be Afraid to Update Your Content

Unlike with forms of print media, where your words are forever etched in stone (or ink), uploaded web content is made so you can update and alter your content accordingly. This means that if you have a piece of content on your website that you feel is underperforming and/or could be altered to serve another purpose, you can do whatever you want with it.

This is useful in the case of any pages that could require periodic updates, such as any seasonal campaigns or offers on your website. Rather than creating a new page every time, updating the content on your page not only maintains a clean sitemap but means that you can retain the authority that the page has gained since its original publication.

When you have a page that is ranking well, you are far better updating the content rather than trying to rank a completely different page for the same keywords. If you create a new page and either delete or forget about an old page that was performing well, you risk losing the rankings and, with that, traffic of your original page and failing to replicate that with the new page.

Maintaining Content

If your website has a blog (and if it doesn’t, it should), analysing old content is something that we would recommend doing. If you find content that isn’t performing well and is, effectively, just sitting there doing nothing, there could be an opportunity to combine several posts into one.

Many websites are guilty of having old posts with short word counts that only cover a small portion of what the user is looking for. It may just be that you have several posts that, when stitched together, could form a single piece of content that will perform well in the search rankings. Some might see this as cheating, but there is no point in having pages of content that aren't doing anything when you can transform them into something that does. It’s just good housekeeping.

As you can see, there is a lot more that goes into making good content than simply sitting at the computer for an hour and bashing out a chunk of text. It takes time and effort to produce content that serves its purpose of ranking in the search engines and answering the queries of the user. If you are not willing to go to these lengths, we can assure you that your competition is – and that is where your potential customers are going, as well as existing customers if you don’t act quickly.