Over the years, “high-quality content” has held different meanings. The current acceptable standard is that content can be classified as high quality when it is over 1,000+ words, as that is what Google loves.
But is a topic with 1,000 words content the only indicator of high-quality content?
Of course not.
What Is High-Quality Content?
Quality content is primarily content that achieves your marketing goal. That might be:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Ranking well on search engines
- Improving click-through rates
- Generating leads
- Getting social shares
A piece of content that achieves any (or all) of these marketing objectives is quality content.
Here are some points to help you create quality content:
1. Research Good Content & Always Have a Backlog of Content Ideas
When you create the right content, your audience will of course read it and help spread it for you.
Get content ideas by checking how your competitors do it and see which type of contents are working for them. You can also use online tools like Google Trends to help you see what topics are trending.
Whatever route you take, you’ll likely have lots of ideas which you can save for later dates on your editorial calendar.
2. Perform Research on Your Chosen Topic
Research is imperative – whether you’re creating visual, audio, or written content. Even if you plan to write solely based on your personal experience, you still need to research your topic.
Research to know what you can improve on based on the already existing content you find. If your ideas are different from what you discover during your research, don’t be afraid to include them in your content. Otherwise, you’ll end up sounding like everyone else.
Want to give your content more credibility? Cite current studies or data.
3. Choose Your Own Unique Perspective
Creating content that is similar to what others have already created is sometimes inevitable. But that often means you can stand out in several ways with careful forethought and planning.
Let’s use the headline of this post as an example – Stand Out With High-Quality Content.
You could separate your content just by changing the headline to something different, like:
- How Not to Create High-Quality Content
- A Data-Driven Guide for Creating High-Quality Content
- Why You Shouldn’t Create High-Quality Content
- Why Creating High-Quality Content Doesn’t Work
These are some examples showing what’s possible and you can apply this to a host of other topics.
4. Use Different Content Forms
Use multimedia to enhance your contents. Other media forms that can boost and add flavor to your content are the following:
- Pictures
- Screenshots
- Memes
- Infographics
- Charts
- Videos
Visual content generally may include text, while videos can have charts, pictures, screenshots, and text. Don’t hesitate on adding different content forms to your piece.
5. Review the Final Piece
Time is your one big problem when creating quality content.
When you’re under pressure to publish content, sometimes you may produce less than stellar content. That’s why you should always create content ahead of time so that there’s enough time to review and determine if it’s good enough for publishing. Let the article stay for a day or two, then come back to it. You’ll easily identify areas you can improve or areas you should remove for clarity because they don’t add much to the discussion.
Video and audio for example needs editing to make them more refined for consumption by your audience.
How you review your content will differ across different content formats, but do it anyway to ensure that what you’ll publish is the best it can be.
6. Measure Your Content’s Performance
What were your goals for creating the content? How does the content stack up against these goals?
For example, common marketing goals for content can include but are not limited to:
- Ranking on Google
- Increasing customer engagement
- Improving brand awareness
- Increasing conversions
Let’s say you’re trying to increase customer engagement. You’ll look at metrics like time spent on page, social shares, and for written content probably use a heatmap software to check how people are reading your content or if they’re scrolling to the end at all. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
Conclusion
Content is an important part of your brand’s identity. You build your brand based on the content you create but make sure you target the right audience.
Also remember that making your brand stand out requires you to create high-quality content. It’s an important part of any SEO arsenal.