A popular route taken by website owners, managers and SEOs who seek to gain a good share of traffic and ranking for their target keywords had been to optimize their posts, get it trending, shared on the social networks and so on. As long as they are able to craft pages that make it on Google news, get trending, roll in the traffic and earn some backlinks, they are fine.

But not all content generation strategies are good for SEO and do actually improve ranking. In this post, we x-ray the best content generation and marketing strategies that will not raise a Google red flag and will improve your website quality and ranking.

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Why Content is Important For SEO

Google is basically a search engine and it simply serves users with the most appropriate content for their queries. If it doesn’t have the right quality content, it’s search results will equally be affected and users are more likely to look for alternatives. Before the launch of the Google search in 1998, there were other search engines. Google’s quality gave it the advantage and Google currently controls over 85 percent of the search market (source: Statistica).

So the better the quality of content served in search results, the more satisfied users will be in using the Google search or any other search engine. Google pays much attention to user experience and satisfaction and will always serve its users with the results that it considers most appropriate with the best answers for a search querry. It can only do these from existing content so the more quality content it has, the better results it will serve its users.

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Do All Content Meet Google Quality Expectations?

Prior to this time, contents that do not violate Google’s quality guidelines were just fine. Today, not all quality content get Google’s thumbs up. You could write very good quality content on a subject that has already saturated the internet and your input doesn’t make much difference to your website users. Ordinarily, writing the same thing that people have written about in much detail will not likely bring in the right and expected results. and does not give your website that exceptional advantage

What Then is Quality Content

Interestingly, Google says quality is relative and subjective. In a Google webmaster hangout, someone asked Google’s John Mueller what was quality content for Google.

The question was:

What is quality content in Google’s eyes? If two people are writing on the same content it’s possible they have a different opinion on the same thing. Then how does Google decide which one is better?

Mueller replies:

With regards to quality content, in general this is something where you as the site owner probably know a lot more about what is actually quality content for your specific kind of site.

So that’s something where I wouldn’t worry too much about what Google thinks about quality content. But rather you need to show that you really have something that’s unique and compelling and of high quality.

View the webmaster hangout here

Relevance and Authority

Your content does not just have to be detailed, it is more rewarding when it contains something new and unique. That way, it is most valuable and Google reward websites with better ranking for such great content.

An important aspect of content quality is relevance and authority.

Gogle’s John Mueller shares Google thinking about relevance:

This is something we do all the time as well. We do a/b tests in the search results all the time to see how can we make sure that we continue to provide relevant results, even when users needs and expectations continue to change over time.
We do user studies in search console as well where we try new features out and try to kind of see which ways users are either confused by these new features or which way they can work better with these new features.

Watch the Google Hangout Here

Relevance is enhanced when content offers something new and unique. When you publish a highly detailed content that does not offer anything new to readers, it is taken as high content of little relevance, does not generate much impact for ranking and traffic.

Authority is equally important in assessing quality. When the content author is a reference point for the subject and knowledgeable about it, the content is seen as authoritative. Another way to make your content authoritative is to build it around the opinion of an authority on the subject matter. For example, discussing SEO based on the suggestions from John Mueller of Google, Rand Fishkin, former CEO of MOZ or Neil Patel can really suggest that you are on top of current trends and your opinion can be far more respected.

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User Experience Impact Quality Assessment

Google has severally emphasized the importance of satisfying user intent. It has gone further to re-assess the way it see website bounce rate and no longer simply consider a single page visit before an exit as a bounce. I’ll explain that further. If a visitor lands on a page from the search engine, spends about 5 minutes on an article that requires 6 minutes to read and does not go back to search, it is taken that the visitor found what he or she needed and so had no need to search further.

The same thing happens if the visitor spends a significant amount of time, may be 4 minutes reading and returns to search for something else. That behavior suggests an interaction that led to asking further questions on the part of the visitor.

So, if the user experience signals are great, user reaction and comment suggest happy customers and the metrics show that your user experience metrics are good, then you have a high quality content.

Key Indicators of Good User Experience

1. Fast website speed. Users may not even be able to read your content if your website loads slowly. Capturing the attention and retaining them on your website should begin with speed improvements. Fundamentally, this will require an effective catching system, optimizing images and compressing your content.
2. Lower bounce rate. If people spend long time on your website, say about 2 minutes, you can consider that your bounce rate is not bad. Good bounce rates usually fall at 50 percent or lower. When bounce rates are too low, it suggest some technical errors on your website and in cases where your bounce rate falls below 20 percent, you will need to to conduct a review of your pages to see if there be some issues. Bounce rates also fluctuate by industry. In the news and blogging industry, bounce rates and much lower.
3. Dwell time. The longer people stay on your page, the better. Contents are generally regarded as impressive when people spend long time reading. The longer the dwell time, the better the user experience.
4. Mobile friendliness. Your website should be usable on all devices including mobile devices. It also counts when it is friendly and usable on all modern browsers.

How to Boost User Experience

1. Use call to action – Implementing call to action like signup forms, subscriptions, buy now buttons and a good way to test a website user experience. When users respond to these calls, it suggest that you have done a good job in improving user experience on your website.
2. Work to boost your website speed. If if your website is already fast like you will have most static content, there is always room for improvement and speed improvement can never too good when there be room to make it better. Learn further with this article on A Practical Guide to Page Speed Improvement.
3. Ease of navigation. The easier it is to use your website, navigate its internal links and find contents, the better and more useful its users will find it.
4. Grammar and errors. Errors give a different context to your writings. Writing without errors will boost your user experience.
5. Clickability. To improve the usability of your website, make clickable elements conspicuous enough for users.
6. Mobile friendliness. We have earlier given insights on the need to mobile frindliness above.
7. In-depth coverage of subject matter
8. Clarity and simplicity. Your purpose in every post should be clear and unambiguous.
9. Visuals, images and color contrast. Use images to describe your message and ensure proper color contrast. This has been a bit difficult for most website designers and even for content professionals.
10. Page ads and intrusions. Do not use too much ads on your page. They annoy users, obstruct their views and could force website users to abandon your page.

Final Words

Quality is intuitive when you assess it from the standpoint of users. So in writing, your ultimate goal should be to provide as much information that answers the questions users ask or could ask. If your answers is seen as the best and user responses to your page suggest a good impression, Google will reward your page with appropriate ranking.

This is not to say that you should ignore the metrics. Combining the results of page analysis with your user-focused content can produce amazing results. Where possible, keep improving as there never be a terminal point for continuous improving.

Have contributions to make, let’s have them in the comments.