In this episode of Actionable Marketing In Minutes we are going to chat about How to Evaluate Your Content Quality.
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Problem:
With businesses having to maintain a presence on so many digital channels, there is huge pressure to churn out copy constantly. People expect your brand and website content to deliver insight or entertain, without being overtly promotional. Content is indeed king but only if it produces engagement. If your content quality is poor then it can impact your brand credibility, reputation and even lead to decreased conversion rates and lost sales. So how can you assess your content to find out the missing ingredients?
Solution:
Here are some guidelines for evaluating and improving your content quality and value.
Is your content well-written? – Potential customers can easily identify high-quality and interesting content that are valuable to them from junk content created to trick the search engines. Your content has to be well-structured, coherent and flow smoothly in order to make a favorable impression on your readers. Avoid spelling and grammatical errors, the use of substandard images and inconsistencies in your blog post, infographic or web page as it can result in brand erosion. Moreover, Google will reward you for taking the time to craft interesting content.
Is Your Content Fresh? – Whether you publish a blog, update a status, or tweet for your business, the best way to improve engagement among followers is to combine quality content with consistent updates. Avoid wasting people’s time by sharing and promoting old news or content that is out of date. Publishing fresh content regularly sends a signal to search engines to crawl your site again afresh so that your new content can be indexed. This helps build your site’s authority and credibility.
Is Your Content Diverse? -To drive traffic between your social media sites make use of diverse platforms. Tweet a link to your blog post or share a video from your YouTube channel to your company’s Facebook page. And make the actual content media-rich. Diversify your content styles and incorporate photos, videos, audios, graphs into your text content, which will lead to better engagement among your readers and also Google.
Can your content be read easily? – Even the most well written content will not get much traction if it is not easy to read. You have to consider the font size, content length, blog template, sentence structure and paragraph format. Text should ideally be broken out into readable paragraphs with headings, subheadings or bullet lists. Think of your audience and play to their reading level. If your target audience is looking for highly scientific terms or very niche-specific terms, you may have more complex text, and if you are targeting a layman audience, then you are likely to have less sophisticated word usage and phrasing.
Finally Check Shareability & Feedback – When assessing your content look at social shares, links, comments and feedback from readers. This should affirm whether the piece of content is interesting, useful, insightful and shareable. Consider sending out a survey to your audience segments as a way to weigh up your publishing efforts. You can use analytics or tools like Quicksprout to find your most successful articles and the content your audience spends the most time reading. Based on the feedback you get, you might need to reconsider your content strategy to create more content around the key qualities in your most popular topics or formats.
Benefits:
There are many other behind-the-scenes analytic factors and on-page content signals involved in driving content success. Understanding those and identifying other performance issues can help in implementing a quality content initiative for a strong impact on traffic and other key metrics that drive your business. Companies that give priority to content quality will definitely see an increase in purchase intent, sales, revenue and customer loyalty.
We hope you’ve found this information helpful. Please connect with us on Twitter @DirectiveGroup or on LinkedIn. Let us know what you think and what you’d like to hear about next. And if you like our podcasts please share with your networks using hashtag #actionablemarketing.
Join us for an upcoming episode where we discuss “Effective Web Design Principles”
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