SEO success depends on providing high-quality content to your audiences. The big question is: What exactly does “high quality” mean?
Content has many meanings. In digital marketing, it simply means the information a website displays to users.
But don’t forget: In a different context with a different emphasis on the word (content as opposed to content), content is a synonym for happy and satisfied. The meaning is different, but the letters are the same.
If you want to understand content quality online, keep these two different definitions in mind.
Every webpage has content. “High-quality” content depends on contexts like:
What the needs of your audience are.
What users expect to find.
How the content is presented and how easy it is to pull critical information out of it quickly.
How appropriate the medium of the content is for users’ needs.
In this article, we are going to cover:
1. What Makes Content High Quality?2. Creating Effective SEO Content3. SEO Content Is Both A Strategy & An Individual Interaction
What Makes Content High Quality?
This is a complex question that we hope to answer in full during this article. But let’s start with a simple statement:
High-quality content is whatever the user needs at the time they’re looking for it.
This might not be helpful in a specific sense but note this somewhere because it’s a guiding light that has far-reaching implications for your website and audience strategy.
We use this definition because the quality of your content isn’t static. Google and other search engines know this and frequently update search engine results pages (SERPs) and algorithms to adjust for changing user priorities.
You need to bake this idea into your understanding of content and audiences. You can have the most beautifully written, best-formatted content, but if your target audience doesn’t need that information in that format, it’s not “high-quality” for SEO.
If you provide a story when the user is looking for a two-sentence answer, then you’re not serving their interests.
This is especially pertinent with the introduction of generative AI features into search platforms. This is a continuation of a “zero click” phenomenon for certain types of searches and why Google doesn’t send a user to a website for these searches.
Defining & Meeting Audience Needs
SEO professionals have many different ways of conceptualizing these ideas. One of the most common is “the funnel,” which categorizes content into broad categories based on its position in a marketing journey.
The funnel is usually categorized something like this:
Top of the funnel: Informational intent and awareness-building content.
Middle of the funnel: Consideration intent and product/service-focused content.
Bottom of the funnel: Purchase intent and conversion content.
While it’s helpful to categorize types of content by their purpose in your marketing strategy, this can be an overly limiting view of user intent and encourages linear thinking when you conceptualize user journeys.
As Google gets more specific about intent, such broad categorization becomes less helpful in determining whether content meets users’ needs.
Build a list of verbs that describe the specific needs of your audience while they’re searching. Ideally, you should base this on audience research and data you have about them and their online activity.
Learn who they follow, what questions they ask, when a solution seems to satisfy them, what content they engage with, etc.
Then, create verb categories to apply to search terms during your keyword research. For example:
Purchase.
Compare.
Discover.
Learn.
Achieve.
Check.
User Intends To Purchase
If the user is looking for something to buy, then high quality probably looks like a clean landing or product page that’s easy to navigate. Be sure to include plenty of detail so search engines can match your page to specific parameters the user might enter or have in their search history.
Product photos and videos, reviews and testimonials, and Schema markup can all help these pages serve a better experience and convert. Pay particular attention to technical performance and speed.
Remember that you’re highly likely to go up against ads on the SERPs for these queries, and driving traffic to landing pages can be difficult.
User Intends To Compare
This could take a couple of different forms. Users might come to you for reviews and comparisons on other things or to compare your benefits to those of another company.
For this content to be successful, you need to be dialed into what problems a user is trying to solve, what pain points they have, and how specific differences impact their outcomes.
This is the old “features vs. benefits” marketing argument, but the answer is “both.” Users could want to see all the features listed, but don’t forget to contextualize how those features solve specific problems.
User Intends To Discover
This intent could describe a user looking for industry news, data to support their research, or new influencers to follow.
Prioritize the experience they’re seeking and ensure that the discovery happens quickly.
This could look like adding text summaries or videos to the top of posts, tables of contents to assist with navigation, or page design elements that highlight the most critical information.
User Intends To Learn
If a user intends to learn about a topic, a long, well-organized post, video, or series of either may serve them best. This content should be in-depth, well-organized, and written by genuine topic experts. You may need to demonstrate the author’s qualifications to build trust with readers.
You must consider the existing knowledge level of your target audience. Advanced content will not satisfy the needs of inexperienced users, while basic content will bore advanced users.
Don’t try to satisfy both audiences in a single experience. It’s tempting to include basic questions in this type of content to target more SEO keywords, but think about whether you’re trading keywords for user experience.
For example, if you write a post about “how to use a straight razor” and your subheadings look like the ones below, you’re probably not serving the correct intent.
What is a straight razor?
Are straight razors dangerous?
Should I use a straight razor?
The chances are high that someone landing on your page “how to use a straight razor” doesn’t need answers to these basic questions. In other words, you’re wasting their time.
User Intends To Achieve
A slightly different intent from learning. In this instance, a user has a specific goal for an action they want to perform. Like learning content, it should be written by subject matter experts.
If the person creating this content doesn’t have sufficient first-hand experience, they won’t effectively guide users and predict their real-world needs. This results in unsatisfying content and a failure point of many SEO content strategies.
In SEJ’s SEO Trends 2024 ebook, Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand at Wix, said:
“One trend I would get ahead of that aligns with Google’s focus on expertise and experience is what I’m coining “situational content.” Situational content attempts to predict the various outcomes of any advice or the like offered within the content to present the next logical steps. If, for example, a piece of content provides advice about how to get a baby to sleep through the night, it would then offer the next steps if that advice didn’t work.
This is “situational” – if X doesn’t work, you might want to try Y. Situational content creates a compelling form of content I see more frequently. It does a few things for the reader:
It addresses them and their needs directly.
It’s more conversational than standard content (an emerging content
trend itself).
To predict various outcomes and situations, you have to actually know what
you’re talking about.
That latter point directly addresses E-E-A-T. You can only predict and address secondary situations with expertise and experience. Most of all, situational content indicates to the user that a real person, not a large language model (LLM), wrote it.”
The difference between “learn” and “achieve” intents can be difficult to see. Sometimes, you might need to satisfy both. Pay careful attention to these types of content.
User Intends To Check
Misunderstanding when a user just wants to “check” something can cause you to waste resources on content doomed not to perform, and another failure point of SEO strategies. If what a user needs can be solved in a few sentences, you’re in zero-click territory.
For example, ‘How to tie a bowtie’.
That is, Google will serve users an answer on the SERP, and they may not click a link at all. You may want to target these types of queries as part of longform content for other search intents using good content organization and Schema markup.
That way, you can give your authoritative and in-depth content opportunities to show up in rich results on SERPs, and users might click through if they see more information available or have follow-up questions.
You should consider these intents part of your SEO strategy, but think of them as awareness and branding tactics. AI features such as AI Overviews in Google seek to surface quick answers to queries. It will be much harder to acquire clicks on SERPs where features like this are activated.
If you struggle to understand why well-written content is losing traffic, you should assess whether you wrote hundreds of words to answer a query that only needed 30.
More intents exist, and to complicate matters further, they are not exclusive to each other in a single piece of content. Comparison and discovery intents, for example, often combine in listicles, product comparisons, and titles like “X alternatives to X.”
More reading about user intent:
Continue reading this article 👇
Content Quality Signifiers
While there’s no quantifiable answer to what good content means, there are many ways to evaluate it to ensure it contains key signs of quality.
Google’s content guidelines provide some questions you can ask yourself to objectively assess your content’s quality.
The SEO content mantra is E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.