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.
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:
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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.
Google uses many signals to approximate these concepts and apply these signals to ranking algorithms. To be clear, E-E-A-T are not ranking factors themselves. But they are the concepts that ranking systems attempt to emulate via other signals.
These concepts apply to individual pages and to websites as a whole.
Experience: Are the people creating content directly knowledgeable about the subject matter, and do you demonstrate credible experience?
Expertise: Does your content demonstrate genuine expertise through depth, accuracy, and relevance?
Authoritativeness: Is your website an authoritative source about the topic?
Trust: Is your website trustworthy, considering the information or purposes at hand?
In its content guidelines, Google says this about E-E-A-T:
“Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them. For example, some content might be helpful based on the experience it demonstrates, while other content might be helpful because of the expertise it shares.”
Understanding these concepts is critical for building a content strategy because publishing content with poor E-E-A-T signals could impact your website as a whole. Google’s language downplays this potential impact, but it’s critical to know that it’s possible. It’s tempting to assume that because a website has high “authority” in a general sense or in one particular area, anything it publishes is considered authoritative. This may not be true.
If you chase traffic by creating content outside your core areas of authority and expertise, that content may perform poorly and drag the rest of your site down.
More reading about E-E-A-T:
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Creating Effective SEO Content
This article focuses on written content, but don’t neglect multimedia in your content strategy.
The thought process behind content should go a little bit like this:
Audience > Query (Keywords) > Intent > Brief / Outline > Create
You can also express it as a series of questions:
- Audience: Who is our audience?
- Query: What are they searching for?
- Intent: Why?
- Brief: How can we best assist them?
- Create: What does exceptional user experience look like?
Keyword Research For Content
Keyword research is a massive topic on its own, so here are some key pieces of advice and a few additional resources:
- Look at the SERPs for the keywords you target to understand what Google prioritizes, what your competitors are doing, what success looks like, and whether there are gaps you can fill.
- Cluster related keywords together and develop a content strategy that covers multiple branching areas of a topic deeply.
- High search volume often means high competition. Allocate your resources carefully between acquiring lower competition positions and fighting for a slice of competitive traffic.
- Building a robust catalog of content focused on long-tail keywords can help you acquire the authority to compete in more competitive SERPs for related topics.
More reading about keyword research:
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Briefing SEO Content
Once you have performed your research and identified the intents you must target, it’s time to plan the content.
SEO professionals may not have the required knowledge to create content that demonstrates experience and expertise – unless they’re writing about SEO.
They’re SEO specialists, so if your website is about finance or razor blades, someone else will need to provide the knowledge.
Briefing is critical because it allows the SEO team to communicate all that hard work and research to the person or team creating the content. A successful brief should inform the content creators:
- The target keyword strategy, with suggestions or a template for the title and subheadings.
- The purpose of the content for the user: What the user should learn or be able to accomplish.
- The purpose of the content for the business: Where it falls into the marketing strategy and relevant KPIs.
- Details such as length, style guide or voice notes, and key pieces of information to be included.
Creating SEO Content
Your research should guide the format of your writing.
Remember, intent impacts the usability of different types of content. Prioritize the information most likely to solve the user’s intent.
You can do this by providing summaries, tables of contents, videos, pictures, skip links, and, most importantly, headings.
Use The Title & Headings To Target Keywords & Organize Information
The title of a page is your primary keyword opportunity. It’s also the first thing users will see on a SERP, which impacts CTR. Match the title to your target query and think about effectively describing the content to entice a click. But don’t misrepresent your page for clicks.
Your primary responsibility in SEO content is to set expectations and then deliver on them. Don’t set if you can’t deliver.
HTML heading formats help users navigate the page by breaking up blocks of text and indicating where certain topics are covered. They’re critical to your on-page SEO, so use your keywords.
Expectations are as true for headings as for titles. Headings should be descriptive and useful. Prioritize setting an expectation for what the user will find on that part of the page and then delivering on that expectation.
More reading about headings:
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Get To The Point
Whether content should be long or short is subjective to its purpose. All SEO content should be as short as possible while achieving its goals. “As short as possible” could mean 4,000 words.
If you need 4,000 words to achieve your goal, then use them. But don’t add any more than you need.
This is a call to avoid rambling, especially in introductions. Do you really need to cite the projected growth of an industry just to prove it’s worth talking about?
Not unless you’re writing a news story about that growth. Cut that sentence and the link to Statista from your introduction. (No shade, Statista, you rock.)
Features like skip links can also help with this. Give users the option to skim and skip directly to what they need.
Use Internal Links To Connect Your Pages Together & Provide Further Reading
Internal links are the bedrock of SEO content strategies. They are how you organize related pages and guide users around your website. They also spread the SEO value of your pages to the pages they’re connected to.
In the keyword research section, we suggested that you create clusters of keywords and topics to write about – this is why. You build authority by covering a topic in-depth and creating multiple pages exploring it and all its subtopics.
You should link between pages related to one another at contextually important points in the content. You can use this tactic to direct the SEO power of multiple pages to one important page for your strategy or your business.
Contextually relevant links that properly set expectations for what the user will find also contribute to a good site experience.
More reading about internal linking:
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Use Personal Experiences And Unique Expertise To Stand Out
AI presents numerous challenges for SEOs. Anyone can quickly create content at scale using generative AI tools.
The tools can replicate competitors, synthesize content together from myriad sources, and enable breakneck publishing paces. This poses two core problems:
- How do you stand out with so much AI content out there?
- How do you build trust in audiences looking for legitimate experts?
For now, the best answer is to lean into the E-E-A-T principles that Google prioritizes.
- Tell human stories with your content that demonstrate your experience and expertise.
- Use Oberstein’s “situational content” principle, mentioned earlier in this article, to connect with your audience’s experiences and needs.
- Ensure that content is created by verifiable experts, especially if that content involves topics that can impact the audience’s well-being (YMYL.)
SEO Content Is Both A Strategy & An Individual Interaction
It’s easy to focus on what you need from users: what keyword you want to rank for, what you want users to click, and what actions you want them to take.
But all of that falls apart if you don’t honor the individual interaction between your website and a user who needs something.
Audience-first content is SEO content. Content is a core function of SEO because it’s the basis of how humans and algorithms understand your website.
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