Ten ways to improve content quality

Understanding what quality means to your audience and to your company is the first step along the road to creating superior marketing content. For your audience, it needs to be clear, honest, informative, relevant and, if possible, entertaining. It needs to provide value not only for your customers, but also for your company. Does it, for example, further your communication objectives and KPI metrics, and fit with corporate values and other materials?

Here are ten suggestions to help improve the quality of your marketing content:

1. Placing the reader first is also placing Google first, so write for human consumption and not machine consumption. It was never a smart idea to produce tepid, keyword-stuffed web pages. Now it’s more likely than ever to drive your page and site rankings down. By all means, employ keywords and phraseology that your audience uses and searches for, but keep it natural and don’t overdo it.

2. Ask yourself what’s new with your content. What additional insights or updates are you contributing to the subject area? If it’s a tried and tested theme, bring something fresh to the table. For example, it could be a different angle, additional content tied to current events, a new illustrative case, another format (checklist, infographic or explanatory video, for example) or research that expands on the subject and offers new knowledge. Even well-taken, informative photos or quality graphics that illustrate a subject better than your competitors’ content will do the trick.

3. Use keyword tools such as AnswerThePublic, AlsoAsked, Ahrefs Keyword Generator or Semrush to help provide ideas. These tools and many like them can provide inspiration by showing popular search terms, formulations and queries within your areas of interest.

Credit: AlsoAsked.com

4. Ensure the content is well-written and free of language errors. Let others in the organisation review, comment and proofread the article. If such resources or time are lacking, consider hiring an external editor or proofreader.

5. Review your current content and rank it by how well it performs, e.g. by page views, time spent on page, backlinks and lead generation. Consider how long ago was it posted, and is it ready for an update or revamp? The goal should be to keep your best-performing content fresh, where possible.

6. Complete research into what your audience cares about and then ask yourself how your content can address their needs. Start with internal resources. What information do you have that can be reapplied, and what experts can be brought into play to answer direct queries and provide solutions?

7. Pay extra attention to the main heading and subheadings, as well as the introductory paragraph. Use any keyword sparingly – once, say, in approximately 200 words of text – and create a hook at the start to draw the reader in. Keep the writing succinct and think twice before using industry jargon. Use call-outs, quotes, examples and active voice in your writing.

8. Optimise page layout. Avoid long paragraphs and use subheadings. Add images to supplement your article and include captions. These are a great way to educate, entertain and, of course, they prevent the reader from drawing their own conclusions about the relevance of an image.

9. Consider creating an easily navigable table of contents (toc) for longer articles to make them more accessible and less daunting to the reader. Construct the page so that the toc is always visible, no matter where in the article the reader finds themself.

10. Remember to include a call to action. For example: ‘for assistance with creating content for all hard copy and digital formats, editing and proofreading, please contact us’.

Well, you’ve got to allow us a little self-promotion…