You’ve all seen it but hardly ever read it past the introduction- low-quality content. Plain text, no structure, repeating the same thing over and over again, with no clear goal or call to action. As business owners, you have to avoid this.
Statistics show that no matter how long your article is, you have a high chance of keeping people interested right until the first half of the text. After that, there is a major drop, so you had better make some good points by then.
Speaking of poor-quality content, let’s dive a bit deeper, looking from the other way around- the importance of high-quality content.
Table of Contents
Importance of Quality Content
Producing high-quality content for your website is extremely important both for readers and search engines. Modern-day readers have a short attention span, while search engines, such as Google, always prioritize informative and high-quality content over anything.
What is Quality Content?
If we put it simply, good, quality content is content that meets the needs and expectations of your audience while also satisfying search engine requirements. It is characterized by originality, relevance, and engagement- the three pillars of quality content. Originality ensures you’re sharing something different from your competitors, relevance involves providing the exact information the readers need, while engagement is the attention the article gets.
If you want to ensure your content is up-to-par, you should check whether it follows Google’s Search Quality Evaluators Guidelines. It is a 170-page document with all the guidelines that deem content high or low-quality. The guidelines include criteria for assessing a site’s content, user experience, and overall reputation.
What is E-E-A-T?
Even though originality, relevance, and engagement could be viewed as the three main elements of creating good content, they are more centered on the reader. By definition, E-E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) are four criteria that search engines use to determine if your content is a success or not.
Experience signifies the understanding or skill of the content creator in a certain subject. Expertise shows how deep their knowledge and ability are, ensuring correctness and perception. Authoritativeness is about the trustworthiness of both the creator and the website, often supported by professional qualifications or acknowledgment in that area. Trustworthiness focuses on the reliability of the content, including transparency, accuracy, and honesty.
In union, E-E-A-T can affect the way search engines rate your site. It decides if your content is seen as a trustworthy and useful information source.
What Does Google Consider Low-Quality Content?
As an individual, you either like or don’t like an article. But, as human readers, we have feelings, and we usually see the written text through a prism of emotions. Search engines, on the other hand, are completely objective, and they focus on the quality rather than the connotation. So, what do search engines see as low-quality content?
In the following, we’ll discuss thin content, duplicated content, keyword stuffing, and poor grammar and spelling.
Thin Content
Starting off the list with the lowest-quality content there is. What exactly is thin content? In a nutshell, it is content that brings no value to the reader. This includes short text, with no real purpose, and a lack of CTAs, images, and structure. Think of it as a big block of irrelevant content in a foreign language to you. It is borderline considered harmful content for your site.
Besides giving no real value, thin content may bring you some serious consequences from search engines. There is a thing called Google thin content penalty, where Google penalizes low-quality content as it violates its spam policies, which puts you at the bottom and hurts your brand, rankings, and optimization. Plus, its Panda update from 2011 attributes to the search engine putting low-quality, thin content last.
If you’re not sure whether your site has it, and you’re wondering how to check thin content online, there are several methods you can try out. Start by running your thin pages through the Google search console, check for URL parameters causing duplicates, and run your keywords through a rank tracker. You can also try out a reputable thin content checker. Sometimes, thin content goes way beyond what the eye can see. As content creators, you must avoid thin content.
Duplicate Content
You probably already know what is duplicate content. Remember your school years, when only one student had the text answer and you all pasted it in your tests? Well, if Google had emotions, it would feel the same way your teacher did back then. So, duplicate content is a big no!
But, how to check for duplicate content? There are several methods that you can apply at different stages of content creation, before and after publishing your articles.
Let’s start with the before. While you’re writing the article, doing research, and coming up with your paragraphs, you can occasionally select the text and quickly run it through plagiarism checkers such as Duplichecker or SmallSEOtools. There are also amazing paid tools such as Copyscape, that writers normally use.
Once you publish your content, you can check it by copying the URL and putting it into different plagiarism checkers. For some reason, this checkup is a lot quicker and you normally wait a couple of seconds.
Did you know that Google tolerates duplicate content to a certain degree? Read Google’s guidelines. You cannot possibly create completely original content for your whole website. Even if you’re extremely careful, there will always be a sentence or two that you’ll have exactly the same as others. This is known as unintentional duplicate content.
So, how much duplicate content is acceptable? Technically, there is not a single limit on duplicate content, but most digital marketing agencies and industry leaders agree it shouldn’t surpass 25-30%. Remember- be responsible and reliable, while remaining unique!
If you’re cooperating with a reputable content service provider, it’s on them to check content originality, as it not only harms your business but their reputation as well.
Keyword Stuffing
Moving onto keyword stuffing. Surely you’ve noticed it. A while back, Google praised articles with lots of keywords, and usually, they’d pop up first when you’d do a quick search. But, people started misusing this, and stuffing keywords where they do, and don’t belong. With the Penguin update, keyword spamming won’t bring you up on Google’s first page but will make sure your content looks unnatural and forced. This update was mainly created to prevent blogs and websites from reaching number one on SERP because of black hat SEO techniques.
How to check for keyword stuffing? There are several tools and strategies you can implement in order to check if you’re borderline spamming your readers with unnecessary keywords.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by using ‘Ctrl+F’ on your keyboard, and searching for the selected keyword in the whole text. As a general rule of thumb, you need to have the keyword once every 100-200 words. So, in a 1,000-word article, you’d aim to have your keyword 5-10 times. Anything below is too little, and anything above is too crowded. There are also tools available to check the content for you, so you don’t waste time searching for the keyword and doing the math. If you cannot burden yourself with keywords, hire an agency that offers SEO services. That way, you’re leaving your business in the safe hands of professionals.
Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs, and instead, find the best user-intent keywords for your article and insert them as naturally as possible. They come in a broad spectrum according to their utility, ranging from informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional keywords. Even if it doesn’t look like enough, if it’s in the right range, Google will approve of it.
Poor Grammar and Spelling
Poor grammar and spelling will turn off both search engines and readers. Would you trust someone who makes spelling mistakes on a published article, with all those modern tools available?
Get yourself a Grammarly already! Jokes aside, even Grammarly makes mistakes, so it’s important to double-check your content or bring a buddy to read it and give you feedback. Prevent these beginner mistakes at all costs!
Clickbait
Clickbait is content created for the sole purpose of making readers click on the link. It usually has titles and thumbnails which are misleading or exaggerated like “You Won’t Believe What Happens Next” and “Shocking Secrets Revealed!”. The intention is to make you curious but often the end result of this kind of tactic doesn’t match up with what was promised, but being in our nature to be curious, we’ll click on it either way.
The effect of clickbait on user trust and SEO is not positive. Even if it can increase initial traffic, the users quickly stop believing in what they see because the content does not meet their expectations, causing them frustration. When this trust goes down, bounce rates rise and engagement lowers- both harming your site’s authority and credibility.
Clickbait Thumbnails
Clickbait thumbnails also have a big effect on user experience and engagement. Usually, these small images make the content look more dramatic than it actually is. This can create bad experiences for your readers, lowering their overall interest and possibly causing them to avoid watching what you post in future times. Using deceptive thumbnails can harm your site’s reputation and make your audience leave, impacting long-term success.
Readability and Legibility
Let’s start this section by answering what is readability. Basically, it represents the ease with which the reader skims through your whole article. It includes elements such as sentence arrangement, word selection, and general continuity throughout the article. Having good readability is very important because it helps in keeping your audience interested and making sure that the message you want to deliver is communicated properly.
If the content is simple to read, then it lessens the mental effort required from the reader, resulting in a higher possibility for them to keep on reading and actually understand the message behind your article. This becomes crucial when dealing with digital content as users usually scan through it instead of reading every word meticulously.
You can check the readability score of your content on both Word and GDocs, whichever you prefer to write on.
How to Check Readability in Word?
Microsoft Word includes its own functionalities for checking the readability of your content. To assess readability:
- Open your document in Microsoft Word.
- Click on “File” in the top menu, then select “Options.”
- In the “Proofing” section, ensure the box for “Show readability statistics” is checked.
- When you finish a spelling and grammar check, Word will show your readability scores such as Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
These scores provide insights into how easy or difficult your content is to read.
What is a Readability Score?
A readability score is a number that shows how simple or complex it is to read a text. Basic tests for readability are Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which take into account things like the length of sentences and difficulty level of words used in the content. A bigger score usually means the content is simpler to read. This is crucial for catching and keeping your audience’s attention, as well as making certain they grasp what you’re trying to convey.
You can also check the readability score on different online tools such as the Hemmingway editor, where the score will be shown with grades. In general, anything below grade 9 is considered amazing.
What is a Good Readability Score on Grammarly?
Grammarly, in its writing suggestions, includes readability assessments. A good readability score on Grammarly is usually between 60 and 70 for Flesch Reading Ease. This suggests that the content can be understood easily by most readers. You will receive tailored comments from Grammarly about how to adjust your content for better readability like shortening sentences or using simpler words and breaking up dense paragraphs – all to achieve an optimal readability score.
Legibility vs. Readability
Sometimes, the understanding of legibility and readability gets mixed up. These two ideas are similar but different. Legibility talks about how easy it is to read the text based on its look – like font size, typeface, and spacing between words or lines.
Readability has more to do with language complexity and structure. While legibility is visually related, readability is more concerned with understanding. Both are crucial for a user’s pleasant experience; clear text ensures readers can view the content, while easy-to-read text guarantees comprehension ability.
Poor Content Quality
Poor-quality content leads to bad search results over time. Whether it’s because of the high bounce rate, low time on the page, or low engagement, the end result is always the same: downfall.
High Bounce Rate
One of the main reasons for a high bounce rate on websites is low-quality content. When people go to a page hoping to find useful information and discover it’s badly written, not related, or boring, they usually leave right away. This fast departure, called bouncing out indicates that the content has not met the user’s expectation resulting in missed chances for more interaction. Search engines detect high bounce rates as a clue that the content might not be fitting or useful which can harm your site’s rankings.
Low Time on Page
Low-quality content also affects time on the page. When readers struggle to understand, find it uninteresting, or not useful, they spend less time reading and interacting with the content. This short amount of time on the page indicates that the content could not grab and keep their attention. Gradually, this may harm the general functioning of a website because search engines usually perceive low time on a page as an indicator that the content does not match what users and customers require.
Low Engagement
Content that is unrelated, badly organized, or containing mistakes leads to a drastic fall in engagement. People are not very likely to interact with or distribute content that they feel does not connect with them. When engagement is low, it makes it less probable for content to be shared; also it reduces its reach and effectiveness. Good content should be interesting, useful, and related to the topic. It helps in creating interaction, motivating social sharing, and constructing a devoted audience base.
How to Check and Fix Low-Quality Content
To keep a good user experience and high search engine ratings, it’s important to find low-quality content on your site. You can do this by looking at main measures like bounce rate, time spent on the page, and how users interact with the content such as comments or sharing. If you see that certain content is not performing well in these aspects, it may be considered low quality.
In addition, you should apply a content audit to review factors such as relevance, ease of reading, grammar, and accuracy. Utilize tools like Google Analytics to locate pages that are not performing well; also employ readability tools for assessing the complexity of your text.
After spotting low-quality content, now you can move towards enhancing it.
Start with rephrasing parts to make them easier to understand and more interesting. This includes simplifying the language used and improving how easy it is to read through the passage. You can also try expanding thin content by adding useful details or refreshing old facts to increase its quality.
It is very important to make sure your writing looks professional by checking for these things. Also, you should optimize content for SEO with suitable keywords (make sure to include them in the domain, alt text of images, and meta description) and structure improvements like headings or subheadings. Keep updating and refining your content so it remains relevant and of high quality. This helps match user needs and aligns with search engine algorithms.
Wrap-Up: Avoid Low-Quality Content to Boost Rankings
Maintaining high standards for content is essential for SEO success. Quality content not only boosts rankings but also engages and retains audiences. Avoiding low-quality content is crucial to prevent penalties and ensure long-term growth. Continuously improving your content through regular reviews and updates helps you stay competitive in an ever-changing digital landscape.
Remember, the key to SEO success is an ongoing dedication to producing valuable, high-quality content that meets the needs of both users and search engines.
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