To assess the quality of content on individual pages, it helps to break the criteria into two sections. First, you have the basic essentials that aren’t going to win you any content awards but can hurt your performance if not done correctly. Then, you have the more advanced aspects that really make the difference between good and great content.
For the basic essentials, you’re looking at:
- Accuracy: Is the information list to data accurate and backed up by trusted sources?
- Recency: How old is the data/information presented in this content?
- Readability: Spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence length, etc.
- Originality: As a basic essential, this means you’ve created the content yourself instead of pinching/copying it from elsewhere.
- Accessibility: Is your content accessible to all users?
- UX: Is your content mobile-friendly, uninterrupted by popups, etc?
- Visual content: Does each article have relevant images, videos and other visual content to reinforce the points being made?
With those basic essentials covered, it’s time to ask some difficult questions about your content – especially for pages that are having a low or negative impact
- Value: What benefit are users digital marketing trends: history and evolution actually getting from your content?
- Originality: What does this content offer that every other piece covering the same topic can’t?
- Engagement: Are users actually engaging with your content?
- Shareability: Are users sharing your content with others?
- Actionability: How actionable is the advice given in your content?
- Influence: What action are users taking after they engage with your content (conversions).
Look at the content produced by your competitors and compare it to your own to get some perspective. You might find the majority of their content has nothing new to offer in terms of value or originality – nothing users can’t get from elsewhere. This is actually far more difficult to do on an ongoing basis than the technical aspects of creating “quality” content.
Update your content
When we update our content here at Vertical american samoa business directory Leap, we follow a step-by-step process that ensures we cover all of the bases quickly:
- Check keyword performance and related search terms.
- Update data sources, stats, figures, etc.
- Update time references (the current year, last year, events that happened X years ago, etc.)
- Check the key points of your content are still relevant.
- Check links are still working.
- Update any old images where necessary.
- Add new sections covering recent developments, trends, etc.
- Add new sections targeting valuable related keywords (going back to step 1).
- Link to newer content published that’s relevant (both internal and external).
- Update the meta description.
- Update publish date.
Re point 9 above, when linking out to external content such as research, make sure you cite the original research and that all facts have a relevant outbound link for corroboration, especially if you are a medical or YMYL site.
Now, for certain pieces of content, we might decide additional things are needed. For example, we might find an article that could better serve as an in-depth guide and extend it to 3,000+ words or repurpose another piece as an FAQ-style article but the process above covers the bulk of our content updates.
