Creating and sharing relevant, quality content with your audience is an important marketing strategy called content marketing.
Content marketing is a form of digital marketing which delivers incredible results to companies that do it effectively. In fact, content marketing produces 3x the amount of leads per dollar spent that paid search does.
However, there is an important difference between creating content and creating high-quality content.
Having high-quality content on your website can help you build trust with your audience and increase conversions, while poor quality content can diminish trust (and may even lead to your customers taking their business elsewhere).
How to Identify Good and Bad Quality Content
1. Quality Content
- The content that your audience is interested in reading.
- Demonstrates authority, expertise and trustworthiness, and positions you as a thought leader in your niche.
- Relevant to the problems your audience is trying to solve.
- Valuable – so valuable that you might feel like you are being too generous with the information you give out!
- Created with a human reader in mind.
- Uses keywords effectively, yet sparingly, and is structured in a way that makes it easy to consume (think lots of sub-headings and bullet points).
In-depth, long-form blog posts and “how-to” guides are a great example of this type of content.
2. Bad Quality Content
- Created for search engines, not humans.
- Uses black-hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and cloaking to increase your website’s ranking quickly. These tactics are pretty easy to spot and will diminish your website’s trustworthiness, both in the eyes of search engines and your customers.
Creating high-quality content for your website is important. Here’s why.
Why Quality Content is Important to Your Business
1. Show Off Your Industry Knowledge
Instead of simply listing your credentials on your website, you can create content that reflects your business expertise and shows that you really know what you are talking about.
You can also use content to answer your audience’s most commonly asked questions and show them you understand where they are coming from.
This will help you project an image of authority, build trust, and become your audience’s go-to source of information.
When you have built up this trust enough, they will be more likely to purchase your paid products and services.
2. Influence Audience Perception
You can use content to craft a compelling brand story and influence how the rest of the world sees your brand.
For example, a series of blog posts about your company’s newest sustainability initiative could help position you as an environmental leader in your industry.
Consumers that value sustainable business practices will be more likely to buy from your brand after consuming this content.
Quality content can also help you influence the conversations happening in your niche.
If you use content to position yourself as a central figure in those conversations, your audience will be more likely to see you as an authority in your niche – even if you are just starting out!
3. Drive (Relevant) Traffic
Quality content can get your business in front of more potential customers’ eyeballs.
The customers who find your content through a Google search or by clicking on a Facebook link are already in the market for what you are offering.
They are already looking for solutions to their problems, which makes them much easier to convert into paying customers.
The same cannot always be said for traffic coming from paid advertising.
4. Increase Website Visibility
Content marketing is a great way to boost your SEO and increase your website’s visibility in search engines.
Each piece of content you create gives you an opportunity to include relevant keywords that people are searching for.
Quality content also gives you a greater chance of earning backlinks that boost your website ranking, since people are more likely to share it with others.
Plus, Google’s algorithms always reward businesses who create high-quality content. That is why in-depth tutorials and how-to guides often end up on the first page of search engine results.
How Poor Quality Content Harms Your Business
The dangers of poor quality content go beyond simply not resonating with your audience or not getting enough Facebook likes.
Poor quality content can damage your brand’s reputation and make it harder for you to build trust with potential customers.
Moreover, Google can recognize poor quality content and will punish you for it by reducing your website’s ranking.
If you use the black-hat SEO tactics we mentioned above, it may get your website banned from search engine rankings entirely.
Final Thoughts
Creating quality content is an important aspect of building a successful brand presence online.
Here at Handmade SEO, we focus on creating content that positions you as the number one authority in your niche and helps you build trust with the people who matter most: your customers.
Want to see how we can work together?
