How can you evaluate content?
The question of quality content is one that haunts SEOs across the board. Most SEOs are not specially trained in writing content. While they are good at knowing the kind of keywords that need to be present in a given piece of content, LSI key phrases, backlinks, and other technical SEO factors.
When it comes to evaluating the quality of content, there is a certain vagueness that can be deafening.
SEO content is not the same as other text contents popular in mainstream media. Typical SEOs cannot be expected to evaluate content like book reviewers judge fiction works.
This is a problem not addressed in digital marketing institutes either. While there are some discussions on learning to write content, the focus is usually not on understanding or appreciating the importance of evaluating content.
Digital marketing as a whole is struggling with the same problem. The intention to connect with the users and make them part of the audience is there, but it’s not being converted into actionable SEO work by those in the industry.
SEOs understand quantifiable factors. To expect them to read content like literature aficionados is ridiculous. The job of an SEO exec should include having the ability to understand and appreciate good content. This can be made easier with the help of some key factors.
In this article, we discuss three content quality factors that can be considered most important while evaluating content.
Subheading Distribution
Before reading the content and checking for obvious grammatical, word-choice, and factual errors, SEOs should first check whether the content contains subheading.
SEO content is not fiction. It cannot go on and on like a story. Writers should separate their content into different parts using subheading at the right moments.
The uses of subheadings are many.
First, they compartmentalize the content into different parts which can help readers jump over parts they don’t need to read. For example, while reading an article on SEO, a reader may want to read only about off-page SEO. Thus, he can scroll down to the part of the article and find a sub-heading for off-page SEO.
Sentence Length
Sentences should be short. While reading any piece of content, SEOs should check whether the content they are reading contains a lot of long sentences. Typically, sentences longer than 20 words are considered to be very long. So, SEOs have to make sure they don’t cross the 20-word threshold often.
This is not to say that all sentences have to be below 20 words. If needed, some sentences can cross that barrier. However, SEOs have to maintain a balance and make sure not more than 20% of the sentences in a content cross 20 words.
Use of Images and Infographics
Content without any relevant images tends to be downgraded by Google. A block of content with no images is not exactly conducive to the average audience. Thus, SEOs must try to include images in their content. The longer a given piece of content, the more images SEOs should think of adding. While adding the images, SEOs must also make sure that the image name is relevant to the topic along with the alt attributes.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, we discussed examples of content that can get relevant backlinks to a website.
About the Author – Apoorv Sharma is a digital marketing intern currently writing guest posts for Delhicourses, an institute known for its digital marketing course in Delhi.