Basic steps to improve the quality of your digital content

It’s always quality over quantity when it comes to digital content, and there are 2 very important things to keep in mind when publishing online…

1. You need to sell to internet users, and
2. You need sell to search engines

It’s important to optimize your content for both of these and really, they go hand-in-hand. After all, Google wants to provide users with informative, relevant and meaningful answers to their queries.

More user-friendly content

Let’s first look how you can make your digital content better for your audience…

1. Find your goal

Why are you making the content? There could be multiple reasons to choose from (and you may have more than one)…

• Inform and entertain
• More traffic
• More sales
• More video watch time
• More social media shares
• More app downloads

2. Choose a target group

With goals in mind, the next step is to think about who is most relevant. Sure a variety of people may come across your content, but it’s more helpful to speak to users with a genuine interest in your topic, as opposed to a generalised crowd.

Target those who are viewing and talking about topics related to your products and services.

A key part of creating digital content is researching and understanding your target audience so you can provide rich, specific answers to their questions.

3. Understand and engage

Once you have formally identified your target group and the questions they’re asking, you can create content specifically aimed at them. Appeal to what they’re genuinely interested in. Create informative and entertaining sources of information.

You can use tools like Google analytics and keyword research tools to identify trending topics, volumes of keyword searches,  and developing rich information relating to these.

Providing relevant, current, informative content will teach viewers about areas they want to know more about and foster a relationship between this audience and your brand. This is an important step in creating better content, and in attaining loyal customers.

Better search-engine ranks

Users aren’t the only ones you need to impress when developing digital content of improved quality, but what is ‘quality’ in the eyes of the search engine?

Google uses an intricate algorithm in which it uses different factors to calculate where exactly in the ranks it’s going to put your content. These factors include:

1. Semantically relevant content

For a while there, simply having keywords that match those in user search queries was enough to make the cut. But recent updates mean you now have to optimize for the topic and not just the words or phrases.

In other words, your content has to be conceptually and meaningfully related to the topic encompassed by your chosen key terms. This is a major push for digital content creators to produce posts containing rich, accurate information about these topics – and in doing this, allow Google to provide your content to answer user queries.

Keywords must be purposefully chosen and used. Google has strict guidelines and is really cracking down on keyword stuffing into posts that lack educational substance.

2. Page speed

Nobody likes a page that takes its time to load. We like our information, goods and services instant. Users navigate away quickly if they have to wait and Google agrees. If your digital content doesn’t load quickly, this in itself will be enough to keep you out of the top results.

Fortunately, there are a number of techniques that can get your page moving faster, including:

• Minimizing redirects
• Optimizing images
• Enabling compression

3. Mobile optimization

As Google aims to deliver to all us mobile users – who wish to access the net anywhere, anytime, on screens of varying sizes. So another imperative is to ensure your site is mobile-friendly.

Ensure the dimensions re-format to fit whatever device the site is being accessed from. You also want to be sure no content is lost or becomes unreadable in the process.

Again, there are various techniques to mitigate this included (but not limited to):

• Making your website responsive
• Not using flash
• Compressing images

SEO Shark Team

We are a friendly and reliable team that pays detailed attention to your projects and management of your brand. Our team at SEO Shark has a passion for all things online. We constantly innovate using the latest professional techniques and strategies.