Business Owner’s Guide to Assessing Web Content Quality

You likely know just how important brilliant content is.

You’ve visited websites and have likely found some fantastic material that you couldn’t pull away from. Maybe it was a video, a blog, or research report. Maybe it was the brand, message or topics within the website that made you feel comfortable and made you get into it.

It made an impression on you. Your mood lifted and you became more focused. And perhaps for a moment, you visualized yourself as a customer of that company.

Consumers minds are that fast — they have the intent, and they’re waiting for the first provider who creates a straight line from beginning to end of fulfillment.

You liked that content because it promised fulfillment or satisfied your interest. So you have evidence in your favorite websites that great content is a vital business asset.

Visitors have their list of key wants they need to cover. You need to know them and cover them in a way they can relate to. That’s when they begin reformulating how they’re going to adopt your services/product. They begin adding up points of value mentally, and prepare to pick up the phone to call you.

Your content is all they see and know and if it’s great, they will call you or buy online.

A Powerful Business Asset You Can Nurture Even More

Your digital content delivers the ideal customer experience on your website and is your online brand experience too.

Content is powerful and it dictates how well your business will do. Because every customer arrives at your website one way or another — to experience your content. That content does the work of creating a new customer, keeping them loyal, and making current customers spend more!

For business owners, content quality might be more of an aesthetic thing, however web design will provide limited effect in building the trust, credibility, and value visitors need to justify a purchase. They don’t offer their time or money that easily. And with high involvement purchases, the content must do more.

As a business owner, you need to focus on what makes content really great. Today, we’re exploring what you need your content developer, copywriters, or videographers to create. Their work will impact the results you get from your advanced SEO consultant.

You Need High Performing Content

What is great content? It’s content which is a high performer in key areas of traffic, brand awareness, impact, engagement, lead generation and long term sales revenue. There may be other KPIs to weigh as well.

High performing content then contributes meaningfully to real business goals and real revenue results.

High Quality Content from Entrepreneur — Screenshot courtesy of Entrepreneur.com

This graphic below shows one blog post I wrote has generated 1 million unique visitors. Reach is vital yet what happens when visitors land on your site to enjoy such a blog post? How long do they stay? What’s the next step they took? Did they phone you, download something, or buy your product?

If your content is poor performing, there may be multiple issues. It is difficult to figure out. The key is determination, analytics, and a fervent desire to find out why. Great analytics is the key.

Why is Your Current Online Content not Successful?

If I asked you right now, why your content works or doesn’t, could you describe why in a sentence or two? Are you thinking it might be a simple reason?

poor keyword targeting creates poorly qualified visitors from Google — poor audience targeting
you don’t have enough high quality traffic or leads coming in
your copywriting isn’t about what they’re interested in
your copy, headings, and layout isn’t in the write tone of voice or style – it isn’t appealing
your Google rankings are low therefore you’re not reaching the best leads
your brand sucks and your website is visually unappealing and not interesting to them
you’re not getting your value proposition across well enough — it’s a mystery to them
visitors don’t believe or like your offer, or its not competitive — they prefer your competitor
your content doesn’t register an impact that forces them to focus on you
the content is weak, uninteresting, uninformative and not engaging
your content is hacked up because of constant updates/revisions
your content doesn’t match your visible branding
your content strategy and techniques are weak
your content and messaging aren’t inviting thus it looks like you don’t really want to do business

Let’s give the content explanation task a try:

Good Content: Our content works because it impacts, engages, establishes awareness of the key drivers in our unique value proposition, makes visitors comfortable and confident that our solution is uniquely right for them.

Bad Content: Our content doesn’t work because it’s shallow, common, forgettable, unpleasant to experience, and makes a weak effort to communicate differentiation on critical points nor why it’s the most significant solution available in the market.

Don’t Forget: Content Actually is a Big Part of your Lead Funnel

It’s a powerhouse for attracting leads, making impact, creating engagement, building brand, and encouraging loyalty. After all, at any time, a prospect can leave for many different reasons. This is what makes content strategy so important. There’s no end to amount of things your content has to achieve (See the 30 objectives below).

There’s a lot of info online about content quality, and they usually refer more to Google’s algorithm issues than all the other areas of marketing performance content must fulfill.

And that’s why we need a reliable way to judge, assess, weigh, compare, and evaluate your web content. Anything your visitors or customers read, view or gets a hint of, is going to affect your sales revenue. It’s worth it to swallow your pride, dig down into what needs to be changed and do the upgrade to high quality.

30 High quality Content Characteristics:

aligns with your brand and the value proposition
makes the brand and UVP seem better than it really is
makes your brand, offer, and company appear cool yet transparent and trustworthy — like a market leader
gets your key UVP points across crystal clear
provides a fast loading, simplified code, technically perfect experience for search engine users (Google page experience)
achieves high rankings on most important Google keywords
achieve rankings on long tail phrases for big traffic from Google
builds a picture of comfort and likability about your brand
makes your visitors feel comfortable, confident and empowered
presents specific topics, problems, and solutions customers are interested in
is free of errors and unpleasantries and the narrative flows coherently
is thoroughly edited to make it coherent, effective and a nice reading experience
is visually pleasing and impacts the emotions of readers/viewers – high quality, original photos
helps move a lead to the next touchpoint in the lead funnel
quietens visitors fears, doubts, suspicions and disbelief
is easy to consume or experience
helps the visitor/customer make a decision at any point in the buying cycle
draws attention and builds interest in the reader
confirms and validates the visitors interest/intent in buying the product
provides a fresh, continuous, new experience for website visitors
keeps your company top of mind, and customers away from competitors offerings
makes readers want to share it on social media or mention it in their blog or newsletter
makes readers talk about your content, your brand and your company
contains attention grabbing headlines, vital keywords, and relevant photos/images
works as part of a powerful overall content strategy
is cited by leading industry influencers and bloggers
is highly engaging and interesting using storytelling and facts
is credible and presents relevant information to support the message/brand
is framed by a website layout provides support to the content in the page (surrounding menus, titles, logos, trust marks, slogans, etc.)
presents you as an authority and is backed up by other authorities or influencers

Put each factor into a spreadsheet and note each one as you cover it in your content strategy. As you go you can add notes that help you develop your understanding. And you’ll definitely grow your understanding and improve your content as you go. Awareness is just the first stage.

Above and Beyond Your Competition

Well, that was an exhaustive list wasn’t it? Yes, your website content serves many masters and it has to be good at most of them. Why? Because if it isn’t, customers will be enjoying and consuming your competitor’s content.

That latter point is important. Marketers don’t respect their competitors enough. Your content has to be more useful and significant to them than your competitors’ content. Your brand must be made so good, that all your competitors fade into the background never to be seen by the customer again.

From now on, they only want you and your product.

It’s not just about being better, but rather more significant to the customer/prospect. In the end, the company/brand that is most significant will win the customer. Unique will not win the day.

And that’s why the old value proposition formula has been upgraded to the personalized, significant, unique value proposition.

Customers want content personalized which speaks directly and specifically to them. That’s why AI content tools are intriguing in their ability to personalize content for each visitor. It’s raised conversion rates significantly.

Bringing it All Together

Sounds impossible doesn’t it? How do you fuse all the 30 characteristics listed above into all your content pieces?

It is difficult, which is why most content developers focus only on a few objectives for each content piece. They don’t overload and work it to get everything accomplished in one piece. Rather the full job of fulfilling those 30 points is spread across many strategically linked articles, case studies, blogs, marketing pages, videos, podcasts, and customer testimonials.

Each piece is evaluated for its ability to present 3 of the 30 objectives. This keeps it doable for amateur copywriters and marketers. Because most companies don’t have experienced, elite talent to help them weave more in.

But on that note, it is wise to hire a consultant for key tasks such as strategy, brand compliance, SEO and editing.

Because all 30 can be built into your content strategy.

Certain pieces of content are worth perfecting and spending more time on. Some pieces just draw traffic which is delivered over to your “conversion pieces.”

The Final Word

Follow through and commitment to act on intent is the top customer emotion to stimulate, especially at the end of the post/video. That’s why we present the call to action, incentive, and next step for them to follow.

Their last thought should be “I need to follow through with this.” That emotion they feel is what drives the decision to buy.

So after strategizing all these powerful tactics, you have to find out what their last thoughts were.

Let’s hope it’s not “this is not for me” or “Y brand is actually better”, or “too expensive, I’m outta here.” Instead, they’re going to say “their service is perfect for what we need to accomplish and there’s no one better at this.”

So while you have narratives in your content, it’s actually the narrative the reader is having with your content and brand. It’s like they’re having a relationship with your website!

In the end, it’s the brand that carries the most influence. That’s why people don’t buy until they’re comfortable with your brand promise. They understand it, trust it, value it, and want to integrate it into their life. That’s when you have a loyal customer.

Your content can do all this if you’re resourceful enough to build the knowledge, develop the strategy, and find content tools to help.

Hire a great content strategist who thinks beyond the basics and you’ll be rewarded well. Time will be on your side.

Call me now at 416 998 6246 to create content that achieves what you need achieve.