What Makes for Bad Quality Content and Why It Has No Place in SEO

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Admittedly, writing good quality content is never easy. It takes time and effort doing research and learning about the subject you’re trying to write about, to churn out what can be considered great quality articles and blogs for your website.

The truth of the matter is . . .

Writing high-quality content has long been one of the most important factors when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Whatever content marketing strategy you’re trying to implement, its quality has always played a major role in the success or failure of the project.

Creating content is more than just finding a subject and writing about it. The process requires creativity and knowhow in laying out your thoughts and ideas in a way that’s easy to read and comprehensible to your audience. Yes, having exceptional writing skills is also important, but that’s not the only thing that good content writers and marketers rely on.

Now, you might read a few blogs and articles online that are not really that good. They’re not informative, engaging, or entertaining for that matter. What’s the first thing you do when you encounter websites with poor quality content? You’ll probably hit the “back” button on your browser or just close the tab, right?

Here’s the thing:

Imagine if that was your website. Users enter it and leave before the page even finishes loading, because that’s how bad your content must be to them. Yeah, you might have a decent rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), but how long do you think will it last if people just keep bouncing off your pages?

The bottom line is, to deem your SEO and content campaigns to be a success, your site should not only be at the top of the SERPs, it should also maintain its position. If people keep leaving after spending about a minute or two on your website, it will negatively affect your bounce rate and eventually pull your site down in the rankings.

What you want is for visitors to actually spend time on your website, opening pages and reading your content. So how do you entice people to stay longer and take your content seriously? Through developing content that is informative, to the point, and engaging.

Practical Reasons Why High-Quality Content Is Important

1. Your readers will have a better grasp of the story you’re trying to tell.

Whatever subject or story you’re trying to tell, whatever ideas or opinions you’re trying to convey to your readers, it’s important that you lay out or structure your content in a way that’s easy to comprehend.

Whether the goal of your content is to provide information, to entertain, or to let people see an idea or opinion from your perspective, if you’re not doing a good job in writing it, the main goal of the content will be lost. And if your message is hard to understand, then you’ve already lost potential followers, which is crucial in SEO and content marketing.

2. It will effectively lower your bounce rate.

As stated before, if visitors refuse to stay on your website longer, it will severely affect your bounce rate and you lose followers. Having a well-written and engaging content will entice visitors to stay longer and read the entire article or blog post.

And there’s more.

If visitors like your post, they might even open other pages and read some of your older content. Either way, guests of your website will be encouraged to stay longer and perhaps comeback for more. This is how you gain a following and lower the bounce rate of your pages.

3. It will positively affect your brand on social media.

No matter how you put it, social media will always have a role in SEO. Social searches can affect search engine rankings, there’s no denying that.

By writing engaging and entertaining content, you encourage your readers to share your posts. And how do they share it? How else, but through social media? The more shares your posts get, the better it is for your brand. And keep in mind that as your social standing starts to go up, the more people will begin to seek you out. Eventually, they will end up on your website. It’s a win-win for you and your audience.

4. It will help build trust between your brand and your followers.

You don’t need to be an expert to know that trust is very important in content marketing and SEO. Trust from consumers and readers will help boost your brand’s popularity. A well-written content will undoubtedly lead to the building of trust between you and your readers/followers.

If people trust your brand and your content, they will be more likely to return and maybe even recommend your site to their own social circle.

The importance of quality content can’t be stressed enough, when it comes to content marketing and SEO strategies. If you want to reach the top of the SERP, and stay there, you need to consider developing your content to a much higher level of quality.

So what are the content development practices that you need to avoid?

There are a lot of practices that one has to consider when dealing with SEO and content development. To figure out which ones have to be avoided, we need to refer to Google’s quality guidelines. Why? Well, ask yourself this: What is the most dominant and widely used search engine in the world? There is no doubt, it’s Google.

Whether you like it or not, most SEO experts and content writing services have their techniques and methods influenced heavily by Google, based on what Google wants and expects. And Google expects high-quality content from websites they rank.

So here are a few content development practices that Google wants you to avoid.

• Hidden links and texts – This is probably the oldest black hat technique in the book. It worked for a while, but it’s been ages since this awful method worked.
• Scraping content – This is a shameful and flagrant way to create content for your website. Scraping content is the process of taking content from other websites and placing it on your own as if it were you who made it.
• Using doorway pages – This is another black hat technique that you should never practice in your own SEO or content development projects. Doorway pages are web pages that are created for the sole purpose of spamming the index of a search engine. Google hates this and will punish any website that uses this tactic.
• Auto-generated content – This is probably the laziest way to create content for any website. One that you should never employ. Automatically generated content is content that has essentially gone through a grinder (usually a software program or automated tool) without human supervision. It is then directly posted on websites without anyone checking its quality or relevance.
• Link schemes – Any website that employs this practice is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Any link or links that are made to disrupt or manipulate a website’s ranking in the SERP may be considered as part of a link scheme.

If you hire content writers or content development services, it’s in your best interest to figure out if the company is employing some of these practices to improve the page rankings of their clients. If you decide to go with professional SEO and content specialists, you better make sure to do your research.

Here are a few tips you can use when hiring a professional for your content marketing project:

1. Find a reputable service provider. Don’t just settle for the first freelance content writer or service you find on the web.

2. Ask for writing samples. Have the service provide you with content that they have made themselves. It helps if you provide them with a specific topic, particularly one that is associated with your industry. And make sure to review their work.

3. Find the right rates or service plan that suits your means. Hiring professionals can sometimes be expensive. In this industry, you often get what you pay for. But there are a few exceptions. There are services out there that provide exceptional work for reasonable rates.

4. Don’t forget to ask for references. If the company you plan to hire has any professional experience, they should be able to provide several work references at a moment’s notice. Content writers and service providers who refuse to comply with such as request, using privacy as an excuse, are not organizations you’ll want to work with. As a potential client, you have every right to ask for references.