Great content acts as traction to drive traffic to a website. In essence, content aims at informing, entertaining, or persuading. No matter the reason you want to create content, it has to be great content.
Sentence structure and proper spellings are crucial elements of good content but these aren’t the only determinants of the quality of content.
So, what is great content? What traits make a great content piece?
Is Your Content Unique?
For starters, Google penalises sites that duplicate content from other sites. Your audiences will also detect unoriginal content which might increase bounce rates. Originality doesn’t only apply to written content – images should also be original.
When creating content, ensure that you brainstorm ideas with your teams or colleagues. Another tip that can help you develop original content is sharing your personal experiences with your readers.
For instance, if you’re reviewing a product, it’s advisable to buy the product and take unique images. When you create such content, you won’t need to regurgitate what’s already on the web. You’ll describe the product based on your unique experiences.
Content should be actionable
Your readers want you to direct them to the next step after interacting with your content. After reading your review of a product, where can they buy it? If you’re writing a blog post, do you have other related blogs that could help them learn more? Or where can they subscribe to your monthly newsletter?
You need to add call to actions giving your audience direction. But, it all depends on how compelling your content is. If the information you provide is bland and does not convince visitors to take an action, they won’t do it even if you have the CTAs.
Credibility
You want to become an authority in your niche, but your followers need to trust you to provide them with the information they need. When writing content, it’s always good to attribute unoriginal ideas.
You should link your content to sources from high-authority sites. By doing so, your readers can verify any information they need. The best sites to link to are government websites and journals.
Keep it concise
People have incredibly short attention spans and you need to utilise this time to communicate the information you need clearly. While long-form content used to perform better on the search engines, now you can rank for short-form content as long as it meets the search intent.
Video content should also be concise. You must have noticed how platforms like TikTok are hooking people with short videos. The developers of TikTok must have analysed the trends and how people interact with visual content. Other platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are following suit with short reels.
Grammatically Correct
Mispelt words and poor sentence structures are a total turn-off for most readers. If you want to create a loyal following and attract new visitors, you need to go an extra mile of giving them quality content that is grammatically correct.
Ensure to proofread your work several times before you hit the publish button. You want to avoid simple errors and typos that could cost you significant traffic.
Content should Engage
Your content should quickly engage your visitors or else they will bounce. Writing engaging content involves creating content in a language that your target audiences will understand and enjoy.
It’s not about writing simple language but rather capturing your readers with content they want and resonate with.
Incorporating written content with visual content also helps break the monotony and keep your readers hooked. Creating videos is easy these days with platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo.
In a Nutshell: What is Good Content?
Good content should be unique, actionable, credible, concise, grammatically correct, and properly formatted. Content creators should however take time to understand their audiences as it is the only way to create content that they would be interested in engaging with.
Do you need help with creating good content for your websites or social platforms? Get in touch with us and let out experienced copywriter produce the good pieces for you!
