Why High Quality Content Matters More than Keywords for SEO

by | Jul 9, 2018

Attention content creators: Google reads everything you write!

Well, they don’t “read” in the literal sense. Their algorithms are now sophisticated enough to pick up on unnatural language and poor formatting.

Both of these send strong negative signals that hurt your ability to rank. Google looks for quality content.

In fact, Google’s approach to ranking has gotten really sophisticated.

They’ve now learned that content quality matters more to search users than the presence of any particular keyword phrase. As a result, you may find a No. 1 search result that doesn’t contain an exact match keyword anywhere in the body.

We’re serious!

In an exhaustive study of 600,000 keyword phrases, 18 percent of the domains that ranked position 20 or higher didn’t have the keyword in the text at all.

Instead, these sites had a few things in common: website visits, user behavior signals and the number of links to the content all influenced Google to rank them near the top. All of these signals tell Google one thing: people seem to like this content.

In addition to these behavior-based markers of content quality, Google and other search engines actively sift through content. They look for signals of quality within the text itself.

After all, Google’s main objective isn’t getting your website traffic. They want to give people good search results.

Thankfully, the company’s own guidelines are fairly specific and helpful. We’ll point you towards the exact markers of “high quality” Google is looking for.

What Are the Red Flags for Poor Content Quality?

Google’s guidelines for content quality are pretty thorough. This is likely because it’s hard to put into words exactly what makes something “good” or “high quality.” It takes a lot of nuance!

On the other hand, you can fairly quickly point out factors that immediately signal poor quality.

It’s like baking cake.

There are a million different types of cakes out there.

There are also many ways to prepare them. Flour, sugar, eggs and milk may be your raw ingredients. But don’t forget this. You can make thousands of different types of delicious cakes. Also, “the right cake to bake” differs according to the context and circumstances. You can have a moist cake that’s yummy. Or you could have a more solid cake that still does the trick.

But you can’t put sand in your cake. That’s a no-no. That’s an automatic recipe for an inedible cake.

Similarly, Google highlights some markers of poor quality that instantly flag a page as having content not worth ranking:

  • Spamming keywords, especially if they’re irrelevant
  • Creating content that’s mostly copies of existing content
  • Typos, bad spelling, grammar errors
  • Sentences or paragraphs that never seem to end
  • Content that has little to no formatting, leaving just a dense chunk of text
  • Going crazy with links that aren’t relevant to the content at hand
  • Dropping lists of keywords somewhere in your page, especially if you’re hiding them with text color choices
  • Content that is excessively thin, especially for pages like blogs that promise substance

There are also a number of ways to get instantly deindexed by Google that go beyond content quality. Since that’s something you likely want to avoid, they’re well worth reviewing!

Google’s SEO Guide Considers Content Quality, Navigation Ease More Important Than Keyword Use

If you go and take a look at Google’s SEO starter guide, you’ll find that suggestions for how to use keywords properly don’t come up until around halfway through. Before that point, they take a moment to repeat four times that you shouldn’t overuse keywords or stuff them into your technical SEO elements.

Once they do mention keywords, they simply advise that you tailor your keyword strategy to your audience. For instance, people who watch soccer regularly might expect “FIFA” or “football” to be in the content they read. Casual users may expect more generic terms like “soccer playoffs.”

Immediately after that, they go back into quality. “Avoid writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes,” they suggest. Also, avoid “awkward or poorly written content.”

To truly hammer the point home, Google spends far more time writing about ease of navigation and quality of life improvements. Based on how the information is organized, remember this.  Google cares more about your site map than your keyword usage when deciding rank.

“The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want,” explains the search giant. “It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important.”

All of this information can be summed up in one sentence. Search engines aren’t dumb. They know the things that make life easier for their users. They can make content better to read in general. Google pays far more attention to these elements than how you use keywords.

In fact, with voice search on the rise, search engines have had to get smarter than ever. They need to be able to interpret keyword intent and find semantically related terms. That way, someone searching for “best places to eat near me” can pull up a list of “top-rated restaurants” easily. They would not have to first sift through unhelpful results that contain exact keyword matches.

5 Tips for Writing Higher Quality Content

So now you’ve heard what definitely not to do when creating content. However, you only have a hint of what so-called “high quality content” looks like. 

To steer you in the right direction, here are a few general tips that can boost the quality of all content.

1. “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”

This rule comes directly from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It’s actually the very first thing they say under “Basic Principles.”

The search giant even suggests you ask yourself “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” when making a decision on how your website operates. Those questions definitely apply when writing new content

First, determine an audience need based on a keyword search. Write to answer that need. You need to satisfy someone’s search intent. This way,  your site receives better behavior signals. Your site will then be more likely to rank.

If you’re at a loss for how to connect a keyword to user needs, do a little research. Plug in the keyword yourself. Try to find questions related to it.

Or, if the keyword is directly related to an “I want to purchase something or research a purchase” intent, take notes on the content that ranks highest. Chances are good that the page offers excellent examples of site organization, layout clarity and overall usability in addition to some solid text content.

2. Edit Your Writing, and Push Yourself to Improve

Like good cake, good writing is definitely in the eye of the beholder. But at the same time, you wouldn’t bank on your cake getting top votes if all you did was use a box mix.

In other words, if you want to write better, you’re going to have to learn from others. We suggest reading publisher sites related to your industry that get high traffic, and cover topics similar to what you want on your blog.

Some general guidelines for improving your writing include:

Use less “being” and “linking” verbs in favor of strong action verbs. If you find yourself writing words like “is, was, are and be,” go back and see if you can identify the true subject of the sentence and what it’s doing.

Structure your writing like you would an outline. Tell people what they’re going to learn from your post as soon as possible, and then delve into each smaller point one at a time until you’re finished.

Write casually but not unprofessionally. Aim for a “friendly, conversational tone with a clear purpose—somewhere between the voice you use when talking to your buds and that you’d use if you were a robot,” suggests Search Engine Land’s paraphrasing of Google’s own Developer Documentation Style Guide.

Edit your writing! Far too many people don’t go back and reread. Watch out for sentence and paragraph transitions that could make people have trouble following your logic. Ask people for their opinion on how readable everything is. If they have a complaint, see if you can break the excerpt down into its most simple parts and reconstruct it.

3. Read, Read, Read and Read Some More

Reading teaches you how words and sentences form ideas. We take a lot of this stuff for granted, but it’s quite complex. Fortunately, others have mastered it and can teach you techniques to add to your repertoire.

4. Pay Attention to Your Audience’s Behavior Signals

What content pages get the most views? Which ones get the best responses? Which posts get the most engagement in comments or on social media? Where do people tend to spend the most time?

Look to your own Google Analytics data. Try to identify patterns. People tell you what they like without ever having to say a word.

  1. If You’re Struggling to Write Good Content, Go Back to the Basics

You may feel hesitant about writing on simple topics. “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO.”  “Why People Buy Things.” These are actually great topics. Yes, they’ve been done to death. However, they help people learn.

Also, you might put things in a certain way that makes an extremely deep or complex subject click for your audience.

Above all else, articles like these teach you the fundamentals of writing for your audience. You learn how to break big concepts down to their bare components. You’ll know how to communicate complex ideas with clarity.

Next to reading, writing down the basics is the best way to teach yourself how to craft better content.

Stop Obsessing Over Keywords and Start Writing Better

The writing’s on the wall: Google and online audiences are sick of bad content. They do not want keyword stuffing and deceptive practices aimed to help websites rank. These things make readers miserable.

Put content quality factors like readability, grammar and topic organization as a higher priority than keyword use. People will know what you’re talking about. They’ll know even if you don’t use an exact keyword match. And now search engines will know too.


Read also : Is Your Content Not Performing? 5 Things That Could be the Problem