How Can Anyone Tell If Your Copy’s Any Good?

Everyone with a keyboard thinks she’s a writer.

The problem with being a writer or a painter is that anyone can do it. All it takes is a few strokes of the pen or brush (manually or digitally), and you’ve got something. So how can you tell if it’s any good? Given the state of art and literature today, you could realistically assume that “quality” is a totally subjective assessment.

Maybe that’s even true, but when it comes to writing online, for businesses, there are ways to determine whether the content on your website or in your blog reaches the heights reserved for the label “quality content.” Ultimately, it comes down to the objective question: Does it work?

Does It Work?

A website for a business is supposed to generate leads and convert visitors into customers. A business blog is supposed to attract people to your website, share insights into your industry, and tout you as a trusted professional. The goal of online content is to get your company noticed.

If it’s not working, you can tell. Traffic to your website is down. The people who do visit aren’t buying. If you have these problems, it could be that you don’t have the right content on your website. It’s possible that good content — content that’s useful to people doing searches, content that’s directed at your target market — can solve these problems.

How Does It Work?

Quality content attracts two distinct audiences: people and search engines. This order is important. Good content is written for people first (not for search engines). If people can’t read it and understand it, then search engines won’t like it either.

Web searches have to provide answers.

People are searching online for answers to questions (e.g., “How do I fix a leaking faucet?”), for specific information (e.g.,”Where can I buy a new faucet?”) and to find businesses (e.g., “Who’s the best plumber in town?”). If you’re a plumbing service, your website should answer all three questions. And more. By making your website useful to people, they’ll find you and remember you.

That in itself makes a website rank higher on a search engine results page. That in itself will help direct more traffic to your website and increase your business awareness and profits (both goals of quality online content). Remember, search engines have competition, too. They want to deliver the best websites to their customers.

More Tips for Creating Quality Content

The more search engines change how they work, the more important quality content has become. The cheap SEO tricks don’t work anymore. Now, it’s all about delivering useful content. That’s all people — and search engines — care about. Here are a few other tips for creating quality content:

1. Make your content readable. If the audience for your website is composed of nuclear engineers, by all means indulge in the esoteric math and computations of the industry. But if your audience is the general public, you will lose them the minute you start talking about half-lives. Make it simple. Keep it clear.
    
2. Formatting matters. No one will read a website featuring solid blocks of type. Every web page should have imagery that helps convey your message. The best images are original photos or graphics that aren’t on any other site, but even if you use stock photos, make sure they are relevant and add to the page.
    
3. Long-form content is more useful. The trend for quality content is to be thorough. The best websites average almost 1,000 words per page. So don’t just cover a single topic; delve into it. Explain how it fits into the Big Picture. Your website and blog should provide value to the people reading at home or at work. Make sure you use subheadings to make the content easy to scan.
    
4. Choose the right keywords. Yes, keywords are still important, but it’s no longer useful to stuff a web page full of the same keyword over and over. Choose a primary keyword phrase and supplement it with related secondary keyword phrases. For example: “Quality content” might be the primary phrase; “useful information” and “web searches” might be relevant secondary phrases.
    
5. Limit your advertising. Some demographics have accepted online advertising as a necessary evil. Search engines aren’t necessarily part of that crowd. When you’re building your website, focus on your audience and not on your pocketbook. It’s anti-intuitive, but it works. Your goal should be to provide value, not a platform for ad space. It will pay off in the end.

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.