02 Feb
Nowadays high-quality content is key for higher rankings. But what is great content? Or, how to tell a good copy from a mediocre one? Answering this question is actually harder than it seems.
A human can tell you either the content reads well and provides value but how can this be evaluated from an SEO standpoint, when a machine gets to decide on these subjective criteria. Well , we are not sure but we can educate on the basis of what google represents.
What constitutes a good copy?
Here a few calculable criteria that may directly or indirectly define content quality:
- Semantic relevance (Is the copy relevant to a target search query? Is the copy in-depth/comprehensive enough?)
- Well-defined content structure (Are there subheadings that reflect key points?)
- Accessibility (Can the content be easily understood by a person with some kind of disability?)
- Readability (How easy is it to read your content?)
Semantic relevancy
Google has been utilizing semantic analysis to create its own understanding of what relevant topics are and how to tell whether a certain document is relevant to a certain search query.
Semantic analysis involves clustering any topic into related concepts and entities and researching relations among all those concepts and entities. There are tools that translate relevancy into numbers as well.
Text Optimizer, for example, takes your copy and compares it to Google’s search results for your target search query. The higher it scores your copy, the more relevant it is to your target topic.
Content structure
After page title content structure is the most important on page SEO factor. Content structure is how you are using H2 / H3 / H4 subheadings to introduce new sections of the copy. Without subheadings, your copy would just be a wall of text.
Google is using subheadings to understand key points of any copy. It has long been believed that Google is using subheadings to figure out which keywords within a web document are more important than the others.
But now Google pays lots of attention to subheadings because it’s now using H2 / H3 tags to locate parts of the documents that deserve to be featured.
You can analyze your usage of content subheadings by using SE Ranking. It offers a handy page audit tool that lets you see your H-subheadings at a glance. You can also click any tag to see it highlighted.
Traditionally, you want those extracted subheadings to make sense without seeing the full copy.
Many web users tend to scan through those subheadings before deciding whether they want to stay on the page and read thoroughly. So you want those subheadings to do a good job keeping all those lurkers engaged.
Outbound links (references)
Outbound links build trust for your website page.
- Google is using them to go from page to page, from site to site
- Links are part of your content quality: Whether you are using a trusted source to back up your copy determines how trustworthy your content is
- Links are your in-content calls-to-action: You are defining your readers’ browsing journeys by inviting them to check your external references.
Your in-content links contribute to the usefulness of your copy.
Site Checker does a good job analyzing outbound links within any page. The reason why we prefer this tool is that it shows the anchor text giving you an idea of whether you are doing a good job controlling your readers’ browsing journey.
Like with subheadings, the best practice is to make sure that you can guess what your copy is about by just looking through its links.
Also, don’t bother nofollowing those outbound links either. Only link to those resources that provide helpful further reading. This way your readers’ experience will be meaningful and Google will catch up on that.
Readability
Google doesn’t use readability as a direct ranking factor but a readability score helps them determine a certain audience type you are using.
Besides, high readability levels will make your content hard to understand for people with various cognitive disabilities, so this may be another indirect signal to Google that your content is good for a limited audience.
Both of these signals may be negative ranking criteria of some sort.
To be on the safe side, avoid high readability scores. Apart from better accessibility, this will also make your content easier and quicker to understand (and hence improve on-page engagement which is surely a ranking signal):
- Make sure your sentences and paragraphs are short
- Avoid lesser-known (and complicated) terms and jargon
- Use active voice instead of passive voice where possible
- Create a lot of lists
- Again, use subheadings
Yoast plugin will score the readability of your copy as you are still working on it.
Content accessibility
Content structure, links, and readability contribute to the accessibility of your content. Google representatives did confirm whether Google is using accessibility or ADA compliance as a ranking factor. We know that Google has been desperately trying to introduce and standardize accessibility guidelines of the web resources that show up in Google SERPs.
Whether it is a direct ranking factor or not, web accessibility is an important on-page engagement factor allowing more users to properly interact with your content. It’s also a huge topic to discuss.
Conclusion
To help blog posts and pages gain search visibility, you need to use on-page SEO to attract search engines and help them understand, recognize, and rank your content. But on-page SEO alone isn’t enough to get your page to rank. You need a complete SEO checklist that hits all of the best practices for SEO if you want to boost your site’s overall ability to rank in search.