Self-assessing our product pages, blog posts or background articles against these questions can be a revealing exercise.
We talked about Google’s “Expertise questions” yesterday. Ensuring that our written content follows these guidelines should mean that search engines will find our content to be dependable. But Google has also produced quite separate “Content and quality questions” which are equally worth copying and pasting somewhere.
Self-assessing our product pages, blog posts or background articles against any of these questions that are appropriate can be a revealing exercise. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the most basic requirements of explanatory text.
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?
- If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources, and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
- Does the main heading or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
- Does the main heading or page title avoid exaggerating or being shocking in nature?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
- Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- Does the content have any spelling or stylistic issues?
- Is the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Answering these ‘Content and quality questions’ can show us if our content is truly useful or just filling space. Google claims to want to elevate work that demonstrates originality and clarity. These are the same qualities that win trust from readers, so if our content can’t pass this test, it’s not just the algorithm that’ll ignore it – our audience will too.