One of the best ways to grow your audience organically is to create high-quality content for your business’s website and social media. But what does high-quality content mean in practical terms, and how do you go about developing it? Is it as simple as posting great imagery and catchy copywriting, or is there more to it? Learn the answers to these questions and more below.
The importance of high-quality content
There are two main reasons why great website and social media content helps businesses to grow their audiences.
People love content that gives them the exact online experience they’re looking for. We all want to click a link and discover that the web page that appears includes what we hoped to find.
High-quality content helps to make websites more visible on search engines so that more people see them. This is what’s known as on-page search engine optimization (SEO).
Both reasons are intertwined: Search engines score the SEO value of websites based on the quality of experience they deliver. So, when your website is full of content that delights users, the search engines will bump it up the search engine results pages (SERPs) so that more people see it.
High-quality website content
There are four key rules to creating high-quality website content. These rules affect your ranking on search engines. That is, they determine whether you appear at the top of page one for relevant searches or way down on page ten. If followed, these rules will also help to turn passive audience members into active, engaged fans of your brand.
The top four rules for creating high-quality content are:
1. Produce regular content
If your content is kept fresh and up to date, your target audience will have a reason to visit your website regularly. It will enable you to maintain an ongoing dialog with readers via blog posts, product pages, or promotions. Search engines reward producers of regular content by ranking them higher than websites featuring old, out-of-date content.
2. Produce original content
Duplicating content from other places online is what’s known as a “black hat” practice. In practical terms, duplicating content means you will be scored down by the search engines, which negatively affects your ranking on the SERPs.
To understand why, ask yourself this—how valuable is your content to your target audience if it already appears elsewhere? Keep your photography, illustrations, product descriptions, blog posts, video collections, and other content original to enable it to rank highly and give people a unique reason to seek it out.
3. Produce relevant content
If you’ve done the preparatory work needed to find your target audience, you should have a comprehensive idea about their tastes, tendency to buy, and subculture. This will enable you to tap into the rhythm of their communication and deliver content that speaks to their needs, in their tone of voice, and at their pace.
It’s important that your content speaks to what your audience is searching for online. So make sure to conduct keyword research, like that enabled by the Search keywords panel in Squarespace analytics, so you can incorporate those keywords into your website’s text. The more relevant your content is to your audience, the higher the search engines will rank it on the SERPs.
As well as running keywords through the headlines, subheadings, and body copy on your website, make sure all photos and images are descriptively tagged when uploaded and that your pages have keyword-rich description tags. This practice will also be judged as high-quality content by the search engines, helping you to reach a wider audience.
4. Produce credible content
Relevance to your audience’s needs is probably one of the most important factors in producing high-quality content. However, search engines also score websites for the credibility of their content. So, make sure that any claims you make are reliable, fact-checked, and, if possible, either credited with a source or hyperlinked to an online source.
Internal hyperlinks that lead to other pages on your own website also add credibility by telling the search engines that you’re a subject matter expert. For example, you might post a product overview on one page, then later on the page link to an overview of a similar product with a message saying, “You might also like...” The better your network of internal links, the more optimized your pages and the more visible you’ll be to your target audience.
High-quality social media content
The quality of social media content you produce does not directly contribute to your SEO ranking, but it does influence it.
Your social media content quality and posting frequency should tell search engines that you:
Practice widespread distribution of content
Actively work to improve the visibility and reputation of your brand
Generate the sharing of your content by other users
All of these factors play into the ranking of your website based on brand credibility. So, the better your social media content—and the more other social media users share it—the better it is for broadening your website’s visibility on SERPs and to your target audience.
Quality social media content depends on the platform you’re using, so focus your efforts on those that are most frequently used by your target audience. If your audience demonstrates a preference for bite-sized content, there are social media channels for that. If they’d rather see longer videos or written content, there are social media channels for that, too.
It’s all about making sure you get a feel for each medium, then using the best tools available to develop content. You might, for example, use a tool like Unfold from Squarespace to give your followers a fully immersive brand experience in video stories, Reels, and posts you produce.
The ultimate goal of a strong social media presence is that your followers become loyal customers. So, it’s essential that you invest significant effort in developing high-quality social content.
Learn how to convert your social followers into site visitors