Content marketing is a complex activity. It consists of countless forms and styles of content, from blog posts and emails to podcasts and social media.
Along with these variations, content creators must develop marketing assets that provide multidimensional quality. They must provide value to end users while also fulfilling search engine requirements and feeding into your larger content marketing strategy.
The question is, how do you know a piece of content is satisfying all of these needs and is ultimately helping convert readers into loyal customers?
If you’re looking for a single quality content meaning, don’t expect to find one. When it comes to SEO and content marketing, there are multiple ways you can assess the quality of your content, and they each matter in their own way.
For instance, you want to have high production quality so that each piece of content is insightful, readable, and engaging for readers. You can use a tool to get a writing quality score and see how readable your content is from a consumer perspective.
This is a good start, but you also want your content to play an effective part in your growth marketing strategy. This is where converting content comes into play.
Conversion content weaves CTAs into high-quality content. This encourages readers to take a desired action while simultaneously benefiting from the inherent value that your content offers.
Google uses multiple metrics to gauge quality from an SEO perspective, too. The search engine’s Quality Score decides the quality of content based on things like relevant keywords. It’s Helpful Content Update, YMYL (your money, your life), and E-E-A-T standards also consider how content helps readers. These can collectively have an effect on your SERP rankings.
A good marketer should have all of these concepts and metrics in mind when crafting a content plan.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example of what holistic, high-quality, converting content looks like. Consider a Saas company that has created a workflow tool. They want to create a series of blog posts designed to help someone work down the sales funnel.
One blog post could be titled “What Is Workflow.” In this case, this is a 101 topic. It is designed to provide basic information to educate someone who is new to the concept of workflow. In contrast, a topic about “How to Organize Your Online Workspaces” is mid-funnel. It digs deeper into the topic and aligns more closely with encouraging a reader to use the brand’s products.
To function as converting content, all of these should be SEO optimized to attract traffic from search engines like Google. They should also have CTAs embedded within the blogs themselves, depending on the part of the funnel they address.
A 101 blog, for example, might encourage readers to sign up for an email newsletter or click through to a more advanced topic. A mid or low-funnel piece of content might have a call to action that asks the consumer to ask for a demo, contact a sales rep, or even make a purchase.
Of course, designing a piece of content to convert doesn’t mean that will automatically happen. Once you’ve created a content strategy and developed the content itself, you need to identify if your content is actually converting.
Once you’ve created your content, it’s time to consider what content metrics to track to see if it’s converting. Google Analytics is a big factor for any onsite content. If you don’t have the analytics tool set up on your site yet, you need it. If you’re creating something like emails or social posts, you can usually access similar tools right on the third-party platforms that you use to manage that content.
Once you have Google Analytics tracking your content, you need to set up goals. These are unique parameters that Google tracks to see if users are completing specific actions. A goal could be clicking on a link, watching a video, the amount of time spent on a page, or even the number of pages visited in a session.
When goals are fulfilled by visitors, it creates a conversion. A high conversion rate indicates that you have well-converting content. What a high conversion rate looks like depends on the metric you’re tracking, your industry, and even your brand’s past data in relation to that CTA.
For instance, email marketing brand Omnisend says landing pages have the highest email sign-up conversion rate at 23%. However, before you set that as your benchmark, you want to conduct additional research to see what the average sign-up rate is in your industry.
If you don’t have goals set up to track in Google, you can still observe general traffic. Look for pages that have the most visitors. When you identify these, you can do two things.
First, support those pages with some conversion rate optimization. Ensure that they are taking advantage of that traffic by locating strategic CTAs in the right places to set them up for success.
Second, use those pages as templates for future success. Consider what elements — such as valuable information, videos, or simply answering a good user query — make them stand out. Use that information to inform future content creation.
Okay, you know how to track your existing content. But what about making new content?
This tends to be pretty straightforward since you’re working with a fresh canvas. Start by reviewing your buyer personas and conducting any market research necessary to fill in the gaps. Make sure you grasp what is important to your target audience and can create content to help answer their questions.
As you create that content, think through both structure and format. Remember both readability and your marketing strategy. In other words, create valuable content for the reader while also answering marketing needs.
For example, when you create a headline, make it snappy for readers and put a primary keyword in it for search engines. Include links for unexplained concepts, and make sure those links connect to sites with high domain authority (DA). Keep paragraph length short and wording simple, too. At the end of the day though, the most important thing is to create helpful content for the reader. If you do that, you’ll win with search engines, conversion tactics, and your audience.
Content is a powerful marketing tool. It can help your target audience while also encouraging them to take action to support your brand. Consider hiring a content marketing agency if you need an expert’s advice.
You should always put the reader first when creating content, as you want to make a powerful and positive impression that establishes yourself as an authority in your industry.
As you do so, though, use content performance analytics to observe how well your content converts, too. That way, you can encourage consumers to not just learn from your content but take targeted actions to solve their problems, too.
