Content marketing: identify and improve your poor content

If there is one thing that search engines and internet users can't do, it's low-quality content. So yes, writing quality content takes time and technique, but it’s the only way to get indexed and get traffic to your website.

So, to help you captivate your prospects - and by extension Google -, we explain how to identify and improve your poor content.

How to recognize poor content?

By definition, low-quality content does nothing for the Internet user. No additional information that he cannot find elsewhere, no useful information on the subject that interests him or on the product he covets ... In short, nothing that makes him want to stay on your site.

Worst! This is double the penalty, because not only will users turn away from your site, but search engines will quickly downgrade you, or even denied pages they deem to be of poor quality. Never forget that content is king!

Concretely, poor content is content that does not meet the search intent of your prospects, because it:

• Is too short to give all the information
• Is illegible because poorly written, poorly structured, or riddled with mistakes
• Doesn't get to the point or is messy and loses readership while reading
• Is not original
• Does not deal with the subject sought

It’s also content that search engines dislike because it:

• Is duplicated
• Does not generate traffic
• Is not structured with suitable tags
• Has too long a page change time
• Contains no external or internal links, or low-quality backlinks

So how do you recognize poor content?

Google Search Console

In the Google Search Console, verify that Google hasn't penalized your website. If Google judges your content to be poor quality, you will see the message "Uninformative content of little or no interest" in the Manual Actions tab.

Google analytics

In Google Analytics, control the bounce rate of your website pages, it will tell you the time the user has spent on a page (Behavior tab, then Site Content and Landing pages).

If it's high, it's a sign that visitors either couldn't find the information they were looking for or that your content didn't captivate them.

Content Analyzer Marsh

Use the Moorish Content Analyzer tool (in the Project's tab). It will give you a lot of information about the content of each page: the number of words, the date of publication, the number of visits, the keywords that allowed Internet users to find your content, etc.

Rigorous research

Scan your pages for too short or duplicate content. It can be an enormous amount of work depending on the size of your site, but it is still necessary.

How to improve your poor content?

Now that you've identified your poor content, it's time to improve it!

1. Target your prospects

When you know how to identify your personas, you will write for them and just for them. This will allow you to no longer scatter and adapt your content and the tone of your text to your target.

2. Demonstrate your expertise

Short, concise content is better than a long, empty tirade. It is unnecessary to write long articles, however, stick to a minimum of 300 words.

The most important thing is not to skim over your subject and to go deeper into it so that the user sees that you have mastered your subject. Be specific and add value to your content, like relevant information or advice on your products.

3. Air your content

Avoid blocks of unreadable content, ventilate your texts to facilitate reading:

• Keep sentences and paragraphs short
• Structure your editorial content with titles and subtitles
• Use bulleted lists
• Make important information bold, without overdoing it

4. Illustrate your editorial content

Visuals are on the rise! Photos will help you illustrate your text and are a splendid vehicle for engagement.

Insert an explanatory video to your article and/or a relevant infographic will skyrocket your bounce rate.

Warning

Illustrations are often heavy, prefer PNG formats for your photos and illustrations, and compress them. This will improve your loading speed, especially on the mobile.

FYI, loading speed is one of the # 1 criteria in the user experience. This seems logical since to get an opinion on your content, the user must first be able to open the pages of your website. 

5. Refine your title and meta description

They are the first thing a user will see about your site in search results. They must therefore be incentive and explicit to make people want to click.

6. Improve your internal mesh

Make navigation on your site pleasant, do not make all the links, and end up losing your prospects in the depths of your website. Generate XML Sitemaps, especially if your site is large, and correct your tree structure. Favor: a semantic cocoon structure (unlike the song, it is the research intention that makes the architecture) to define your silo.

Definition

Link baiting is about creating quality content to collect backlinks. This is not only the most natural technique but the most effective!

 

7. Focus on the user experience

Quality content comes with beautiful packaging!

• Work on the ergonomics and design of your site
• Make it responsive and adapt to all media
• Do not neglect your CTAs, they must be effective (use action verbs)

 

8. Clean up your site

Now that your site is full of great content, remove poor content that you find unnecessary or de-index it so that it is no longer crawled by search engines. And finally, rework and improve your content that is too short. 

Need help? You understand, identifying its poor content and improving it represents a significant investment of time, but oh so essential to generate traffic on your website.