HOW TO MEASURE THE QUALITY OF CONTENT?

Quality content is the foundation of content marketing strategy. You and your team might constitute extremely efficient and talented writers. Yet, your content might not be able to perform well online, adding no value to your company’s profits. As a matter of fact, without great content, even perfectly documented content marketing strategy can fail. Witnessing your relentless efforts go in vain is pretty depressing, isn’t it? To your luck, there are ways you can create kick-ass content every time by measuring the quality of your content.

There are several ways you can measure the quality of your content and upgrade your content game as and when needed. Using these, you can not only measure the quality of your content but also find ways to improve or reuse old, poor-performing content effectively.

This blog will help you explore some of the best methods to analyze the quality of content easily!

How to Measure the Quality of Content

Content is the ‘king’. No content marketing strategy can survive without quality content. But let’s not skip stones and take one step at a time into measuring the quality of the content.

First of all, the starting points for any content are:

Strategy: Content marketing strategy helps chalk out a guideline that you and your writers can focus on while creating content. This strategy is normally based on the company’s requirements, its objectives from the marketing, target audience, etc.
Objective: This covers the position and platform of content. Content marketing requires different formats of content placed on different platforms to improve the interaction between the client and the brand. It helps in understanding the requirements of the audience and the tone for said platform. You need to ensure that your content helps the target audience move ahead in the sales funnel.
KPIs: Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are the metrics that will be used to determine the performance of each content or the content marketing strategy as a whole. These should be pre-decided along with the strategy so that the writers know what they are working for.

These three elements should be well-defined and followed for good quality content which should achieve better results.

Next are the what and how factors. These elements will help you find out what you should focus on while measuring the content quality, and how you can do it.

Here are the elements that need to be accounted for in measuring the quality of content:

Traffic

No matter how interesting and informational your content is, how painstakingly you created it-if there’s no traffic, there’s no one to read it.

Starting from the basics, it is a must to know if your content has the quality required for digital space. There are some software and platforms that can be used to effectively analyze the traffic on your website.

One popular application used for this purpose is Google Analytics. This facilitates you to check for:

Users
Page Views
Unique page visitors

Google Analytics provides you with raw as well as narrowed down data. You can get a general overview of the website traffic as well as specified elements such as age, geography, gender, device, etc.

The raw data assists you in analyzing your current content’s performance. The specified data enables you to analyze the demographics and alter your future content accordingly.

Site Engagement

It is very common that readers barely finish reading the blog but don’t stay past a hot minute. Obviously, the probability of them reading the whole article, or even clicking on other links, is directly proportional to your content quality. This is the reason why site engagement is of much higher value than site entrance.

Good quality content should be able to make the reader stay till the end, potentially click on other related links, and convert into a lead- perhaps even make a direct purchase. In order to determine the ability of content to engage visitors, these are the factors you can analyze:

Total Reading Time (TTR): This quantifies the total reading time of each reader of the content. It can be done by briefly recording the scroll position of the reader at regular intervals and calculating the cumulative time spent by all the readers on the article.
Scroll Depth/ Time on Page: Google Analytics aids you with the data regarding time spent by readers on the page.
Conversions: It can be measured online through Google Analytics, as well as offline through sales data. It helps in understanding whether your content was compelling enough to convert readers into leads.
Online Purchase through E-commerce: If you have an e-commerce website, there are several metrics that can be used for estimating and analyzing online purchases.
Shares: Google Analytics and the website’s inbuilt metrics can help you in measuring how extensively your content has been shared. This is a direct indicator of the content’s influence on the readers.

SEO Metrics

One of the main objectives of content marketing is to improve the ranking of your website. Blogs are the most important element when it comes to improving website ranking since it helps in SEO.

While Google Analytics provides you with important data related to site visitors from different platforms, it is necessary to get traffic from search engines as well. SEO metrics are very efficient in providing statistics on the overall performance of your website. The most important one is SERP ranking. Using Google Search Console, you can analyze the performance of your website based on the keywords you focus on.

Apart from this, impressions, reach, etc are also important SEO metrics for website ranking.

How to Improve Content Quality

Once you have measured your content quality, you will find yourself with a lot of valuable data and information that can help you improve your future content. Here are some ways you’ll be able to bring out better-quality content:

Follow Google guidelines for SEO and SERP rankings
Use the right balance of keywords. Don’t overuse it.
Use the demography data and focus on writing for your current audience (or change to attract a newer audience)
Use statistics, images, etc in your blogs
Promote your blogs on social media
Encourage readers’ feedback

Creating new and impactful content every time might seem challenging. It is normal to not have one content perform as well as another. You should focus on improving your writing skills and the quality of your content as you move ahead. Once you figure out what works best for your audience, the improvement in content performance will be visible. Don’t forget to keep a check on the data and enhance your work accordingly.

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