High-Quality Content: What Is It? July 5, 2023 No-one can agree on what ‘high-quality content’ means. The kernel–chaff rubric is designed to solve that problem.Quick Lessons
95% of SEO content should guide buyers towards a purchase.
If your content DOESN’T help someone navigate the buying journey – understand their problem, evaluate solution types, and decide on a vendor (i.e. you) – it’s a waste of budget.
But there are exceptions.
The most common: building up topical authority.
Have a high content velocity or cover very niche areas?
You might need to create assets that don’t map exactly to your buyers’ purchase journeys.
That’s OK – stronger topical authority helps your other, problem-focused pages rank better.
But the other 95% of SEO assets need to go beyond being just helpful (unless you’re a media brand).
They need to actively solve the problems that buyers face on their way to purchasing your product or service.
The best SEO content:
- is technically competent (written well w/o errors, looks nice, loads fast)
- contains some original elements (informational or otherwise) beyond what already exists in a given search landscape
- entertains, educates and/or inspires your ICP
- helps your ICP progress further in their buying journeys
- is written using research from primary sources (personal experience, original research, raw data, interviews with experts, etc.)
With Google updates like the helpful content system now fully rolled out, thin, valueless content isn’t just a waste of budget.
It’s a liability that can result in site-wide demotions.
So, before you hit ‘Publish’ on your next content asset, make sure you’ve checked it against the above quality factors.