How do you create high-quality content?

 

How do you create high-quality content?

This has been a topic that’s been around since the dawn of the internet, and I think many people are realizing that in order to create good quality content, you need to really find out what people are looking for and what they’re searching for.

The old days of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) were full of all sorts of black hat tricks, keyword stuffing, and trying to trick the algorithms. The good thing is that in today’s marketing landscape, you do not need to know all these special tricks. You actually need to write for the reader who’s reading the post in the first place.

Google has said this for a number of years now that it’s all about the user experience and not about the algorithm, so if you can create high-quality content that people are looking for and searching for, then you’ll find that your SEO results will go through the roof.

I want to show you how to go and find exactly what people are looking for so that you can deliver those answers to those people, and in turn also get some really good SEO results from creating that high-quality content.

I’ve been saying this for a long time, and I love this meme above because it really is the future of marketing. We’re hearing a lot about that now and we can see big brands are starting to get on board. We’ve seen all sorts of content functioning as their main staple of marketing and if they’re doing it and it’s working, then it’s about time that small business owners do it as well.

How do I find content?

So the question is, how do I find the right content?

You need to make sure that you’re creating engaging content and you’re not just creating content for the sake of creating content. Too many people, especially smaller businesses, fall into the trap that they go to a marketing seminar, they hear the guru get up on stage and say, “You’ve got to create a blog every day.”

So people go away and they’re creating blogs every single day, but the reality is they’re not creating quality content. They’re creating content for the sake of creating content and it’s not going to work.

There are many examples of people who have done a blog every day for many years and they’ve gotten no results, I’m going to show you some of those coming up soon.

 

Stop Chasing people around the internet

 

But the fact is that you have to create high-quality content. The term they use for this is inbound marketing. The idea of inbound marketing has been thrown around for a while, but really what is inbound marketing?  Chasing people around the internet and hoping they visit your website has got to stop. The days of us putting random content on the different social media platforms and expecting to get some results have gone. The landscape has changed.

We really need to be able to create high-quality content that draws people in from wherever they’re at. Of course, you still use the social media platforms, but you’re using it to draw people in rather than push your message out. So you’re attracting those customers with great information that’s keeping them engaged and then you delight them so much that they want to return.

Engagement is a very important metric for high-quality content

Engagement is one of those terms that really has come to the forefront in the last two years. Not only are big companies really relying on the engagement metric of their content, but also ALL the social platforms including Google are all using that as a metric to drive their platform’s growth.

So it’s super important that you have got the right mix of content that’s really engaging the user, because if they are not engaged, the signals on the algorithms will just say, “This is not interesting content”.   Human behavior will tell us that once we’re not interested, we’ll leave. And those leaving signals will tell the platforms, “It’s not good content. We’re not going to share it any further.”

Fresh, Unique and Relevant Content

So when we talk about content, I like to say that Google loves FUR, F-U-R, and so do your customers. So what does F-U-R stand for?

1. Fresh Content. You want to make sure that you’re adding fresh content. Now, we’re talking about your website content here, but this content can be the basis for all your social posts coming up. If you’re adding fresh content to your website consistently, then Google loves it. It’s a signal that you’re alive, you’re well, and you’re doing some great stuff.

2. Unique Content. You are not allowed to copy other people’s content. I mean, apart from being plagiaristic, you need to be able to create unique content that has not been found anywhere else on the web. Now, what will happen if you do copy stuff from other people’s sites?

You simply will not be found in Google Search.

Google will not show your content in the search results. And this is what it’s all about, we’re trying to get our content out there so that people can see who you are and find your content. If you don’t create the unique content, then that content that you have copied or plagiarized will not be shown in search results, which is almost a waste of time.

3. Relevant Content.  The R stands for relevant content. The content that you have on your site needs to be relevant to the other parts of your site. So for instance, you don’t want to have a website that sells women’s shoes and then you’re also selling Viagra on the side. It doesn’t connect, doesn’t make sense. You want to make sure that the content that you’ve got on your site is relevant with each other. Some people say, “Well, I’ve got some multiple facets to my business.” If they’re really separate, then you may need to think about running separate websites because it’s going to confuse the message of your visitor when they get to your website.

Sp by following the F-U-R method, you can easily make sure your content will fit the form for Fresh, Unique and Relevant Content

Using Google to create high-quality content

Let’s have a look at content that you need to be delivering for high engagement. Now, in this day and age, we’re so lucky that Google’s algorithm has what they call predictive or preemptive text, and as you can see below, there is the ability for us to find out exactly what Google and the people on Google are looking for.

We’re very lucky that Google has given us this ability to tell us what people are searching for. If we have a search bar and we start typing in some words, you can see that Google pre-fills and tries to guess what we’re looking for.

Now, what are they pre-filling this with?

Is it just guessing?

No, it’s not, it’s actually based on all the searches that have been done for people around this content. And what they’re saying is this is what people are looking for, so if you can find out what people are looking for, then you’re going to discover some really unique stuff.

How to use google search suggest

I want to show you some examples of what I’m talking about. Okay, here’s the homepage of Google.  Let’s say that for instance, we’re dog trainers and we’re trying to create articles around dog training.

So let’s type in ‘Why’. Now, as you can start to see, as soon as I type in something, it already comes up with different content that has been searched for, for the word ‘Why’.

 

So I’m going to say, “Why does my dog,” now I’m just going to leave it at that. Watch what comes up for me here…

 

Now, check this out. If I’m a dog trainer and I want to create content, I want to create content that people are searching for. I don’t want to second guess myself and think that “I think I know what they want”. ( Yes, read that again if you have to… 🙂 )

I want to actually deliver what they want. So as you can see here, I’ve typed in, “Why does my dog.” I’m relying on Google to give me some great advice here. You can see here it says, “Why does my dog lick her paws? Eat grass, shake, eat poop, snore, lick his paws?”

So already there is some high-quality content that I could start writing articles about. If I was a good dog trainer, and if I knew what all the answers were to this, I’d probably know how to write an article on each one of these.

This is in essence, Using Google to create high-quality content and this is what people are looking for.

Now, let’s say that I liked the first choice that Google have given us. I’m going to click on the first result and it comes up and says, “Why does my dog lick her paws.”

There’s a lot of search results there, ( nearly 2 million results) and I know that it’s a very common question so people are asking that all the time. If I wanted to get some ideas for content, I could look at some of the results here and I could see what people are talking about.

I can make up my own bullet points and then talk about those bullet points in my own voice and in my own article. I am not plagiarizing, I am using it as a guide to create high-quality content.

So there’s one way to go and look at the content, get some ideas around what people are looking for, and then create your own content.

How to use Google’s People also ask to find content

Let’s say that I wanted to remove the, “Her paws,” at the end of the phrase and just have, “Why does my dog lick?” And I’m just going to hit enter here.

What I want to show you is if I scroll down a little bit, what Google also does, it gives me 4 suggestions on what people are also asking. So not only do I have some ideas around licking paws but why is my dog constantly licking?  And How do I stop my dog from compulsive licking? Now, these are great questions that people are typing into the search results. So once again, here’s some more content.

Here’s the really cool thing is if I click on this one here, “Why is my dog constantly licking.” (#1 in the image below)  I click the dropdown arrow. It’s going to show me the snippet that gives me the answer to that question.

It’s going to give me a link as well, which is great, so I can go and check out what they’re talking about. (#2 in the image above) But if I go and look below that new dropdown, you can see there’s now an extra two more questions(#3 in the image above) that Google have given me.

Here’s the really cool thing is that they’re both related to the question that I’ve clicked on, and now I’ve got myself some more questions or more content for my website. If I click on a dropdown and ‘unclick’ it or bring it up again, you’ll see there’s two more. And as I do this, suddenly I’ve got now a whole bunch of high-quality content that I can create and that I know people are looking.

They want answers to these questions because Google is telling me this.

 

So you don’t need to go and find expensive SEO tools, keyword tools, and that sort of stuff, or hard-to-use, complex algorithmic tools to go and find out what people are looking for. This is a very, very basic way of doing it, but it’s super powerful because what we’re trying to do is rank in Google’s eyes, and if we’re giving what Google wants, then we’re going to get rankings for that.

How to use Google’s Searches related to how to use google search suggest to find content

One more thing that I want to show you is if you scroll to the bottom of your feed, of your search results, you’re also going to see searches related to, “Why does my dog lick?”

And now Google is telling us, “Here are some other related topics.” So all of a sudden, within just a few minutes, I now have enough content if I was a dog trainer to fill my entire content calendar with content that fits exactly what people are looking for.

What sort of results can you expect with creating high-quality Content?

So what sort of results can you expect? Well, we’ve been doing this for a number of clients, and the results are pretty staggering. In fact, let me show you an example.

I type in  “What is tripwire marketing?”

You can see this first result and you can also see there are 1,400,000 results. , is one of our articles that we wrote on December 4, 2016. Now, as at the time of writing this, we’re into the middle of 2020.

For nearly three-and-a-half years, this article has brought me more traffic to my website every single week, even this week that we’re talking about, even the week that you’re reading this article.

It’s has brought me more traffic than any other post or even home page on my site

Now, here’s the cool thing is when we created this article, we didn’t spend any money to advertise or market it.

It was simply a play for organic reach in Google that we wanted to make, so we were delivering content that people were looking for. And to this day, they’re still giving us traffic, which is what we want.

Now, we haven’t had to pay for this.

So this is free traffic now for three-and-a-half years, the amount of traffic that we’ve had for this article is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous in a good way because we put in some good work, we wrote a great article, and it’s still to this day being found by Google.

And as you can see here, it’s in a snippet box that gives the appearance of being a very important and credible article as well.

We’ve been able to capitalize on this and get a lot of traffic from here, and as you will see, we’ve beaten out a whole bunch of other really good companies, Inc.com, crazyegg.com, and ActiveCampaign, amongst others.

These are the sorts of results you can get.

Now, a number of our clients are getting snippet features. The longer the tail and the keyword, the more chance you’ve got of getting into one of these boxes. If you’re trying to rank for a very short keyword, it’s going to be much more difficult, so we like to rank for longer keywords.

How long does it take to get results?

Here’s another result that I’d like to share with you. This is one of our clients and these people here were doing a radio show and a blog, and they have been doing this for nearly 10 years. Every single week, they did a radio show, they wrote an article, they added their images, and they were not getting any traffic. They were creating A LOT of content…

The image above is taken from the Google Search console. Unfortunately, when we look at all this content, we go back to talking about content for content’s sake. These people were doing pretty much that. And as you can see here, they’re only getting 34 clicks in three months, that’s 10 clicks a month, one every three days, and you can see their impressions were pretty low. They have an average click-through rate of 0.9%.

In case you don’t know what these numbers mean…THEY ARE TERRIBLE

Now, what we did was apply the methods we have been showing you; we did some research and we found out what people were talking about. These clients were not titling or putting out content that was relevant to what people were searching for. They had some funky titles, they had some industry jargon going on, and people weren’t looking for that, so it wasn’t effective content, it wasn’t engaging content.

Google was not delivering the results because nobody was looking for it, nobody was typing it in.

So we went back through all their posts. We started changing the names of their posts so that it reflected what people were searching for but also matched the content that was in the post, so we didn’t have to change the content, we just went and changed the titles and made sure the keywords were put inside those posts.

Here are the results after 4 months …

And as a result, we went from 34 clicks and nearly 4,000 impressions to 269 clicks and 19,000 impressions. You can see their average click-through rate went up, their average position dropped down, which is great.

So you can see that there are lots of plus sides for doing this sort of stuff, and we’re seeing this on every single client that we do this for.

Conclusion

So if this is something that you’re looking to do, it’s not that hard. As you can see, the example that we went through is not that difficult and every industry has this opportunity. I’m going to encourage you to go out, look at some of the content you’ve got on your site, look at some of the questions that people are asking you around your industry and around your expertise, and type in some of those questions into Google.

See what’s coming up, and use those responses as the basis of your content. Hopefully, this has helped you. I really enjoy teaching this stuff and I’d love to find out what you’re doing in terms of growing your blog and your traffic using this strategy.

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How do you create high-quality content?