If you haven’t already, stop wasting your time constructing low-quality filler content for your website to make it look like it’s fresh and constantly updated. This content isn’t being read by your site visitors, isn’t being shared on social networks, and isn’t helping your website perform better in SEO. Low-quality content takes time to develop and doesn’t add anything of value to your brand web presence. While your regular site visitors might start to notice if you go weeks without updating your content, they’re not going to care if a few hours go by during the business day without any updates.
In order to avoid creating low-quality content, we need to understand what constitutes it. It’s easy to tell in hindsight what is low quality content: if you read it and think you didn’t learn or gain anything from it, it’s low-quality. Any sort of content that is written for the sake of having content and doesn’t have value to your website visitors should be avoided. Instead of writing brief 200 word posts several times a day, you’re better off paying a writer for hire to create a single 500 to 1,500 word article or blog that’s well-written and well-researched. This single high-quality content page will outperform dozens of poorly generated pages and may actually be less work overall. Write to be read, not to stuff your site with new content.
It’s actually much easier to build an audience by providing occasional high-quality content than with a constant stream of low-quality content. An over-saturation of low-quality content is bad for audience building because it makes finding your quality content a process of sorting through junk. Additionally, low-quality content may give a site visitor a negative impression of your business, which can turn them to your competitors.
Low-quality content can also hurt how well your site performs in SEO. Search engines like Google love high-quality content and are deliberately programmed to return that content at the highest positions in searches. However, each page is not a stand-alone entity. The search engines recognize which sites are most reliable for generating high-quality content and reward them for it, so by providing a constant stream of low-quality content your site is not getting a SEO boost. The SEO specialists at MOZ measure this reputation factor with something they call “Domain Authority.” In a worst case scenario, having a massive amount of low-quality content can hurt a site’s “Domain Authority” which will count against everything on the site, including high-quality content. However, having the occasional dud of an article won’t make a difference.
Because Search Engines are built to emulate human behavior, content that performs best with people does best in search engine results. One of the most effective strategies to avoid creating low-quality content is to write content for readers and not machines. Focus on creating less, but better content. Don’t over-extend your content creation staff either. If there’s not enough time to turn around quality content consider extending the deadline. Additionally, low-quality content is often not a result of poor research and writing, but a poorly conceived topic. It’s not fool-proof, but you can alleviate this problem by planning content well in advance. That way your content creators are not struggling to come up with an idea in the morning that needs to be published that afternoon. Again, this becomes creating content for the sake of creating content. If you direct your content creators away from low-quality content, you’ll create a better overall web experience for your audience.
Writer Bio: Dan S is a former news journalist turned web developer and freelance writer. He has a penchant for all things tech and believes the person using the machine is the most important element.
