You might have heard that – Content is King. So you may ask yourself a question- What this king looks like? We often hear that we should be writing Quality content instead of focusing on Quantity because Google loves Quality not Quantity. I always heard this during the starting days of my Blogging journey and believe me I was like – What the hell is quality content? This happens with most of the newbies; i.e. they can’t determine the quality of the content.
But why should we bother about the quality of our content?
The answer is simple – Because people love it + Google loves it.
So writing quality content gives you loyal readers as well as high SERPs. That’s why it becomes necessary to determine the quality of our content.
So, How to check the quality of our content?
Well, there is no such tool to check the quality of your blog content but you can get an idea about your content. Below are some measures which give you an idea about the Quality of your content.
1. Your Google Analytics Account
Google has the solution to every problem. It has some great tools for bloggers to increase their Productivity like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. So why not make use of them? You can track the user behavior on your site with Google Analytics. You just have to put a piece of code on your blog and it starts tracking every single visit and the behavior of your readers. So, how to exploit the features of Google Analytics fully? Use the following parameters to know more about user behavior on your site and to determine – whether your blog is producing quality content or not?
Page Views: Track the number of page views on your site. If it is increasing, then chances are that you are writing quality content. But this is not a perfect measure of quality content. But yes it is a major factor to determine the quality of a blog.
Bounce Rate: Keep track of bounce rate of your blog. Bounce rate is the measure of readers who visit only 1 page of your site and then they bounce, so your bounce rate should be low. If it is high then you are doing something wrong and readers are not satisfied with your articles. So what should be the ideal value of bounce rate?
Well, there may be several possible answers to this question but I say “There is no such value”. Instead, try to reduce it every day and compare it with the previous results. If it is decreasing then users are engaged with your content and they are happy with you.
Avg. Time Spent On Site: You should keep track of the avg. time spent on your site. Again there is no ideal value as some niche attracts more reader’s attention like photography blogs can have more avg. time and tech blogs have less avg. time but compare it with the previous results and it should be increasing.
2. Number of Blog Comments
How comments can help in determining the quality of your blog content? Well, this is really easy. People start commenting on your blog if you do some good job on a topic. If you are getting more real comments on your blog then chances are that you are good at writing.
But remember most of the people comment just for the sake of backlinks so how to filter out your loyal readers? Well, if your comments are being converted into a discussion and readers are coming back to reply the comments then you are writing quality content.
3. Number of Real Subscribers
Real subscribers are another measure of quality content. More number of subscribers means your blog has inspired many peoples and they want to follow you. But remember some people subscribe to your blog just for guest posting and spamming so don’t consider those subscribers. You can easily find the real subscribers by taking a look at their email IDs. If they are from Gmail, yahoo and Hotmail then 90% chances are that they are real but if they are having email IDs like example@o2.pl, example@pl and other email IDs like example@domain.com, then they are spammers or guest posters and they are not interested in your content (there may be some exceptions).
4. Getting Trackbacks and Pingbacks from Good Blogs
This is another sign to determine the quality of content you have written. If people are linking to your content automatically, then you are writing quality content on your blog. But getting trackbacks and pingbacks from Spam sites doesn’t mean people are linking to you. Check all the links you get trackbacks from and if the blog is a good blog then only consider those links as good links.
Here, automatic means people are linking to you automatically without asking for any favor like money and link exchange. That is because they want to give you credit for whatever you have written, so they are inspired by you.
5. People Asking for Suggestions and Help
If people are following you on Social Media and you get too many mails like: “Please, Take a look at my blog and give some suggestions”. Then you have inspired a lot of people and this is another sign that you are writing quality content on your blog.
So it seems that there are various measures to determine the quality of your content. So what must be the actual measurement because some of these criteria may not be fulfilled by a blog? Well, if your blog has all these qualities then – Your blog is producing quality content.
But if it fails to satisfy some conditions then you need to work more upon your content because every good blog has all these qualities.
No doubt these steps are very helpful to analyze any blog’s content quality. In blogging the most important thing is content, high quality and fresh content can boost any blog’s viewership, traffic and ranking position in SERP. Therefore every blogger should focus on quality content and easy navigation.
The best way in my opinion to tell if your content is good is by having user interaction, real interaction not people spamming to get a backlink from you. People usually only like and comment on stuff that’s good and is the most accurate method of checking for content quality.
A very nice article prabhat,
In my opinion the best tool to check whether you are producing the quality content or not is Google analytics, it provides all sort of information regarding the site visitors and their behavior by monitoring on the page views.”bounce rate” etc…
by the way very detailed article.. 🙂
Hey Prabhat,
Nice post and Thanks for sharing these useful tips with us. Yes, Google Analytics is best way to know whether blog producing quality content or not and if blog comments are increases then it means people enjoying our post and helping him.
A very usefull article – Thank you very much I wish you will not mind me blogging about this article on my website I will also link back to this post Thank you
I also think referring the Neil Patel’s guide on his blog as he has given the exact guide of using the Google Analytics and its all features
thanks krishna, i dont know about that guide but thanks for your comment
Great piece of writing.Each and every point you have mentioned in your post is crucial to determine the quality of blog contents. Thanks for sharing.
thanks lakhyajyoti for your nice comment, keep visiting
Google Analytics will tell most of the stuff like where we are going and how we are performing. It’s a great tool!
yes cristopher, you are right,GA tells us more than enough
I’ve always wanted to know if I’m writing the good stuff. Good feedback and comments from your real subscribers is really not enough to evaluate the content of my blogs. Thanks for the tips on tracking user behaviors using Google Analytics. Thanks a lot Prabhat!
i am glad you liked my post glen. thanks for leaving a comment
Hello Prabhat,
Nice tips for getting completer info about the blog whether it is producing quality content or not. Google analytics is a good tool for analyzing the quality.
you are right prakash, google analytics is a great tool if you know how to use it
Personally, to ensure if our blog posts are quality or not, it depends on how many times people share our posts. If they dropped a comment only and didn’t share our posts, this could mean that they are not interested to share it in their network so good comments should not only the part we should look at.
i did not say that number of comments is the only part we should consider. leaving comments takes much more time then sharing post and if user is taking time to leave comment then surely he likes the post but sometimes people share our posts just to get 10 recent posts in commentluv so its not a perfect measure.
BTW i said these all points are necessary to determine the quality of content not only one (at the end of post).
Very good post. Puts blogging in perspective as THE foundation for an effective marketing strategy. Helps ensure you will ‘get found’, attract leads and convert those leads to sales.
thanks sonali for your response, i am glad you liked the post
These days many people are writing good stuff, so we can say that Content is not the king! Marketing Strategy is the King. This is the reason why sites like Mashable or Gizmodo always rank for almost everything they write. Most of the Indian bloggers just write the things which are already present in hundreds of the places in world and consequently none of them makes it big on the web.
you are right utkarsh but it doesn’t mean that mashable,gizmodo and huffingtonpost are not writing quality content..they have already built their trust that’s why they rank for everything they write. BTW thanks for reading this post and leaving response
Good post,
The way I tell if an article is a good quality one is the comments, if you have good comments that are relevant to it (not just spam) as this means that there is a good interaction. I do agree with you though, sometimes you cannot base it on this and it’s always good to look at stats like bounce rate.
Another good thing is if you use software (javascript) that tracks clicks, I have found when reading, the visitor sometimes clicks on bits that are interesting.
Sam
you are right sam, but more scripts means slow website and more loading time so i think these things are enough to determine the quality of content you have written. if a blog satisfies all these criteria then it must be a good blog. btw thanks for stopping by
Prabhat, You have covered a lot in this article about assessing the quality of content.My website is about Jobs in Medical sector in India – it has very high bounce rate of around 60-80%.Is there any way for a Jobs website to improve bounce rate….
i am glad you liked it krishna, thanks for stooping by
hello krishna yes you are right, these are some really helpful tips to know the quality of content. i am glad you liked it
Hi Prabhat, well detailed article you have given which will really get to know the quality of any website or blog in-sense of quality of the articles. I always use Google Analytics (a perfect tool according to me) to get the very detailed study of quality of articles.
And yes, I don’t really think that Comment should be considered the key point here but yes it still depends on the niche of blog.
Thanks,
Krishna Parmar