Are you accidentally harming businesses you love through ratings?
12/11/2019
Customer reviews are one of the most important metrics to help first-time visitors decide to visit a company. Most review sites such as ...
Search Engine Marketing | SEO | 19/07/2019
Contributor Phil Robinson. Partner, Founder + CE
If you’ve ever read any marketing or SEO tips from experts, you’ll find that they nearly all of them say the same thing about written content: quality is the most important aspect. High-quality content ranks better than low-quality (obviously). And if you have to choose between quality and quantity, quality Trumps every time.
Of course, for the longest time, no one bothered to define what “high-quality” actually meant. Gibberish text full of random words strung together without punctuation was low quality. Everyone agrees on that. But what about the other side? What makes something high-quality?
Quality writing is subjective. What one person deems high-quality, someone else might think is a flaming pile of sheep dung squished into a screen. Think of it like movies; some people like to watch all the big blockbusters, while others think the only good movies are foreign films that air only in small French villages for a single night.
But quality to Google is something specific.
Google says your website should provide value to visitors, whether that be through videos, resources, blog posts, or simply a way to reserve a table or order from your store. Quality written content can be difficult to gauge, but one way to help with this is through checking a few basic things on every page:
Always being hungry for more, Google developed over 100 pages of quality guidelines in May 2019 when they had individuals start checking top search results and give them a quality rating, something they likely will attempt to automate in the next few years. Their new rating system is measured through Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) guidelines. Since content is supposed to be useful and make visitors want to devour more, it should be something they can EAT and digest. So, the owner of a plumbing company with accolades, multiple certifications, and 40 years of work experience would be weighted higher than someone who once unstuck a wad of paper towels from their clogged toilet.
Currently, this means that the only way to accurately judge quality by Google’s standards is to have your site pages reviewed manually through the Search Quality Rating Program, which is unlikely to happen. However, by knowing what they’re looking for, you can be ahead of the curve once they figure out how to implement these guidelines into their search algorithm. A few best practices you can do now include:
With Google’s Search Quality Rating program in the works, content quality is going to become more important than ever before. While the guidelines of high-quality content might seem over-complicated and difficult, they boil down to taking the time to write useful information that is honest, relevant, accurate, and free of spelling and grammar errors.
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