11 Ways to Improve Content Quality for SEO

• By Olivia Ava
• 21-04-2022
• SEO

The effectiveness of a site’s SEO efforts depends heavily on the quality of the uploaded content. Substandard content that is riddled with grammatical errors and plagiarized bits of text is appreciated by neither the readers nor the search engines.

If you are not sure how to improve the quality of your content for SEO, you can start by following the 11 tips mentioned in this post.

11 Ways to Improve Content Quality for SEO

Let’s get started.

1. Make Your Content Grammatically Perfect
In online content, bad grammar sticks out like a sore thumb. Grammatical errors are noticeable, even for lazy and inattentive readers. And these mistakes are quick to damage the reputation and integrity of the written content.

But, here’s the thing.

One or two grammatical faults in a blog post or article are somewhat overlookable. Even your readers will understand the fact that despite multiple proofreading sessions, subtle errors can remain undetected.

However, grammatical imperfection becomes an issue when it is found consistently in your content. Once you are done writing your draft, always run it through a grammar checking tool before finalizing it.

Technically speaking, bad grammar won’t directly damage your ranking on Google (unlike Bing). However, it can chase away readers, which will mean a decrease in incoming traffic.

1. Detect Plagiarism
Another step that you should take to increase the quality of your content is to check for plagiarism at the end of every writing session.
You can use a free plagiarism checker to detect duplication in your content. If you find any matching phrases or sentences in your text, change their wording to make them unique.

Plagiarism can be very harmful for your website’s ranking in the SERPs. Copying content from published sources can get you a Google penalty. The most serious form of a Google penalty is site de-indexing. This means that your website will be removed from the listing altogether.

However, in a milder form, a Google penalty can make your website rank lower in the search results. It is, therefore, very important to check for plagiarism in your content before publishing it on your site.

If the tool manages to recognize the plagiarized and unique text correctly, you can go ahead and use it for your own work as well.

2. Use Simple and Easy Words
There are a lot of different ways in which you can improve the readability of your content. We will look at some more of them as we go along with this post.

However, the biggest factor that plays a part in deciding the readability of your writing is the words and phrases you use.
You should stick to using simple and well-known words so that your readers can easily understand you.
Incidentally, using a paraphraser is also a good way to come up with simpler and easier-to-read content.
A rewriter tool usually works by replacing specific words with synonyms without changing the meaning of the original content.

Some tools work a little smartly, and they also change the sentence structure. If you cannot think of a simpler alternative for a complex sentence in your text, you can use a paraphraser and get it reworded.

3. Perform Your Keyword Research Properly
Before we talk about how you should use keywords in your content, let’s talk a little about which keywords you should use. Typically, we would not have mentioned ‘better keyword research’ as a step to improving content quality.

However, since we are talking about SEO writing, this is an essential point to mention. When preparing the list of keywords to include in your content, find the ones that are directly related to your brand.

If you branch out too far, you can end up optimizing keywords that are no use to your website.

However, it is worth noting that going to the other extreme in this process is not going to pay off either.

Because if you pick keywords that are too similar to one another, you could end up doing keyword cannibalization.

4. Use Keywords in the Right Density
Moving on, when you do pick the right keywords to use in your content, you need to make sure that you use them in the right density.
Keyword stuffing can be a serious problem. Your website can get penalized by Google and your ranking can drop.

And contrary to what the term may imply, keyword stuffing does not only refer to the over-usage of short-tail and long-tail keywords in the text.

According to blog.alexa.com, some types of keyword stuffing consist of:
Needlessly repeating words
Writing words that don’t match the context of the overall content
Using unrelated keywords
Coming to the recommended keyword density, there isn’t a fixed standard or value that we can mention here.
However, according to expert opinion, the ideal density is 1 – 2% of the whole content. That basically means mentioning a keyword every 50 – 100 words.

5. Use Images
Using images can be helpful for your website’s SEO due to two reasons.
Firstly, it helps in making your content reader-friendly. Visual representations can make your content look more engaging.
Secondly, adding images can be helpful for increasing your website’s ranking.
Image searching is getting quite popular nowadays, and if your content has any type of visuals in it that can come up in popular searches, it can help your overall ranking.
You can also add ‘alt’ (alternate) text to the uploaded images to make it easier for site crawlers to determine their relevancy.

6. Use Internal Links
Adding internal links in your content i.e., adding links to other pages on your website, can also help your SERP ranking.

Using internal links, site crawlers can quickly move around your website. This helps them in determining the relevance of your content.
Similarly, internal linking can also improve the reader-friendliness of your content.
By linking different pages in various spots around the post/article, you can help the reader go to other pages on your website without having to look through navigation menus.

7. Use External Links
Another way in which you can improve the quality of your content for SEO is to use external links.
And just like with internal linking, there are two reasons why this can be useful.
Firstly, adding links to authoritative websites in order to substantiate your mentioned points and facts can be a good way to build the credibility of your content.

If you add a hyperlink to any mentioned statistic or figure, it will show that you have done your research properly.
For example, if I was to say that 69.7% of search queries contain four or more words, you won’t be very likely to believe it.
On the other hand, if I was to tell you that 66.31% of web pages have no backlinks, you will trust it since there is a hyperlink that points back to the original source.

Moving on, the second reason why external links can be helpful for your SERP ranking is that they can help Google determine the relevancy of your website.

External linking not only helps those websites from where the link is going out. It mainly helps those websites to which the links are pointing towards.

In other words, if there are a lot of websites that have your site’s link mentioned on them, it’s going to be good for your SERP ranking.

8. Discuss Customer Pain Points
If you want to improve the quality of your content for SEO, you should focus on making your content relatable and appealing to the readers.

Instead of mentioning random details, you should try and discuss customer pain points.
If you give your readers solutions to the problems they face (for whichever product or service you are writing about), you will be able to make your content valuable.

There are a lot of different ways in which you can find out the problems and issues faced by the customers of a certain service or product.
You can conduct surveys, visit public forums, and read published blog posts.

Another reason why mentioning pain points in your content is a good idea for SEO is because people can specifically look for them in the search engine.

For example, if you are writing a post about laptop batteries, you could make a heading like: Why is my laptop getting warm after using it for some hours?
Now, this is a pain point, and this exact sentence is a string that can be used by people looking for the solution to this problem.
If you include this question in your content, your site will appear close to the top of the SERPs because of the direct search match. It will have a greater chance of being clicked on.

9. Don’t Make Promises That You Don’t Plan on Keeping
In the introductory part of your content, you should clearly describe to your readers the things that you are going to be discussing in the post/article.

If you tell your readers that you are going to be discussing this feature and that feature, but end up talking about neither of them, it’s going to affect your content very negatively.

In this context, making promises refers to telling the readers what they should expect in the given content.

The benefit that you will get by not making false promises is that your content’s integrity will increase.

Your readers will know that whatever you have mentioned in your introduction, will be elaborated on in the post/article.

10. Write as if You’re Talking to a Friend
One thing that you could have understood after reading this post is that improving content quality for SEO does not only mean taking care of the technical aspects.

The core of SEO-friendly content is reader-engagement. If you make your content engaging, your site traffic will increase, and your readers will make repeated visits.

And to increase your content's engagement, you need to make sure that your writing is relatable and likable.

Try and use humorous words and phrases where possible. Also, try and give real-life examples.

A useful tip that you can follow to see if your content sounds natural or not is to read whatever you’ve written aloud.

If it sounds like something you would say or tell to a friend in real life, then it’s okay. But, if it sounds too mechanical and robotic, try using a paraphrasing tool to reword it.

Conclusion
And that brings this post to an end. In this post, we discussed some ways in which you can improve the quality of your content for SEO.
To start off, you should make sure that there are no imperfections in your text with regard to grammar, readability, and uniqueness.
After that, you should work on doing your keyword research properly and using them correctly in your content.

At the same time, you should work on incorporating other SEO techniques such as adding external and internal links.
Throughout the SEO content creation process, you should keep in mind that the easier and more natural your writing is, the more likable it will be for the readers.