Will Critchlow was a recent guest on SEOMoz’s Whiteboard Friday where he discussed a questionnaire he uses to help people better understand how to create content that Google’s Panda update sees as quality content.
The questionnaire, as used by Critchlow, would be given to survey takers about a particular page on a web site. Those surveyed would simply answer yes or no to the questions. The data returned from the survey could be used to see how well the targeted content would fare.
Of course that doesn’t mean we can’t take something away as bloggers, writers, SEOs, marketers, etc. By looking at the questions, we can simply take this information and apply it to every post we write.
If we write content that would make a survey taker answer yes to all, or at least most, of the questions then we can feel confident that our content will be viewed upon favorably by Google.
If we find no to be a more prevalent answer then it is time to reexamine the content and fix what doesn’t work.
To start with, we can look at some of the page level questions that Crichlow used in his survey and then some thoughts on how we can improve our content:
- Would you trust the information presented here?
- Does this article have obvious errors?
- Is this article written by an expert?
From these three questions you should have picked up on the fact that Google is looking for content that people can use.
And if someone is going to actually use the content they first have to trust the that the information is going to help them.
But to build trust, we have to look to the other two questions asked.
Does this article have any obvious errors?
Errors can be broken down into two categories: grammatical errors and errors in what is being said.
Grammatical errors are easy enough to spot and they almost immediately turn off a reader. After all, if an article is laden with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, how accurate can the content really be, right?
Errors in content are as equally off-putting to the reader. They are looking to solve a problem or learn something new. If what you are posting is inaccurate, you can bet that they won’t be bookmarking your site, sharing your content on the social channels or even reading another article.
Is the article written by an expert?
Proving that you are an expert can be a bit of a hurdle. You have to capture your audience early on and show them right from the start that you know the topic and what you have to say can help them out.
And this goes against many of the tactics that are often used to game the search engines.
Take for instance a client I had up until a few months ago. They insisted that I load up the first 100 words with the primary and secondary keywords regardless of how the content read. To them, gaming the system was far more important than making sure their readers found value in their content, despite my continued insistence that we abandon this route.
Starting your content with a strong foundation and building from there is one way that you will hook the reader and get them to pass along your content to others.
From the way things look, these social shares are going to be the next big thing in how well your pages rank. Getting people to trust your words enough to pass them along is going to be vital if you wish to survive Panda and the next round of algorithm changes.
