Nowadays 81% of adults go online daily, including 28% who say they are online regularly, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
At least some of the time, they’re expected to read brand-provided content – content that answers their questions, content that talks their pain points, content that keeps them updated on their industry, content that involves them with interesting stories and relatable anecdotes.
For those customers to view that content as reliable and engaging, it must be valuable and reliable. How do you do that? Let’s discover.
- Be authoritative
No, adding authority to your content does not mean imagining you’re a middle school principal moralizing a group of unruly youngsters.
Being authoritative in your content means understanding what you’re talking about and showing it. It’s an authority in terms of Google’s EAT standards: Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
In case you haven’t heard, Google uses human assessors to test the quality and precision of search results and there are published guidelines for these raters with lots of clues about how Google estimates search rankings. The main factor that sets apart a high-quality search result from a low-quality one is the amount of knowledge, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness existing in the content.
To prove your knowledge, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, you should:
- Use what you know – Draw on the years of experience in your business to generate examples that demonstrate points and concepts you’re trying to clarify.
- Show your work – Mention relevant content pieces that you published on topics that enlarge on the subject you’re writing about in this article.
- Use research – Include statistics and data from the reading and research you’ve done (because if you truly are a manufacturing authority, you keep up with this type of stuff). Ensure the information is fresh and links to the native source.
- Maintain up-to-date author bios on your site – The bios should comprise the authors’ skill, how they earned it, and their credentials. List all (or many) content pieces they’ve created.
- Be informative and comprehensive
Probabilities are your readers are coming to your content because they have questions (especially if they found you on Google). Ensure you offer the answers.
Easier said than done, right? Of course. Here are some rare tips to help:
- Research the questions your readers are asking – Topic, audience, and keyword research gets you a long way here. They help you know what your readers are looking for and their major queries. Then, you can concentrate on generating content pieces that answer those questions.
- Stay in the one-topic wheelhouse – Narrow your content focus. Discover a few key areas of one overarching topic or theme. That way you can go in-depth and offer useful information versus skimming the surface and telling your readers what they already identify.
- Outline a purpose for every piece of content you create – Before you begin drafting, choose what that content piece will do for your viewers. In what way will it help them? Once you figure that out, accomplish that purpose in the content. Make the reader walk away thinking they educated something or answered a problem.
- Be readable
The third way to generate valuable content is easy, but many people get it wrong. It’s all about readability. That doesn’t mean just using the right spelling and grammar. It’s also about:
- Writing to your audience’s level of knowledge
- Writing for the medium on which your words will look (that means electronic screens both big and small)
- Writing for clearness and meaning
- Arranging the text clearly and logically using readability principles like hierarchy, white space, contrast, and consistency.
- Have a point of view
Does valued content look, read, and feel like every other part of the topic? No.
If your content offers nothing new, gives the answers everyone else is giving and sounds the same as your industry peers, it only enhances the noise.
As an alternative, differentiate with your content.
- Give your readers a fresh view of a tired topic – Look at what is previously there and strive to be different or better.
- Provide the unique spin, angle, or outlook only you can give.
- Fill your content with personality – Some people find this easy to do through writing. Others select video or audio, and some find personality comes through better if another writer interviews them.
- Give satisfaction
Finally, valuable content is satisfying content. New information replaces confusion. Readers feel satisfied.
Satisfaction blends all these previous pieces of advice into well-executed content. For instance, if the purpose is to give your newbie readers a summary of a meaty topic, you use understandable vocabulary, clarify terms they haven’t heard, and avoid introducing innovative topics. If the purpose is to distinguish your content, you examine high-ranking content to evaluate the answers and recognize how you could improve on it.
But satisfaction also draws on a couple more tips:
- Cover the topic at hand from front to back – Don’t leave out important facets. If you write about SEO, you have to discuss the on-page and off-page factors that inspire rankings.
- Provide closure – Don’t leave the reader hanging. Wrap up your post with a tidy inference that repeats the main point (or points). If you can, offer a parting thought that nicely sums up what the reader has learned.
