The Value of Good Content

Your website content is the foundation of everything your website is about. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, an information site, corporate portal or blog, the purpose of the site is to provide quality content to achieve a stated goal. That goal could be to sell, teach, gossip or entertain. Whatever the reason, good content is the medium through which it is achieved.

The value of good content is in the reactions it provokes in your audience. But just how exactly to you define good content?

Good content is informative, entertaining, original and grammatically correct. The aim of your content is to drive home a point and achieve a goal. You want to communicate to people and share with them the knowledge you have gained through your learning and experience. You also want to achieve the goals we mentioned above.

Let us break it down a bit more.

Informative

Good content is written in a language the reader understands and communicates your message clearly and unambiguously. It must also benefit the audience in a clear way, otherwise it’s just a waste of time.

Entertaining

We all want to be entertained, it’s why we use the internet. Entertaining copy gets your message across while also offering value to the audience. It can be witty, informative, dry, caustic or whatever, as long as the tone suits your audience and communicates clearly.

Original

Originality is essential if you’re considering SEO as well as audience value. Non-original content cheapens your site and can get you penalized by the search engines. Your audience won’t appreciate being served up regurgitated content either. Start as you mean to go on, with your own voice, saying things your own way.

There are hundreds of websites on hundreds of niches. If you want to grow an audience, you need to say things in an original way. Offer those visitors something they don’t get anywhere else. Otherwise you’re going to get lost in the noise.

Grammatically Correct

Grammatically correct website content is more important than you think, but not for the reasons that you’re thinking of. The correct use of tense, or knowing where to use “whom” instead of “who” are useful, but not essential. Most readers will neither know, nor care, whether you get the apostrophe positioning right every time.

Grammatically correct content means proper sentence structure, paragraph structure and your content making sense. The language and style should be consistent throughout your content, and reflect the style of your audience.

Good content means material that will achieve your stated goal. If that’s purely SEO, then the quality of that content isn’t as important as the focus. However, if you’re expecting human visitors, that quality must be paramount if you’re to garner the authority you need for your website to survive.