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Everywhere you look in digital marketing news, the story is the same: you need great content. Good content isn’t enough, it has to be excellent! Content is what gets people interested in your brand. It encourages them to visit your site, to browse around and come back for more. But how the heck do you measure content quality?

If you’re in the business of putting content on the Internet, you need to be sure that it’s really, really, ridiculously great stuff. Otherwise, you’re likely wasting precious resources on blog posts that nobody discovers, or social posts that are mere content noise.

This article explores exactly what it means to create quality content, including Google’s quality rater guidelines, and how to measure content quality.

By the end, you’ll be able to create a list of KPIs for analyzing your own content (and probably also need a long break from the words ‘quality’ and ‘content’).

How to Measure Content Quality

The best way to measure your content’s quality is by building a custom mix of key performance indicators (KPIs) focused on three primary sources of standards:

• Your audience – their searches, pain points, and expectations
• Google’s quality standards
• Your business goals

Take what these sources say your content needs to achieve, throw in a dash of what Google demands, and translate that into qualitative and quantitative KPIs that you can measure with tools.

I know, I just listed a bunch of complex processes as if they’re easy.

But once you’ve gone through the chore of figuring out exactly which metrics will tell you about your content quality, the battle is won. You can create a dashboard in your favourite tool, pulling all the data into one place from then on.

Then it’s a matter of regularly auditing your content, tweaking it as needed, and periodically updating your KPIs to reflect changes in your audience, Google’s latest updates, and your goals.

Obviously we’re also going to cover how to do all of that, right here. After all, my goal is for this article to be a quality piece of content (wink).

Common Qualitative Content Quality KPIs

“Qualitative content quality KPIs” is a mouthful that sounds like jargon, but I promise you it’s just kind of meta. What we’re talking about here are qualitative methods you can use to analyze your content – for quality.