What constitutes quality content? It’s more than just the text

Google has always been very clear about one thing…”Produce great quality content that users will love”. Follow this simple guideline and you’ll be rewarded with Google traffic. Actually, it’s not that straight forward, there are many factors at play. But what is “quality content”?

In a recent Google SEO office-hours Q&A session, Google’s Gary Illyes was asked about issues related to the indexing of a website. Gary clarified that in order for Google to properly index a website, it depends upon the popularity of the website (backlinks) and the quality of the content.

Previously, Google engineers have stated that quality content is not just about the textual part of the page, but also the quality and integration of images, the page layouts and page load speed, to name a few.

One of the ways to look at this is from an intent perspective. If a user is searching for “anniversary gift ideas”, it’s unlikely that they want to read a lot of text, they probably want to see images of actual gifts that they could buy for their partner. A page with just text on it, is unlikely to rank for this search term. In many cases, especially for searches where the intent is for an expected visual result, it’s probably better to make the images the priority, even above the text.

There is a new trend now towards the use of AI images on web pages. These can sometimes be misleading to users and Google has announced that they will be identifying AI images in their search results and labelling them accordingly. With the ease now of creating new images, it’s a great time to ensure that web pages are deemed higher quality by search engines.

Users tend to scan text, but will always focus on an image. Use them to your advantage to make pages high quality…you will be rewarded!

View More Insights