Recently a customer was asking about content:
have you already created a blog post about what qualifies as "high-quality content" and how creating a blog post or page on our site needs to be written, in order to "catch the tradewinds" of Google's featured snippets?
I started answering this question by digging into what Google looks at, word counts, and frequency of important words.
And it got too complex and kinda pointless.
Google's become so advanced these days that you can just think of their algorithm as person.
You can look at a page's content and easily decide if it has high quality or low quality content. Google can do the same and is getting better every day.
I don't think you need a sophisticated formula or spreadsheet model to analyze it if you don't want it.
The hardest part is looking past your design to just look at your content. A great looking design can mask anemic content.
One way to see just your content is to open a page in your browser, press Ctrl-a to select all, Ctrl-c to copy, and then Ctrl-v to paste that inside of a basic text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. (Not Word, Google Docs, or anything else)
That should show you only the text content.
(If you get some formatting, try to use Ctrl-shift-v instead to paste it as unformatted text)
Read though that content and see if it feels high quality to you. You'll probably have a gut response that is mostly correct.
If you do want a simple checklist for your content quality, start with this. Every important page in Shopify should have:
- 500 words or more
- 200 words of unique content (e.g. product copy, article)
- one large headline
If you can check off all of those and you feel like the raw content is high-quality, then look at your competitors.
Is yours better or worse than theirs? Be honest with yourself.
Improving your content means writing more, writing better, and making it more useful to visitors. Continue to improve it as eventually Google will reward you with better rankings, featured snippets, and maybe other search enhancements and placements.
It's a lot of work but you can take small bites of it every day.
Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven't yet.
It can take some time before Google awards Rich Snippets to your store so if you want to be competitive for this holiday season, you should get this done soon.
Eric Davis