Relevancy and Does Your Content Qualify?

By | August 13, 2019

Getting people to click on your content is the ultimate goal of writing content for your website. To achieve this goal making your content relevant to your subject is the most important step in creating a good user or UX experience. Find out if your content qualifies, according to Google.

Relevancy image by GinsuText

(Image by permission)

 

 

What Is Relevancy?

Why You Want To Write Relevant Content

How To Write Relevant Content

Providing All Relevant Information

 

What is Relevancy?

Wikipedia defines the word “Relevance” as the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first.

Another meaning to the word “Relevance”, Relevance of Ideas. A good paragraph should contain sentences that are relevant to the paragraph’s main subject and point. While the topic sentence sets up the main idea, the rest of the sentences provide details that support or explain this main idea.

 

Why You Want To Write Relevant Content

Making your content on your website relevant to your website is what you, as a webmaster, must do to

  • Get search engines to rank your website
  • To get people to click on your content
  • To provide good users experience

You have about eight seconds to capture the visitors to your website attention to stay and read your content. If your post or page is not relevant, they click away. The same is true for the search engines indexing your content. Your content is run through a program that decides whether the content on the whole page is relevant to the title of your web page.

If there are discrepancies in relevance your web page will not rank on page one of the search engines. Remember, the search engines want to deliver the most relevant content to the search term that a person is looking for.

To get on page one of Google is a feat all in itself. In order to qualify for page one, your web page must be of high-quality content relevant to the subject, or title of your web page.

Put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors, for a moment. The website visitor is looking for information that answers or solves a problem. As a webmaster, you want to provide the best possible answer to their question so as you solve their problem.

This results in “good user experience”, which will lead to trust from the visitor and maybe, just maybe, lead to a follower.

 

How To Write Relevant Content

 

Practice makes perfect or so goes the phrase. We are taught in school how to write, which basically is communication through words on paper. The first sentence of a paragraph is the subject and the sentences that follow are relevant to the subject.

A web page is no different. Each paragraph has to relate to the subject or title of the web page. Similar to using an outline, a web page follows the same path. Each heading of a web page should be relevant to the entire web page, and each paragraph under each heading should relate to the heading.

When I set out to write content for a web page, I first research my keyword tool for search terms that people are using to find information. Once I gather several search terms that have a decent amount of search volume and low competition, I make a list of these search terms.

Next, I decide which of these search terms would be a good fit for my website. I write five headings to use on the web page. These five headings will be my content. I find that breaking up my subject into five topics provides a higher quality of content over just three or four topics.

In the diagram below, I use this outline for all my web pages.

  1. Title
  2. First Heading
  3. Second Heading
  4. Third Heading
  5. Fourth Heading
  6. Conclusion

Providing All Relevant Information

Without writing a novel with too many details, it is best to hit on each topic with enough detail that the end-user understands the information that allows them to see your point of view.

Unlike the news on TV, you want to provide convincing information without hiding the truth. Write your content for the end-user and not the search engines. By providing all the information you can, you give the end-user the ability to arrive at their own conclusion.

This is what we are all supposed to be doing, providing truthful, relevant information to the end-user. Hopefully, we will be rewarded by the search engines with higher rankings that will get more visitors to click on our content.

 

Conclusion

I have clicked on a lot of web pages in my research that have left me still asking questions. The web page didn’t provide useful information to me, or at least not enough that left me hanging. For me, this not providing good quality content that answers all my questions or that solves a problem.

I don’t return to those websites that didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I don’t want that to be happening to me. My goal is to provide adequate quality content to my end-user. This should also be the same goal for you when you start writing content for your website.

If more people did this, what a wonderful experience the online world would bring.

8 thoughts on “Relevancy and Does Your Content Qualify?

  1. Henderson

    This is an awesome post.  Truly, you hit the nail on the head with this post. Content, I mean good content is a good way to get your post qualified for page one of Google. Like you said, if the post is not catchy, the readers lose interest and click away. So it is important to have a good introduction that is captivating. This post is really informative. Great one, worth sharing.

    Reply
    1. Kenneth Merrick Post author

      Eight seconds, Henderson, is all it takes to be a winner. Go and create some relevant, high-quality content!

      Reply
  2. RoDarrick

    Hmm! It is indeed germane to make contents on websites very relevant to the goal of the website. I’m also among the set of people that finds it very difficult to stay for more than a few seconds if I click on a website without adequate information to what I’m searching for. But as a blogger, I’m impressed with your take on relevancy, which I have learned by reading this article. Thank you for helping me with the rudiments that are needed to ensure quality is attained with every content I create for my site. I learn something new every time I visit this site.

    Reply
    1. Kenneth Merrick Post author

      Ro, If more people authors would do a little research before they wrote their website content chances are the end-users would benefit greatly. Maybe that is why 90% of websites never make it to the first page of Google. Thank you again, Ro, for reading my article.

      Reply
  3. Feochadan

    I have seen many web sites that have left me asking questions.  Sometimes I think the writer was just in too much of a hurry to get a post up.  Your comments on relevance are spot on.

    If people do the proper research before writing, I think this would help a lot.  Also, you need an understanding of what the reader wants.  So, to present yourself as an authority on a subject you need have a deep understanding of the subject and what the reader needs.

    Reply
    1. Kenneth Merrick Post author

      Yes, Feochadan, you are spot on with your understanding of what it takes to write relevant, high-quality content.

      Reply
  4. Kay Patterson

    This article is just spot on. I am glad you pointed out the importance of breaking down your articles, as you say this is really vital for readability for people and web spiders but also important for us as writers as it makes smaller hurdles to jump and forces us to create well-structured content.

    The thing I still struggle with is choosing a subject based on keywords. I have no problem writing relevant content – I’m sure if I was running a market stall dedicated to my niche I would be answering the questions people of all expertise levels would be asking. Now whether or not my articles are going to actually get seen by anyone online, I don’t know. I am not convinced I will be ranked as I struggle to get to grips with the keyword research. Any tips to finding “search terms that have a decent amount of search volume and low competition” when you already know what you want to say? 

    Reply
    1. Kenneth Merrick Post author

      Kay, I am glad you understand the importance of relevancy and that you are able to write high-quality content for UX (user experience). As far as your keywords, I first think about a topic, then I plug in a search term I would ask to see what the keyword tool delivers. I view what the tool displays, sometimes the tool offers a much better search term than my “seed term”. I always go with search volume minimum of 100 (higher is better), Traffic minimum of 50 (higher is better), and QSR maximum of 125 (lower is better).

      Reply

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