How can you measure the quality of your website content?

Digital Marketing | Web Design

Have you ever heard a recording of your own voice?

It sounds so weird, doesn’t it?

My voice always sounds much lower on the recording than it does in my own head when I hear it. It’s really hard to have an objective impression of your own voice without outside help. 

The same is true of website content. If you’ve built your own website, it can be tough to judge the quality of your own website content. 

And if your content isn’t good, it won’t work to convince leads that find it to choose you over your competitors. After all, that’s what a great website is supposed to – turn leads into enquiries.

Most people reach out to us when they realise that their website isn’t bringing in the number of enquiries they think they should be getting. So, one of the things we always check first is whether the content on their site is of high quality. 

One of the tools we use to try and measure the quality of the content on a client’s site is a content audit. 

What is a content audit?

Content refers to the images, photos, videos, infographics, and copy that make up your website. The content should be designed to answer the questions that your potential clients have and give them the reassurance they need that you are the company they need to do business with. 

A content audit is a series of documents that analyse the features of your site. Normally, these documents list the data that makes up your site. It will list the pages, including their titles, metadata, the number of visitors and backlinks, plus the content on each page and its role within your sales funnel. 

This data is quantitative. It can help you answer questions such as “how many pages are including the social proof that my clients need to choose me over a competitor?” or “which pages are not receiving any traffic?” 

In some ways, this data does not really measure content quality but rather measures the impact of the content. It can throw up red flags that indicate a problem, but not necessarily give a measurement of the quality of the content itself. Things like how attractive the images are, or how well the copy is written are harder things to measure. 

Instead, an excellent content audit should also include a more qualitative report. This report should assess the quality of the content on your site. How good is the copy at answering the pain points that users have? How good is it at turning a lead into an enquiry? This is the purpose of your website, and if it is not doing this, then it is failing. 

We’ve realised that measuring content quality requires looking at things from several perspectives and looking at lots of different types of data. 

Here are some of the factors we use to measure the quality of the content on any given page when we write our more subjective content reports.  Be warned though, for each factor, you will see that things are not always straightforward. You have to hold all your judgements in tension before forming conclusions. And a lot depends on the reason why each page on a site has been written. 

Enjoy!

1. Engagement time

One way to measure the quality of each page’s content is to look at the average engagement time. This is the average time that people are spending on the page. 

One would think that pages with a high-quality long-form copy should have a longer engagement time than a poor-quality copy; that videos that encourage users to keep watching to the end are higher quality than those that don’t, and so on.  

However, if your user finds their answer to their question during the first few sentences of the copy, it’s done its job, and a long engagement time is not always required! Likewise with videos, images or any other piece of content, if the user gets all the information they need quickly then they don’t need to stay on the page for a long time. 

See, I told you it is complicated. 

So, although it should not be the only judge of quality, it can give you some information about how well a website page is working. 

2. Scroll count

Again, this one is similar to the engagement rate. Generally, if users are scrolling all the way down the page to read the whole content (or at least a large chunk of it), we would assume that the content is of high quality. 

But, what if they’re scrolling because they are desperately searching for answers and just can’t find them? That’s no good, is it? 

So, we use it as a measurement along with other data to make our judgement. 

3. Path exploration

A good way of judging how well the content is encouraging users to navigate through your site is to use the path exploration feature within Google Analytics. This allows you to see what users do when they land on your site. You can drill down and down, deeper into the users’ journeys finding out the paths they took through your site at each stage. 

What you might find when you do this analysis depends on your website and industry. Generally, if you’ve written the content on your site to adequately answer the pain points of your target audience, then you should see users moving around your site, looking at content deeper within your site and allowing them to evaluate the quality of your brand or service.

4. Usability testing

This one really is helpful. A way of testing how clearly you are communicating on your website is to get some guinea pigs to interact with the site as if they are real customers and ask them about their experience. This technique is known as usability testing. 

Find some willing volunteers in your target audience and set them a series of challenges to complete on the site you are trying to analyse. Ask them to talk through their thought process as it’s happening – you will be able to get an insight into the way their mind is working as they’re looking and using the site. It’s really important that you record them whilst they’re doing this. You need to see what they’re looking at, and you need to hear what they’re thinking whilst they’re doing it. 

Some examples of the kind of questions you may ask are:

• “Pretend you are looking for [insert service]. How would you decide whether this company is the right one for you?”
• “You want [insert service]. Does this page answer all of your questions about it?”
• “What do you think about the photographs on this page?”

5. User Journey

A customer journey is the series of steps that your potential client makes as they become aware of your company for the first time and move toward hiring you. 

We can use the concept of a customer journey as another way we try and measure the quality of your website’s content by trying to put ourselves into the shoes of your target market when they look at your site. We presume that we are landing on your page for the first time, with the intent of finding a service that you provide. We then ask ourselves the following questions, with the aim of trying to mimic the customer journey that a potential lead might follow as they engage with your site. 

• What do we find out about what you can offer us the second we land on the homepage?
• Are we intrigued to find out more?
• Do we feel we can trust you?
• What evidence is there that we can trust you?
• Can we find information about the service we want?
• What kind of questions do you answer on your service page?
• Is your process clearly explained?
• Do we know how to contact you to find out more?

Answering these questions helps us determine whether the content of the site is good enough to move us from becoming aware of your brand to evaluating whether they want to use you to decide towards making an enquiry. 

6. Competitors’ sites

Looking at your competitors’ websites can really help you look at your site with fresh eyes. You might realise that your site’s content is cluttered or the copy is too small to read well. You might see that their images are more attractive, or show similar services in a better way. You might realise that you’ve missed a whole section like case studies that would really help provide your clients with the social proof they need. 

We always have a good look at other sites within your industry and location to help us figure out how you can compete. 

7. Experience

There’s no shortcut with this one, I’m afraid. If you spend as much time looking at, building and managing websites as we do, then you start to realise what works and what doesn’t. 

Half science, half art

Content quality is a tricky thing to measure. You can itemise a website’s content and use the results to look for red flags. But determining the quality of your website content is half science, half art. It involves looking at multiple measurable data points, and a huge amount of research and experience. 

Most of all, though, it’s about empathy. Websites might be built using computer code, but humans use them. And humans are emotional, relational beings, who don’t always interact with your site the way that you want.