Signs of Successful Content

by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp — all-in-one help authoring tool

Every company creates a lot of content, i.e., about a company, guides, faqs, etc. How to find out if yours is valuable for readers and stands out among the others? There are specific rules to make your content good:

1. Good content is always about the correct targeting. It’s a marketing issue, really. Before you start writing, you should thoroughly consider who you’re addressing and how your content can offer some kind of solution.
2. It should be optimized to have the right keyword phrases naturally fit in the text. Your text should be dedicated to the subject matter and not to the abundance of keywords.
3. The structure is the basis of every worthy content. As a good technical writer, you already know that, right? And don’t forget about the length of your text.
4. Along with the above mentioned, grammar is also vital. It helps to gain your readers’ trust towards the documents you make and show that you are a professional juggler of words, phrases, and punctuation marks.
5. The topic should be as unique as possible technically and by meaning. With the plethora of diverse opinions, yours could be not the only one, so please find a way to present it like nobody before you.

Another way to learn if your content is valuable is to ask the readers: SMEs, colleagues, customers, sometimes family members. But that’s not always possible:

• SMEs and colleagues may be busy with their work.
• Customers may not have time for feedback.
• Family can be biased.

Don’t worry! In such cases, we have a set of analytic tools to measure what you write and how you do it. Let’s have a look:

1. Google Analytics is the first that comes to mind. The ultimate tool that every website manager and marketing expert needs. It gives comprehensive demographic data about your audience, the most liked topics.
2. HubSpot’s social analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths, and impressions. It’s similar to Google Analytics but at the same time simpler in a way. There are many more to these, but that’s what I use. They are also helpful in measuring the ROI of your content.
3. Readability metrics measure the quality of your documents. There are various popular readability indexes, all of which are calculated by the Readability.info tool. Some take a different approach or measure things a bit differently, and, in any case, everyone selects just a few favorites that they rely on regularly. (Among them are: Automated Readability Index, Coleman-Liau Index, Gunning-Fog Index, SMOG, etc.). I already touched upon this subject in one of my previous articles — Metrics to Improve Your Documentation.
4. Having a great platform to combine all content in one place to help you evaluate effectiveness is critical. For example, by combining tracking links built-in HubSpot and utilizing Databox to create content-performance dashboards, you get the visibility of your content’s performance.

Such tools and services are aimed at making your work simpler, and in some cases, to show your boss the value of your work:) Learn how to apply and analyze these data to take advantage of them. Also, I’d recommend testing different tools to find the right one for you.

Have a nice day!

Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors