Just like a good website design with a great user experience, your websites’ content contributes a lot when it comes to ranking on any search engine. This is why you should invest a lot of time in coming up with good content for your website.

Quality content is important for SEO for many reasons.

The first and most important reason is that it helps your users and it actually provides value. Write for your audience first and optimize for search engines later.

It of course also helps with how well you rank in Google or other search engines.

Let’s skip to the good part, How can you tell if your website has good quality content?

Here are some signs that you have good quality content :

1. A high CTR - Click through rate (CTR) is an important factor to rank your website - the more you get users to click on your links on search results, the greater the chance of getting better rankings on search engines. You can check your CTR on google search console.
2. Visitors repost or share your content - Content shares/reposts is an indication that your site visitors understand, like and relate to your content. It is a good conversion indicator and a lot of times users who share your content will usually scout around your website in search of some other good content. Think about YouTube for example, you watch one video at 5pm and the next thing you notice, it's 2 am and you are watching cat videos…. On YouTube!!
3. You are getting more calls or sales : Depending on what the call to action is on your website, when your site visitors find something they find useful to them, they will usually take action such as calling or making an order.
4. High site traffic - Good content and high traffic go hand in hand. With more shares and clicks, your site will definitely get more users visiting and staying on your website for extended periods of time

Here are some signs that you have low quality content :

1. High bounce rate : If people are not staying on your website especially those who found it through organic search, your content is either irrelevant or incomplete.
2. No User Engagement : A lack of user engagement can also be a sign that your content is irrelevant.This happens because people do not find the content interesting, relevant or even valuable.
3. High impressions but no clicks : If you see high impressions for a page on Google Search Console, but no one is actually clicking on your article, it is very likely that your page title and description are not optimised for search. The page title and description should give the user a snippet of what they expect to find when they open that link
4. Low sales : When users don’t relate to or fail to understand your website’s content, it is hard for them to take any further action on your website. These actions may include :  Joining your mailing list, visiting other web pages within your website or making inquiries about your products

Common mistakes when generating content

Thin content (Content with no value to the user)

Thin content is content that has little or no value to the user. Google considers doorway pages, low-quality affiliate pages, or simply pages with very little or no content as thin content pages.

One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking on search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content. According to Google, search engines will take action against domains that try to rank by just showing scraped or other cookie-cutter pages that don't add substantial value to users.

How to avoid the thin content penalty:

• Do not post Automatically generated (also called "auto-generated"—content) that is generated by a program on your website. This type of content unreadable full of search keywords but is unreadable to site visitors and therefore offers no value
• Do not post product descriptions and reviews that are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value.  Added value means additional meaningful content or features, such as additional information about price, purchasing location, or product category.

Irrelevant content (Not related to your products or services)

Irrelevant content can be content that is not related to the services that you offer or the products you are selling in any way. A bad practice that would fit this scenario would be a website that sells motor vehicle parts posting content about groceries and healthy eating. Chances are, someone reading an article on healthy eating would not be interested in vehicle parts. In such a case, it is nearly impossible to convert this type of visitor into a customer.

While having a lot of content on your website can help improve your websites’ overall rank on search engines, however, if the content is irrelevant, it won't help your website sales in any way. 

Duplicate Content (Copied from other websites)

Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. That “one place” is defined as a location with a unique website address (URL) - so, if the same content appears at more than one web address, you've got duplicate content.

While not technically a penalty, duplicate content can still sometimes impact search engine rankings. When there are multiple pieces of, as Google calls it, "appreciably similar" content in more than one location on the Internet, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.