探花精选

As someone who’s made a living writing for the web for over a decade, the term “quality content” haunts me. The bar, it seems, is constantly shifting, ever subject to Google’s changing algorithms and, as of late, AI’s rising influence. It’s a lot.

No one knows this better than 探花精选’s content strategists. I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside them for the past year in my role as the 探花精选 Website Blog’s staff writer and editor.

So, what are the quality content secrets of the talented team at the helm of one of the best-known business blogs on the internet? Read on to find out.

Table of Contents

• What is quality content?
• Why is having quality content on your website so important?
• 10 Tips to Write Quality Content (Straight from 探花精选's Content Strategists)

What is quality content?

Quality content helps your audience and your business. It can be in the form of blog articles, social media posts, videos, or podcasts. In SEO, "quality content' is also frequently used to describe content that meets Google's E-E-A-T guidelines.

A YouTube video that walks you through fixing your leaky kitchen sink? Quality content. A blog post describing the pros and cons of CRM software? Quality content. A TikTok video that makes you laugh so hard you send it to your friends? Quality content.

If you’re a business, however, there’s a second layer: Quality content, in addition to being valuable to your audience, needs to meet your business goals. In that case, it’s content that drives traffic, generates leads, and turns prospects into customers.

The term “quality content” usually comes up when talking about SEO and Google.

The term can feel subjective. But when you consider that, according to 2024 , more than 60% of referral traffic comes from Google (which publishes guidelines on what it considers to be quality content), it’s concrete in some ways.

So what does Google consider to be quality content? Well, here’s an overview of what you should know:

• Google says it wants you to create "." That means you should write for humans first— not search engines. Google doesn’t like when you try to game the system.
• Google’s algorithms are based on E-E-A-T, a mix of factors that, though not direct ranking factors, help the search engine ensure that a page contains helpful content that should surface in the SERPs.
  
  Here is EEAT explained based on Google's :

• Experience: Does the creator show first-hand experience?
• Expertise: Does the creator have expertise?
• Authoritativeness: Is the creator, content, and website reputable and recognized as a trusted source?
• Trustworthiness: Is the page “accurate, honest, safe, and reliable”?

Free offer: Get this comprehensive guide on in the AI era.

• Google regularly updates its algorithm to better optimize its results for quality content. Sometimes, it announces these updates. Other times, SEOs detect or make guesses about the updates happening.
  
  It can be hard to keep track of these changes, but I like .
• Google employs actual humans who manually review some websites to ensure Google’s algorithm is working well. It calls these people “search quality raters.”
  
  Here’s what Google itself says about on its website (bolding added by me):
  
  “We work with external Search Quality Raters to measure the quality of Search results on an ongoing basis. Raters assess how well website content fulfills a search request, and evaluate the quality of results based on the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the content.
  
  These ratings do not directly impact ranking, but they do help us benchmark the quality of our results and make sure these meet a high bar all around the world.”

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Why is having quality content on your website so important?

It attracts traffic to your website.

A one-pager with your business mission, its products or services, and its contact info would suffice as a company website. So, then, why do so many companies have so many pages of content, especially on their blog?

Because without it, their site wouldn’t attract as much traffic from organic search or surface in answers generated by AI like ChatGPT. The more quality content on your website, the more keywords you have the chance to rank for, the more target traffic and influence you can gain.

It builds trust with your audience.

Just like you don’t trust someone until you talk to them and get to know them, your prospects don’t trust your brand until they can interact with it through quality content on the web.

In fact, 2024 research found that 65% feel a stronger connection to brands that have a “robust presence on social.”

It turns visitors into customers.

That’s the draw of content marketing.

If you ever doubt the power of consistently publishing quality content, I want you to remember the story of , CEO of content distribution platform Stacker.

It took Greenberg five years to become a 探花精选 customer. But the entire reason he even knew about our software’s value? Our content.

Greenberg was an avid reader of The Hustle, which 探花精选 acquired in 2021. From that point forward, he constantly heard about our products through podcast and newsletter content that highlighted how 探花精选 was helping businesses grow.

So in 2024, when his sales team proposed 探花精选 as its new CRM, Greenberg gave the green light.

"This is why brand publishing works,” on LinkedIn. “But you have to be willing to play the long game."

10 Tips to Write Quality Content (Straight from 探花精选's Content Strategists)

So, what are the keys to writing quality content for your website, especially in the age of AI? I asked eight 探花精选 content strategists for their top tips. I’ll share them below, along with real-world examples of how 探花精选 puts those tips into action.

1. Organize your content around topic clusters — and stick to them.

When I first started blogging in the early 2010s, a single blog could build up enough domain authority to write about practically any topic — from travel to business to health — and rank well almost every time.

Those days are gone. Google favors more than ever before.

For example, I had a lifestyle blog that, up until 2020, was ranking number one for keywords about termites. And now, guess what kind of website ranks for those keywords? Pest control sites. As it should be.

Google is doubling down on ensuring that publishers, especially those in niches, are writing about the topics for which they have authoritativeness.

In SEO, means that not only do you have the experience and expertise — but you’ve also got a strong reputation and are a recognized source on that topic.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

You’ll notice that the 探花精选 Blog is actually four different properties:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Service
• Website

Each blog property has its own unique set of topic clusters and a team of writers who are experts in those areas.

Topic clusters are an SEO strategy that organizes blog content into pillar pages (the broad overview of a topic) and their related clusters (subcategories of the pillar page topic) that are connected via internal links.

For example, here are some of the topic clusters for the 探花精选 Website Blog:

• Website Design
• Website Development
• User Experience
• HTML
• CSS

Each of the above terms contains a pillar page + cluster content + internal links that connect the pillar page with the cluster content.

Every month, our team selects a few topic clusters to brainstorm assignments for each blog property.

While, in the past, we might’ve cast a wide net into what our clusters could contain, now, we’ve pruned irrelevant content to ensure that Google sees that we’re writing about topics within our topical authority and that our readers get only the most helpful content.

“The range of topics is now much narrower,” says from 探花精选’s organic growth team. “Now, we only ever choose those that align closely with the 探花精选 Customer Platform.

“For instance, we could focus one month's worth of content on Website Development because you can develop a website on . But we don‘t add new posts to the Call Center cluster anymore because there’s no call center feature on .”

Figuring out which clusters to keep was a massive endeavor that involved auditing all 400+ topic clusters on the blog and asking:

• Which clusters are aligned with the product?
• Which ones fall into a gray area?
• Which ones are clearly not aligned?

"Today, Google is pushing people to dial into their core areas of expertise, and they’re rewarding sites that focus on content that’s relevant to those areas,” our 探花精选 CMO Kipp Bodnar writes on the 探花精选 Marketing Blog.

That’s why our (in)famous “how to type the shrug emoji” post is now gone (RIP). Though fun, and a huge traffic-driver in the past, it didn’t relate to 探花精选’s topical authority, and more importantly, it wasn’t serving our ideal audience.

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2. Lean into your humanity — it’s now your superpower.

Is AI making content creators obsolete? At 探花精选, we think absolutely not. Humans have two things that AI does not:

• True, lived experiences
• Authoritativeness (reputation and trust built over time)

In a world where LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT can generate text on any topic, anyone can fake expertise. But experience and authority? Not so much.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

Nearly two years ago, my colleague Rodriguez ran an experiment that boosted clicks on one blog post by 724%.

Here’s the formula she used, which she cleverly calls “(E)xperience Soup:”

(E)xperience soup not only overhauled the 探花精选 blog writing style but also ended up being remarkably ahead of its time considering the influence of AI today.

Today, 探花精选 writers infuse personality, perspective, and anecdotes into our pieces. AI cannot replicate our personal experience (“person” is even in the term!).

But, as Rodriguez points out: “(E)xperience soup is now the baseline. Maybe when I created it, it was kind of this next-level thing. What we need now is to go above and beyond that to optimize for language learning models.”

3. Embrace the AI era by writing for LLM search.

Speaking of optimizing for language learning models, in the age of AI, this is increasingly important.

As Bodnar mentioned in a recent episode: “Now we‘re not just influencing humans, we’re influencing robots.”

It’s time to think beyond SEO. As more people bring their queries to AI tools like ChatGPT instead of Google, we want those LLMs to surface our content. (A January 2025 study found that two-thirds of LLM users use them as a search engine.) It might mean fewer clicks, but it means our brand can still influence that user.

Free tool: Curious if your brand is influencing LLMs? See how you stack up against competitors in AI search by using this free .

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

It’s still the early days of brands figuring out how to appear in AI search, but we’ve seen some wins.

Earlier this year, while Bodnar and a fellow 探花精选ter were chatting about the big DeepSeek launch and doing some research in ChatGPT, guess what appeared in ChatGPT’s output? Our SVP of Marketing .

Here’s what that hinted to us about surfacing content in AI search:

• Timing matters. Flanagan was one of the first to publish a video covering the new AI model (he posted it within three days of DeepSeek's launch).
• YouTube is an important signal in LLM search, which is why we’ve been investing in it for years and have been increasing our focus on that channel this year (more on that later).
• Depth over breadth. AI has breadth covered — it’s trained on the entire internet — but depth is something that helps you stand out as a human creator. Flanagan’s 13-minute DeepSeek video goes into great detail, comparing the model against other popular ones and describing what DeepSeek is best used for.

4. If AI isn’t helping you create quality content faster and/or better — you’re using it wrong.

For content creators, the major draw of AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is that they’ll and , enabling us to make quality content at a scale never seen before.

But if you’re just using AI as a shiny new tool or distraction, you’re missing out.

That’s a common mistake my colleague sees among marketers. In her role as principal content strategy & operations program manager at 探花精选 Media, she focuses on building AI-powered agents to help our editorial teams create quality content.

“The way I think AI is underutilized is that it's used as a replacement rather than a catalyst,” says Coleman. “So instead of replacing things you already do with AI, is it doing anything faster or more efficiently?”

She gave me the example of using AI to check what meetings you have coming up.

“Cool — but does that save you any time? Or is that just a new interface for an existing problem you already had?”

(As soon as she said this, I felt guilty, as I had literally just used the new Claude Gmail integration to check my email when I could've just as easily opened my inbox.)

My AI faux pas aside, here’s a real way that Coleman is using AI as a catalyst — and not just a fancy calendar/email checker.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

Despite describing herself as “non-technical,” Coleman used Pipedream and Windsurf to build an AI agent that identifies trending topics for our team to pursue.

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Every morning at 9:15, the AI workflow runs, checking LinkedIn and various online publications for topics of interest to 探花精选’s audience. Then, in a spreadsheet, it adds a new tab with all of the daily trends along with a score for each based on preset criteria.

“So I can just look at it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we want to talk about that this week’ and create a brief,” Coleman says.

She essentially outsourced half of the work she spent four hours doing manually every week. Her AI agent does it in less than two minutes every day.

So, now that you’ve seen how we’re using AI in our editorial workflows to decide what to create, the next question is, can AI actually create quality content? For an answer, I turned to , who wrote about how the 探花精选 Blog team uses AI.

Forsey told me that AI excels in generating content on cut-and-dry topics, articles that compare the pros and cons of software, for example.

“It can do a really good job with collecting vast amounts of information from different sources: from review sites, from user-generated content, from the product pages of each business,” Forsey says.

“Where it can fall short is if you're asking, ‘Does this piece of content push a conversation forward? Does it offer a really unique and maybe controversial perspective? Does it inspire? Does it change minds?’

“I‘m not going to say AI can’t do it — I‘m going to say it can’t do it by itself. And that's where you really need the human element.”

If you’re curious about collaborating with AI for content creation, 探花精选 has a .

5. Conduct original research to set yourself apart from AI and competitors.

So, if AI is faster at compiling information from all over the web, how can we human content creators set ourselves apart?

As our CMO Kipp Bodnar writes on the blog, "Start by asking yourself: Do I have unique data? Unique insights? A unique customer base with a unique perspective?

“If you do, you should be able to own that area of expertise and get some strong search traffic around it. But if you don’t, then a generic LLM could likely create the same content as you."

One way to get unique data and insights is through original research.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

At 探花精选, we love conducting original research. We have a Content Innovation and Research Team that’s constantly brainstorming new topics and conducting surveys to gather data that enhances our blog posts.

Just a few examples?

These reports then become lead magnets, inspiration for new blog posts, and research that gets cited on the 探花精选 Blog and others.

Just last month, I reached out to , who leads the CI&R team, and told her I wanted to run a survey to find the latest trends in website management. She gave me the green light, and we came up with questions and audience demographics to run the survey.

Within a week, I had all the survey data I needed to write a gated post on the state of website management, complete with original research that readers won’t find anywhere else.

We’ve seen a lot of traction lately with original research behind a gate (it’s totally free; readers just enter their email address).

As Bump explains, “It’s not only a clickable way to drive traffic, but it also encourages referrals, shares, and leads when we place data or thought leadership behind a gated offer.

“Anyone can target a high-ranking keyword by writing a basic post with third-party sources. But not every publisher will go the extra mile by providing data, quotes, or insights you can only get from them.”

6. Dare to give readers a peek behind the scenes.

Radical transparency can be your great differentiator when writing quality content.

Why? Few companies want to peel back the curtain. But these types of posts are the most useful and sought after by readers. They give real, tactical advice, putting theory into practice.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

The 探花精选 Blog is known and loved for its tactical, transparent content that breaks down our successes in a step-by-step format, such as:

• 探花精选’s SERP Secrets: How The 探花精选 Blog Is Combatting SERP Volatility
• How the 探花精选 Blog Built a Freelance Writing Program That Actually Makes Great Content
• How 探花精选's social team grew their LinkedIn presence by 84% in six months

Earlier this year, 探花精选 went viral thanks to some edgy commentary on social media about our blog losing traffic. Everywhere I looked, someone was posting a new hot take on what we did “wrong.”

As a business owner myself, my instinct was to hide. I wanted to defend my team in the comments on LinkedIn and X, but I didn’t.

But that is not the approach 探花精选 took. Instead, our CMO went before his 71.5K subscribers on the Marketing Against the Grain podcast to clear the air about .

That podcast episode was then repackaged into a blog post — and it was, by far, the 探花精选 Blog’s most popular piece in April.

I didn’t end up having to defend my team — because Bodnar did it for me. What’s more, he gave our listeners and readers actionable advice straight from the trenches.

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7. Spend at least half of your time updating old content.

This may seem counterintuitive: Shouldn’t websites always be churning out new content? Well, yes and no.

For a blog, it may be tempting to constantly create net-new posts, but that isn’t the best use of your time.

Old posts have a significant advantage: They’ve had time to age and gain authority on Google. As we know, it takes a long time to start ranking.

So, by looking at the analytics of your existing posts, you can see what’s doing well (and what isn’t) and adjust accordingly.

The 80/20 rule (aka Pareto’s Principle) has shown up time and again in my blogging career. If I have 100 posts on a blog, 20 of them are generating the majority of my traffic and revenue.

Now, that’s not an exact number, but you get the idea: Most traffic/leads/conversions will come from a minority of your content.

Because of this, optimization is key. It’s so crucial, in fact, that I and the other 探花精选 Blog writers dedicate 50-80% of our writing time each month to updates instead of net-new posts.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

Constantly updating a content library consisting of thousands of posts is a major undertaking. No one on our team knows that better than Ivelisse Rodriguez.

“I used to be a writer on a team called Historical Optimization, where I and four other writers were solely dedicated to updating old content on the blog,” Rodriguez tells me.

“That team was dissolved, but ‘historical optimization’ continues to be a critical part of our content production engine. Ideally, all blog content would be updated on a rotating schedule, but that's not possible with a content library of any size.”

So, instead, we prioritize our top-performing articles and refresh them to give them a competitive edge in the SERPs. This might include:

• Adding original research
• Sourcing quotes from subject matter experts
• Sharing stories based on our personal experience with the topic

We give each update at least six months to mature before refreshing it again.

“Six months might seem like a short time, but the industries we're writing in (marketing, sales, service, and website) move quickly, especially marketing,” explains Rodriguez.

“We also did a study on our update performance and found out that updates generally stop becoming effective (i.e., a URL starts backsliding in ranking or reverts to its previous performance) after 6-9 months.”

8. Prune your low performers.

In writing, we have a saying, “Kill your darlings.” And while that metaphor is more violent than I’d prefer, I like what it’s getting at: You must delete the words that aren’t helping your story, even the ones you love.

In the case of content strategy, regularly pruning your low-performing content is key to staying competitive. On the 探花精选 Blog, we’ve been known to remove thousands of pages in one period.

It all begins with a content audit.

“Content auditing has so many benefits and use cases, but one area we’ve been focusing on lately is relevance,” says from 探花精选’s organic growth team.

“When we audited the oldest content in our library, we found that the majority of it was outdated and no longer had organic potential. Instead of letting those posts weigh down our website and add to our tech debt, it was better for us to prune so we could focus more on the content that was more aligned with our current strategy.”

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

The following is a summary of Huffman’s detailed blog post on how content audits help the 探花精选 Blog age backwards, which you should definitely check out for full details.

1. Define our goals.

Before we begin a content audit, we define why we’re doing it. Is it to improve on-page SEO? Boost user engagement? Increase conversions on the in-page content offers?

2. Make a content inventory. The exact process depends on the CMS you use (if you use one at all). Typically, you'll export a .csv or .xslx file of all your blog URLs. Then, sort the list from oldest to newest so you can start on the oldest blog posts first.

Delete any columns that aren’t relevant. Name this spreadsheet Content Audit Master.

3. Retrieve relevant data.

Using Google Analytics, , or whatever analytics software you prefer, pull the relevant data you need for each URL. That might be organic traffic from the previous calendar year, total backlinks, and total keywords, for example.

4. Evaluate the content.

The way 探花精选 evaluates content depends on that specific audit’s goals, but here are some good starting points for you:

• Type of content - Examples include educational, thought leadership, and research.
• Freshness level - We’ve evaluated freshness on a scale of “outdated” (where the topic is so old it might not make sense to do an update) to “relatively fresh” (where an evergreen topic simply needs a moderate update).
• Organic potential - Answer yes or no to the following question: “Will anyone search for the content on Google?”

5. Recommend the next step.

Based on the evaluation, choose one of the following actions:

• Keep - No further action needed because the content and URL are still good.
• Optimize - Update the content.
• Recycle - The content can’t be salvaged, but the URL can (it might be useful for backlinks or keyword opportunities). Keep the URL and write a brand new blog post to publish on it.
• Prune - Archive (404) or redirect (301) because neither the content nor URL has organic value.

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9. Keep up with SEO updates (things change fast).

With how quickly things change in search engine optimization, courses and books can’t keep up. But blogs and social media can.

I highly recommend identifying thought leaders in the SEO space and following them to keep up with rapid changes in search algorithms, LLM models, and how it all affects quality content on a website.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

Admittedly, I’m spoiled because I have access to an entire SEO team staffed with world-class talent. When I have an SEO question, I ping them.

I also have access to a Slack channel where we share the latest in search with each other — blog posts, videos, commentary. I mined this channel for some resources to share with you.

• - Authored by SEO consultant , this newsletter recommendation comes straight from 探花精选 SEOs, whom my colleague Laura Browning tapped for ideas for the best free SEO newsletters.

• - SEO consultant at Marie Haynes Consulting
• - Vice President of SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive marketing agency
• - Google's Public Liaison for Search
• - SEO blog now owned by Semrush
• - Blog publishing information for SEOs and marketers
• - Search engine marketing blog founded by Barry Schwartz (another SEO leader).

10. Diversify and unify your content channels.

Looking ahead, how is user behavior shaping the future of website content?

“I don't think folks are just reading blogs anymore,” says , 探花精选 Media’s head of content strategy & operations (and yes, her words broke my blogger heart just a little).

But, she went on to say, “I don‘t think they’re just searching for content on YouTube or just listening to podcasts. To excel in the age of AI and continue to differentiate, it has to work together.”

People aren’t necessarily sticking to a single source these days — they’re going across multiple touchpoints to get answers. That means brands must invest in multiple channels and ensure their content aligns with the brand’s audience.

That will only become more important as LLMs become more popular.

“As people tend to use more AI, they're going to be thinking less about one specific starting point,” says , lead content strategist at 探花精选 Media.

“They‘re going to intuitively head to the channel that’s most comfortable or immediate for them. So it's important for us to have content that really resonates across channels and that creates a seamless journey.”

That journey might look like this:

• Someone sees a 探花精选 YouTube video in a ChatGPT answer.
• After watching the video, they dive deeper into the topic via a long-form article on the 探花精选 Blog.
• From there, they subscribe to one of our newsletters to get more updates about that initial topic.

How We’re Doing This at 探花精选

Both Prater’s and Rumberger’s comments reflect 探花精选 Media’s increased focus on unifying our content channels — Blog, YouTube, Newsletter, and Podcast.

To do this, we’ve created working groups that are aligned around a specific audience segment, rather than a vertical.

The goals here are to improve communication across teams, enhance how we repurpose content across channels, and better understand how content influences the buyer journey.

Today, all of our Media channels flow into and feed off of each other. Here are some examples:

• A YouTube video becomes a podcast, which becomes a blog post, as you’ll see in this blog series based on Marketing Against the Grain podcasts.

• Inside our blog posts, we embed 探花精选 YouTube videos to enhance our written content and boost engagement. You’ve seen it already in this post.
• The Blog Team (myself included) has even started creating our own short-form videos that we share on LinkedIn and embed in blog posts. Here’s one from yours truly:

It’s an entire content ecosystem — and it is thriving.

Just look at our recent investments in YouTube. In April, 探花精选’s YouTube views went up by 84%, and leads jumped 91% YOY.

In what VP of 探花精选 Media Jonathan Hunt calls “the video flywheel effect,” one video can turn into multiple pieces of content through artful repackaging and smart redistribution.

Final words of advice? A lot is changing, but at its core, quality content remains the same.

While interviewing 探花精选ters for this article, regardless of the insights they offered, two themes about quality content emerged across the board:

• At the end of the day, quality content always will be about serving your audience. We as content creators do what we can to please the algorithms, push our articles to the top of the SERPs, and surface our content in LLMs. But none of that matters if the very people we are trying to help … don’t find our content helpful.
• Your humanity matters more than ever before. AI has upended a lot of things. But instead of fighting it, find ethical ways to use it to your advantage.

Remember: Your humanity is your superpower. And until humans start trusting AI as much as we trust other humans (which I sincerely hope never happens), it always will be.

So amid all the noise, predictions, and changes regarding AI, SEO, and quality content — hold onto the hope that you as an individual have something unique to bring to the web. Something that your audience, if you keep working for what’s best for them, will most certainly appreciate.

This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure to learn more about how we use AI.

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