As it becomes easier to publish content online, there is an ever-increasing amount of low-value material each day, often by people with little experience or understanding of what makes good content. This flood of information online makes it difficult for any organization to be heard above the noise of other organizations, all trying to publish their own views and share their own information online. Therefore, in addition to publishing content online, any organization trying to establish itself online needs a content quality process in place.
A content quality process for any organization ensures that all content published by that organization meets a high standard of quality. This is important for the organization’s reputation, reader engagement with the organization’s content, and business outcomes. Building such a process is the work of planning, setting standards, and executing consistently.
The True Cost of Unvetted Content
Unvetted content can pose immediate problems for any organization, leading to huge problems for businesses and damage to a brand’s reputation. Misleading readers and uncertainty about whether what is published is true can create serious problems.
It is extremely easy to write off an organization’s credibility because of errors, in addition to poor writing, that can be found in published content. Trusting an organization takes years to build but only seconds to destroy. This is especially true with written content and how it is distributed across the web.
By publishing low-effort and low-quality content, you can also harm your organization’s search engine rankings. Today’s search engines rank high-quality, clear, accurate, and in-depth content above lower-quality content. If a search engine user clicks on your organization’s article and then immediately returns to the search results, this can indicate that the content did not provide enough value. This can cause your organization’s visibility in search results to decrease over time.
Most importantly, low-quality content can lead to wasted resources. As I noted earlier, creating and distributing content can require significant amounts of time and money. Thus, creating content that fails to meet expectations is not only ineffective, it can also be extremely expensive.
Key Pillars of a Content Quality Workflow
Designing a reliable review workflow for your content does not have to turn into bureaucracy to maintain the highest standards of publishing quality.
1. Fact Checking and Research Accuracy
Many writers depend on outdated sources for their writing, including articles, academic papers, and studies, because verifying facts can take too much time. By relying only on the most recent research, your team can ensure that all published articles and blogs are of the highest quality, building long-term reader trust.
2. Structural Editing and Clarity
Structural editing focuses on the overall content, looking at it more generally and ensuring that it is relevant to the audience the publication is intended for. This level of editing ensures that the overall message of the publication is conveyed as effectively as possible. The editor reviews the overall content to ensure it flows logically from section to section, that the headings are appropriate, and that the main points are clearly highlighted.
3. Language, Style, and Originality
Once the structure is solid, the focus shifts to sentence-level details. Content should align with your brand style guide, maintaining a consistent tone across all channels. Additionally, team members should use a plagiarism checker to confirm that all text is original and properly attributed.
Following originality verification, running the piece through a grammar checker helps catch subtle typos, awkward phrasing, and mechanical errors that human eyes might miss after multiple revisions. Combining technology with human editorial oversight helps produce a clean final draft.
4. Visual Appeal and Layout
In addition to the text-based elements of a piece of content, the visual presentation must also be high quality. Ensure that the content formatting is correct. Also, ensure that there are no excessively long blocks of text. Instead, use bullet points where appropriate. Ensure that all images are used correctly within the content, and that all hyperlinks are tested to ensure that they work correctly.
Building an Efficient Review Team
A quality process is only as good as the people running it. To keep your publishing pipeline moving smoothly, define clear roles within your team. Set up roles within your team to review your content and ensure your work is of the best quality. The creator writes the article after receiving the guidelines. The subject matter expert reviews the work to check for technical accuracy and sufficient depth. The editor refines the work by checking the tone, the structure, and the readability. The managing editor or publisher finally checks and gives the green light for publication.
Each person on your team has a role to play to prevent burnout while ensuring high-quality content is published. By outlining each person’s specific role within the team, you can ensure that your content is published on time, without sacrificing quality.
Balancing Speed and Standards
Most organizations will feel that introducing a quality process will hold up production. However, the reality is that each error found before publication will take less time to correct than the same error found after publication, potentially requiring a retraction or a completely new article.
To increase content output, a growing organization can develop templates, style guidelines, and checklists for the editorial process. Using these within the review process of a piece of content ensures that all important aspects are covered and that the writer, researcher, and editor can work efficiently through the necessary steps.
Measuring the Success of Your Quality Process
Keep track of the progress of your content review process by monitoring certain performance indicators. Measuring these indicators regularly will allow you to determine whether your quality process is improving.
Tracking reader engagement, including average time on page, scroll depth, and social shares, as well as tracking the number of post-publication revisions, will allow you to gauge whether your workflow is producing content of sufficient quality.
Providing high-quality written content will eventually raise your organization’s overall brand status. It shows that your organization is a reliable source of true information amongst the masses of online rubbish.
