How to Create Quality Content (Follow Our 5-Level Framework)
But what does “quality” even mean? Some people think the Alchemist changed their lives, while others think it’s the worst thing ever written. What’s “quality” to one reader may be complete BS to another. So how do you measure...
JimMin
If you’ve spent some time in digital marketing, you’d think making quality content is the cure-all to every marketing woe. It’s in every SEO guide and content marketing playbook and tossed around like buzzwords from a management consultant’s presentation. But what does “quality” even mean? Some people think the Alchemist changed their lives, while others think it’s the worst thing ever written. What’s “quality” to one reader may be complete BS to another. So how do you measure whether your content is truly “quality”? To find out, we analyzed our own content at Ahrefs and discovered five distinct levels. Each level represents a different kind of investment, skill set, and potential impact on your marketing goals. Understanding these five distinct levels will help you: Here are the five levels: Simple listicles are blog posts that aggregate basic information that’s widely available. They typically don’t require deep knowledge of the subject, thorough research, or vast writing experience. As such, they can be created quickly by interns, freelancers, junior marketers, or even AI. Here are some examples: Even though we consider them “Level 1” content, these types of posts tend to generate a lot of search traffic. For example, the top articles that send our blog the most search traffic are all simple listicles. To capture this search traffic, you need to target topics that people are searching for. This is known as keyword research. Since we’ve established that it’s likely that such topics send a website tons of search traffic, the easiest way to find them is to see what keywords your competitors are already ranking for. Here’s how: For example, you can see that HubSpot ranks for and gets search traffic from a number of simple listicles. You can tell by looking at the titles—mostly “XX [something]” or “XX [Best]”. You’d want to go through this report and note down those topics that are relevant to your site. Making simple listicles is straightforward. In fact, so straightforward that AI can easily produce them. That’s why in today’s climate, you need to go above and beyond just simple “here are #1, #2, #3”-type articles. You need to make something that AI cannot reproduce. The best way to do this is to use personal experience. Instead of just naming items, actually do, use, or experience what you’re writing about. For example, instead of just listing out AI image generators, our Director of Content Marketing Ryan Law actually tested them out: Focus on adding real-world detail to your simple lists: mini-reviews, personal pros and cons, or what you learned from your experience. Advanced listicles are list posts that dive deeper and group tools, resources, strategies, or insights in a more detailed and curated way. This requires the writer to be well-versed in the domain so that they can distill complex ideas into concise summaries and organize them into a coherent list. Here are some examples: The line between Level 1 and Level 2 may seem tiny, but it’s the difference between a fast-fashion, “sell anything” platform like Shein versus a boutique shop like Goodhood that curates its selection. In Level 1, there is an element of “information dumping.” The writer leaves no stone unturned and gives everything to the reader—it’s up to the reader to decide what they want out of it. That’s why you tend to see large numbers: “75 SEO resources”, “124 SEO statistics”, and more. In Level 2, curation takes precedence. The writer expresses their opinion by selecting, omitting, and categorizing items together. The list is intentionally small; the point is not to overwhelm but to state clearly why this selection is the best, at least according to the writer’s opinion. That’s why you need domain knowledge, otherwise you can’t curate well. However, if you don’t have existing knowledge, a good way to overcome this hurdle is to interview experts. For example, I’ve never worked in travel. So, it was impossible for me to produce a piece on “travel SEO” without generously using cliches and broad generalizations. That’s why I reached out to experts in travel SEO, interviewed them, and curated their insights into a piece: Deep dives are guides that provide exhaustive coverage of a topic. Here are some examples: Writing a deep dive will require you to do tons of research and speak to subject matter experts. You’ll also need an extensive understanding of the topic yourself. After all, you can’t ask the right questions if you don’t know the topic well. For example, our Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Tim Soulo interviewed a dozen link building practitioners for his link building guide: He also made sure to cover all bases and interviewed experts of all backgrounds: agency, consultant, affiliate, in-house, e-commerce, and more. Having the knowledge is only one part of writing an amazing deep dive. You’ll also need the ability to architect your post in a way that’s engaging and easy to follow. As my friend Visakan Veerasamy says: “thinking is easy, information architecture is hard.” One method you can potentially use to structure your guide is to run your target topic in our AI Content Helper. AI Content Helper will help identify the important subtopics people want to see in your guide. For example, here are the topics AI Content Helper suggests to cover for “event marketing”: This was really helpful when I was writing my guide to event marketing. Even though the guide was based solely on our experience organizing a large-scale conference, the subtopics were helpful in laying out its structure. Since I knew that searchers want to see subtopics like benefits, how to prepare and plan for one, how to drive demand or market your event, and post-event activities, I covered all of them in my guide: Experiments or surveys are articles based on first-hand data: you run an experiment or a survey, gather responses, or measure a specific phenomenon. Then you share insights from what you’ve learned. Here are some examples: Your goal is to generate original insights not seen anywhere else. However, doing this is not easy. You need thorough knowledge of a topic, practical experience, and in many cases, a sizeable investment of time and resources. This is the main reason why you don’t see such content pieces often. But if done right, it can gain a lot of traction. For example, Aira’s State of Link Building report has earned 1,400 backlinks from 488 referring domains. Considering how difficult it is to build links, that’s an incredible achievement. While there isn’t a surefire way to generate experiments or survey ideas, my best suggestion is to interview your co-workers. After all, it’s likely they’d have run experiments during their work. You can talk to them about the experiments they ran, their hypotheses, the results generated, and what they learned. For example, that’s what I did when I talked to our Head of Partnerships, Igor Gorbenko about what he learned from spending $1 million on sponsoring creators: Even if they have yet to run any experiments, they might have questions or curiosities along the way that you could run experiments on. This is especially true if you talk to your sales team. They’ll have lots of questions from prospects and customers that need to be answered. For example, here’s our Head of Enterprise Sales telling our content team what they want to see more of: Research studies are in-depth analyses often involving large data sets or new methodologies. Original ideas are innovative thoughts that have the potential to reshape how people in your industry approach a topic. Here are some examples: This is the highest level because it is extremely difficult. You need extensive domain expertise, years of experience, and critical thinking. If you’re running a research study, you’ll need data and even data scientists to help you with the analysis. It is a lot of time, effort, and money. But if you hit ‘bingo’, you truly get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Because if you’ve said something unique and notable, people will cite and link to you. For example, if you look at the top-linked articles on our blog, they’re mostly research studies: Even the reason why the article on long-tail keywords got so many backlinks was a result of critical thinking. The original version of the post focused on correcting the misconception behind the term: “long-tail keywords” were so-named because they resided on the long tail of the search demand curve, not because they were long. The 2018 version of our article on long-tail keywords There are no shortcuts to reaching this level. If I had the secret hack, I would be publishing Level 5 content all day long. But evidently I’m not. It’s akin to being in academia—not everyone can be a published professor. That’s why we respect academics so much; you need to conduct brilliant research and generate innovative ideas to even be on that echelon. That said, academics don’t just publish novel studies all the time. They also publish replications. So if we extend the academia analogy, you’ll realize that you can publish replications of existing studies in your industry too. Here’s how we can find potential studies to replicate. I’ll go to Content Explorer, enter my target keyword and “study”, and then filter for: Scrolling through the results, I see a few potential studies that might be worth replicating: As you can see, the higher the level, the more effort, investment, and time you have to put in. Especially Level 5 content, where you might even take years or decades to accumulate enough expertise and experience to come up with brilliant ideas. As finance writer Morgan Housel writes, “The long run is just a collection of short runs.” You need to survive in the short term in order to be around in the long term. You can’t put all your eggs in the Level 5 basket—you need to balance it out with the other levels. The levels might be a scale but they are also a portfolio. You need all of them, not just the highest level. At Ahrefs, we produce content of all levels. How do we decide which level to produce for each topic? Let me introduce our BREW framework: To get the green light, the idea should be balanced in these four factors. For example, let’s score the topic “link building”: In this case, since this topic scores well on our BREW framework, we decided to commit resources to make the best link-building guide ever. If you want to become a great content marketer or a company known for its high-quality content, you need to climb the content quality ladder. After all, the higher the level, the harder it is for AI to keep up. You can’t shortcut the process to expertise. You have to learn, put in the work, experience reality, and do it over and over again. That’s how you can come up with innovative ideas to write about. You may argue that it’s simply a matter of prompting, but without deep expertise, it’s also difficult to write a good, detailed prompt that can get LLMs to generate original ideas. And without expertise, you also can’t tell if the generated output is truly innovative or just regurgitation. But as I’ve said, treat the levels as a portfolio. You should be creating Level 5 content, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect the Level 1s. There’s a time and place for all of them—and all of them are helpful to readers at different skill levels. Even better: repurpose your content. Invest the time and effort into a piece of Level 5 content, then splinter them into multiple Level 1s, 2s, and 3s. That’s how you can make your content go a long way.
Business potential — How well can you feature your product or service? We score this on a scale from 0 to 3, where 3 is an irresistible pitch of your product and “0” means there’s barely a way to mention it at all. For example, the topic “social media marketing” would score a ‘0’ and “link building” will score a ‘3’.Reach—Who are you reaching, and how many can you reach? We might go viral on TikTok, but the millions of random people watching are highly unlikely to buy a premium SaaS product. A bottom-of-the-funnel article may have a lower traffic potential, but we could be reaching decision-makers at companies.Effort — How much time and resources would you need? Will it be worth it? Perhaps you might even make a minimum viable article, where you find creative ways to ‘reduce’ the effort while maintaining the same potential reach. For example, you might interview three people instead of 12 for a deep dive guide.Who — Who’s going to execute this idea? Does this person have the necessary skills to pull it off? For example, it might be overkill to get your most senior content marketer to make a simple listicle, while it might be early days for your intern to come up with a groundbreaking idea for your industry.
Final thoughts
