7 Steps to Perform a Content Quality Check (Plus Tools)

If you want to rank in 2025 (and beyond), great writing isn’t enough. You need content quality that meets and exceeds what users and search engines expect.

In fact, with AI Overviews reshaping SERPs, Google’s evolving E-E-A-T standards, and users demanding faster, clearer answers, ensuring content quality isn’t optional — it’s your competitive edge.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through what content quality means, why it matters, and the 7 steps (plus the tools I personally use) to make sure every piece you publish is worth ranking.

What Is Content Quality?

Content quality is the measure of how well your content satisfies user intent, delivers value, maintains accuracy, and provides a smooth reading experience — all while being optimized for SEO best practices.

High-quality content is:

• Relevant to the searcher’s query and intent
• Updated regularly to stay fresh and accurate
• Trustworthy, citing credible sources and data
• In-depth enough to fully answer the user’s questions
• Easy to read, scannable, and logically structured

One thing you should keep as your holy grail of writing is that content creation isn’t about writing longer posts for the sake of it. 

It’s about writing better — answering real questions, solving real problems, and connecting authentically with your target audience.

7 Steps for Checking Your Content Quality (Plus Tools To Use)

Now, that you have a clear understanding of what content quality really means, let’s look at the 7-step guide to making sure that you produce high-quality content consistently.

Step 1: Define Your Content Goals and Audience

Before you even write a headline, you need to know two things:

• Who exactly am I speaking to?
• What is this content supposed to achieve?

Ask yourself: Are you aiming to educate, convert, build awareness, generate leads, or establish authority?

The clearer your goal, the easier it becomes to check if the final piece meets that goal.

For example, a blog post designed to educate will be judged differently from a landing page meant to convert visitors into customers.

This is where audience personal refinement comes in.

You can’t talk to everyone, and you shouldn’t.

Deepen your audience’s understanding by identifying:

• Pain points and challenges
• Demographics (age, location, industry, role)
• Preferred tone and content formats (e.g., how-to guides, templates, case studies)

I recommend using SparkToro to analyze where your audience hangs out and what they care about.

The goal?

Make sure that from the start, you’re creating content for the right audience, with the right message, at the right moment.

Step 2: Conduct Thorough Topic and Keyword Research

Once your goals and audience are clear, it’s time to choose your battlefield wisely by picking topics and keywords that match what your audience is searching for.

Today’s SEO isn’t just about picking keywords with the highest volume. It’s about:

• Understanding search intent (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational)
• Avoiding generic terms and instead niching down into hyper-relevant phrases
• Prioritizing long-tail, conversational keywords that mimic how real people ask questions

For example, instead of targeting just “content marketing,” you should also focus on a query like “how to create a B2B content marketing strategy” based on your search intent.

Speaking of which, you should also identify keyword intent to research the right topics.

So, keeping this in mind, here’s what your topic research process should look like:

• Use keyword research tools like LowFruits to uncover long-tail, low-competition opportunities.
• Plug those keywords in SEOBoost’s Topic Reports to find content statistics and content gaps.
• Use AIOSEO’s Keyword Rank Tracker to track keyword position changes directly in WordPress.

By focusing on search behavior first, you ensure your content is rooted in what people actually want, not what you think they might want.

Step 3: Outline and Structure Your Content

You can have the best ideas in the world — but if your content isn’t structured properly, your audience (and Google) will lose interest fast.

A strong structure isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a must for SEO performance, readability, and user engagement.

Start by creating a logical, intuitive hierarchy of headings:

• H1: Main topic (e.g., “How to Build a B2B Content Strategy”)
• H2s: Major supporting points (e.g., “Define Your Goals”, “Choose the Right Channels”)
• H3s: Details under each H2 (e.g., “Set SMART Objectives”, “Identify Decision-Maker Personas”)

The structure should:

• Flow naturally from broad to specific
• Address different aspects of the user’s query
• Anticipate FAQs and related sub-questions

Each section should feel scannable and complete on its own, even if a reader jumps directly to it.

If you’re managing multiple articles, AI can save you hours of manual structuring.

This is why, I use SEOBoost’s Content Briefs feature to create content outlines. It pulls data directly from a topic report of a keyword and gives suggestions for what to add in the outline.

It helps you with the following:

• Content statistics and suggestions for what to add
• Keyword usage to avoid keyword stuffing
• Suggests H2s, H3s, FAQs, and common SERP sections
• Helps you mirror the best-performing SERP structures, making your content more competitive from the start

It’s like having a second strategist on your team — one that’s trained to build outlines designed to rank and satisfy readers.

Step 4: Draft and Optimize for Readability

Once your outline is locked in, it’s time to write. But content quality depends just as much on how you write as what you write.

Today’s readers expect content that’s:

• Conversational but professional
• Easy to scan (think 2–4 sentence paragraphs)
• Broken up with lists, tables, pull quotes, or infographics
• Full of real-world examples, frameworks, and step-by-step instructions

Every paragraph should earn the next one. Every heading should set clear expectations for what’s underneath.

If you’re writing for voice search or future AI Overviews, simple clarity wins every time.

Strong readability goes hand-in-hand with on-page SEO best practices.

That’s why you should always:

• Avoid keyword stuffing — it hurts both readers and rankings
• Use synonyms and contextually related terms (for semantic SEO)
• Naturally integrate your primary and secondary keywords early on (within first 100 words if possible)

Here are the tools that I use for content drafting and optimization:

• Grammarly: For basic grammar, clarity, and style checks
• Hemingway Editor: For readability score and sentence complexity insights
• SEOBoost’s Content Optimization: To get live SEO tips (keyword use, headings structure, related terms) while you write and optimize the content

By balancing clarity, SEO optimization, and natural language, you maximize the chances that your content will rank, engage, and convert.

Step 5: Fact-Check and Validate Sources

In 2025, content credibility is more important than ever.

Why?

Because search engines and users are increasingly skeptical of unverified claims, outdated data, or generic fluff.

To pass Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) standards and build real audience trust, fact-checking must be a non-negotiable part of your process.

Before publishing, review your draft and ask:

• Are my statistics up-to-date?
• Did I cite credible industry experts or recognized sources?
• Am I linking to original research (not just another blog quoting a blog)?
• Are my examples and frameworks aligned with current best practices?

If you mention case studies, whitepapers, or industry benchmarks, provide a clear link to the relevant resources.

To strengthen your content’s credibility, add author bios that highlight experience, especially for YMYL topics and link out to high-authority sources.

Remember, your content isn’t just information — it’s a representation of your expertise.

Here are some of the tools you can use for it:

• Manual cross-checking with trusted publications (essential!)
• Ivy.ai for quick summarization and checking source accuracy
• OpenAI’s Plugins if you’re using ChatGPT with browsing capabilities, to validate data fast

Step 6: Use AI-Driven Quality Scoring and Optimization

After the initial draft is ready and fact-checked, it’s time to take your content from good to exceptional — and that’s where AI-powered optimization steps in.

Instead of manually guessing whether you’ve used the right keywords, structured the flow correctly, or covered enough depth, you can use SEOBoost’s Content Optimization feature to evaluate your content against real ranking criteria.

When you open your draft in SEOBoost’s editor-style interface, the platform analyzes it across over 25 key ranking factors, including:

• Keyword usage (primary, secondary, and semantic terms)
• Heading structure (H1s, H2s, H3s relevance and order)
• Content length compared to top-ranking competitors
• Readability metrics (sentence complexity, passive voice, transition words)
• Multimedia presence (images, videos, charts)

It then assigns your content an overall SEO content score, plus real-time, actionable suggestions to improve weak areas.

Here’s my typical workflow:

• Import or paste my complete draft into SEOBoost’s Content Optimization section.
• Review the score breakdown for keyword coverage, structure, readability, and missing on-page SEO elements.
• Tackle the high-priority suggestions first, such as adding missing keywords, improving headers, or condensing long paragraphs.
• Fine-tune the tone and structure to hit a 70+ optimization score — but never at the cost of user experience or natural flow.

Within 30 minutes, I turn a decent draft into a fully search-optimized, user-ready piece — all with clear, data-backed guidance from the tool.

Step 7: Final Review, Testing, and Publishing

You’ve optimized, audited, and fact-checked. But before you hit “Publish,” there’s one more layer to securing content quality: human review and performance monitoring.

Before going live, share your draft with editors or the reviewer and ask for feedback.

Remember, content quality doesn’t end at “publish” — it evolves.

Use SEO analysis tools like Google Analytics to monitor:

• Scroll depth
• Bounce rates
• Time on page
• Conversion events

Content quality is a continuous process, and the best teams build iteration into their publishing flow.

Bonus Step: Update Content Regularly

This is something you can do for older content and content refresh.

For that, you should use content audit tools like SEOBoost that don’t just check grammar. They analyze SEO optimization, keyword density, readability, depth, and topical relevance.

Instead of manually checking everything, I run my content through SEOBoost’s Content Audit and Optimization feature to evaluate:

• Keyword usage (natural, not forced)
• Semantic coverage (related terms and phrases)
• Heading structure (does it match SERP expectations?)
• Readability and tone consistency
• Potential topic gaps or missing FAQs

This tool scores the content based on over 25 SEO and quality factors, then provides actionable suggestions to improve clarity, SEO performance, and user experience.

By updating your content regularly, you eliminate weak sections, surface gaps early, and avoid content decay.

FAQs

Final Word

If you want to build traffic that sticks, converts, and compounds over time, content quality needs to be baked into every stage — from ideation to auditing.

It’s no longer enough to just “create content.” You need credible, optimized, deeply helpful content that users and search engines trust.

By following these seven steps and using tools like SEOBoost, LowFruits, AIOSEO, and others, you’ll set your content up for long-term success.

Alina Zahid Content Writer

Alina is an SEO professional with specialized knowledge of content marketing. When she’s not busy researching and creating awesome content for SEOBoost, she can be found practicing piano, writing fiction and traveling.

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Content Marketing SEO Content Strategy