What Makes Content Good? The 5 Characteristics You Need to Know

In case you hadn’t noticed, in today’s online world, we’re practically drowning in content. More content, to tell you the truth, than we could ever begin to consume. To give you a sense of the scale of it, just consider that every day 70,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, two million blog posts are published, and 294 billion emails are sent.

So, with this incredible flood of information, how can your business make content that stands out? What makes content “good” enough to capture your audience’s attention, build trust, and drive results? The answer lies not in volume, but in quality.

This guide will show you the five essential characteristics of impactful content, along with a content checklist to help you create pieces that truly perform.

Key takeaways

• Quality over quantity: In a crowded digital world, great content is not about producing more, but about creating genuinely impactful pieces.
• The five characteristics: The key to standing out is ensuring your content is readable, engaging, consistent, findable, and governed by AI guardrails.
• Beyond the basics: This article goes beyond traditional writing advice to introduce the modern necessity of AI guardrails for maintaining brand consistency, quality, and compliance at scale.
• An actionable checklist: The article provides a clear, step-by-step checklist to help you create content that truly performs and achieves your business goals.

A content checklist for making impactful content

The key to building a content strategy that truly resonates is ensuring your content embodies five essential characteristics. For your content to stand out and make an impact, you must:

1. Ensure your content is readable

When you create content, nothing is more important than making it easy to understand, which mainly depends on whether the content is readable. The readability of a piece of content is shaped by many factors, including your use of jargon, terminology, spelling and grammar, and sentence structure.

Likewise, for your content to be readable, it has to be scannable. Scannability focuses on concise paragraph messaging, streamlines complex sentences, and makes use of lists and tables to easily convey ideas. 

2. Create engaging content

Your customers will see right through your content if it’s not trustworthy and authentic. In the enterprise, you achieve this by consistently aligning your writing with your brand’s style guide and tone of voice. In other words, practicing what you preach!

Engagement isn’t just about feeling — it’s about recognition. When your audience encounters content that sounds fragmented, inconsistent, or off-brand, it breaks their concentration and erodes trust. In contrast, a consistent, recognizable voice makes your content immediately familiar and reliable.

Poor readability makes your content less engaging, but other factors also play a part, including your use of personal pronouns, the conciseness and liveliness of your writing, and the overall tone of your voice. A consistent tone is a great opportunity to engage your audience. Are you punchy and to-the-point, or laid back and expressive? Ensuring this voice is upheld across all teams is critical for building enduring customer relationships.

3. Achieve greater consistency

Because content comes from many sources both inside and outside of your organization, inconsistencies are inevitable. Inconsistencies confuse readers. Inconsistencies also affect your company’s brand recognition. Rising above the noise of a crowded marketplace is difficult, but if your company name, product names, or key messages appear inconsistently, then rising above the noise becomes impossible.

Start simple: Make sure all of your company-specific terminology is in order and well documented. Then focus on making this accessible to writers across the organization. 

4. Maintain consistent terminology and clarity

Your content’s credibility is lost instantly if your audience encounters inconsistent terminology or overly complex language. Consistency and clarity are the cornerstones of trust, especially for technical documentation, legal contracts, or product descriptions.

• Consistency: When product names, features, or key messages appear inconsistently across channels, readers become confused, and your brand recognition suffers. Starting simple by documenting all company-specific terminology and making it accessible to every writer is a non-negotiable step toward consistency.
• Clarity: Using jargon or unnecessarily complex sentences acts as a barrier to comprehension. Content that’s clear and easy to understand makes your audience feel smart, not confused. This focus on plain language ensures that your message is universally understood, reducing support costs and minimizing user error.

The goal is to move past just simple spelling and grammar checks and toward a system that rigorously enforces the correct use of your proprietary, industry-specific vocabulary across the entire organization.

5. Establish guardrails when using AI

The rise of generative AI has added a new layer of complexity to content creation. While AI can drastically increase your content velocity, it also introduces risks such as factual inaccuracies, off-brand messaging, and compliance errors. The need for governance has never been greater. AI guardrails are the intelligent solution to these risks, ensuring that even at massive scale, your content remains accurate, on-brand, and compliant.

This is where Markup AI’s Content Guardian Agents℠ come in. These specialized agents are purpose-built to act as your content’s safety net. They scan, score, and rewrite content in real-time, ensuring that every piece of AI-generated content meets your brand’s exacting standards for tone, terminology, clarity, and policy. By setting up these guardrails, you embrace the speed of AI without sacrificing quality or credibility.

Why you need a Content Guardian Agent in your writing workflow

The bottom line is this: Simply creating content isn’t enough anymore. To truly stand out and drive results, your content must be great. And in today’s AI-first world, that means it must be readable, engaging, consistent, findable, and — most importantly — governed by intelligent guardrails.

Using a Content Guardian Agent helps you achieve these goals effortlessly. Unlike a traditional content improver that only offers guidance, a Content Guardian Agent is a proactive force in your workflow. It scans, scores, and rewrites your content in real-time, enforcing your brand’s standards automatically. It’s an invisible yet essential layer of protection that frees you to focus on strategy and creativity while ensuring every piece of content meets the highest standards of quality and trustworthiness.

Ready to create content that truly performs? Let’s talk about how a Content Guardian Agent elevates your content strategy and delivers measurable results.