Do you really need to produce more content?

When it comes to content marketing, there seems to be two distinct approaches:

quality or quantity.

Both strategies are expensive and require significant man-power, but each is carried out in a different way.

The debate is on and people are choosing sides – so, which side are you on?

 

The Quantity Argument

“Publishing more will only increase your inbound traffic.” – Neil Patel

Many people say that you need to publish lots of content frequently to drive traffic to your site. That traffic is then said to bring in new leads and, eventually, those leads are converted into customers. The concept behind this is that the content doesn’t have to be in-depth and awe-inspiring, just frequent and informative. This keeps the Google algorithm satisfied with fresh content and readers up to date about specific topics of interest. In terms of SEO, this tactic satisfies a large quantity of low-volume, long-tail keywords, rather than competing with the heavyweights to rank for one generic, high-volume keyword.

 

The Quality Argument

“Attention is too scarce to risk it on low-impact content.” – Janessa Lantz

On the flip side, more and more people are jumping on the quality bandwagon. The quality advocates say that, because the internet is saturated with content, time and money should be spent on producing top-quality, in-depth pieces of content less frequently. This content should be valuable enough to the consumer that it leaves them wanting more for all the right reasons.

Rather than creating the most noise with a high-quantity of expendable content, this strategy works to make a small number of content pieces really stand out among the rest. This requires unique, engaging and authoritative copy, which takes much longer than the high-volume pieces.

 

So, which strategy is best for your business?

There are a few factors that we can use to measure the success of each strategy and figure out which strategy is right for you:

ROI

It’s all well and good to get technical on traffic figures and rankings; however, most businesses are interested in one thing: the bottom line. We can get a pretty good idea of the effectiveness of the strategy by the ROI it generates. Largely, this will depend on your business but, looking at ROI alone, the quantity approach is generally really effective.

You can get lots of people to visit your website for a relatively low investment in resources; however, it’s unlikely that just any visitor will be useful to your business. Visitors need to be qualified before you can turn them into customers. So really, measuring ROI in terms of traffic, doesn’t give us the full picture. So, even if you do concentrate on content volume, you still need to ensure you are attracting the right visitors with engaging content.

Practicality

Next, we need to look at the logistics. Regardless of your business size, you will have limitations when it comes to resources. Maximising quantity doesn’t mean the content you produce can be of low quality. Google simply won’t rank poorly produced content. You should be aiming for quality in everything you publish on behalf of your brand; however, if you’re prioritising quantity, you’re not likely to have time to be agonising over every last detail. When you take the quantity approach, there will be an element of “this will do the trick,” unless you can afford a full staff of dedicated writers. Again, it depends on your business. There is no point banging your head against the wall trying to churn out content if it’s not going to rank. You need to ensure you have the resources necessary to fulfil whichever strategy you choose, and fulfil it well.

 

The verdict?

Drumroll, please!

More is always better…but only if it’s good.

It’s a balancing act and, like any good circus routine, you need to have solid support behind you. To succeed in content marketing, no matter which strategy you choose, you need good writers. Google always says their primary goal is to streamline the customer experience and make it easy for users to find useful content. By ensuring that there is a baseline value to all you deliver, you can then tune the quality and quantity up and down to suit the resources you have to spare.

Content marketing is not an exact science; there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Instead, it’s about testing and tweaking your strategy until you find something that works best for you. If you need help coming up with the SEO element of your content strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch with an online solutions advisor at Melbourne IT today.