Every one has been talking about the importance of content marketing and its benefits to SEO for years. A common question I come across is “how much content do I need to produce to make a difference to my SEO?”
I think this question is fundamentally flawed. By asking the question you run the risk of going down the blind alley of creating crap content, just for the sake of rankings.
A much better question is “how can I create the best content for my target audience and objectives?”
Start with your objectives in mind
For many businesses brand awareness is a key objective, for a lot of others it is lead generation and sales.
Your objective will shape the type of content that you need to produce as well as the frequency and quality.
Who is your audience?
The better you understand your audience and their needs, the easier it will be to create content that resonates with them. Is your job to educate, answer questions or entertain? For most of the businesses we work with, the main objective is to generate quality leads that convert to business.
Education is one of the best ways of achieving this. The benefit of well targeted educational content is that it builds trust, awareness and ultimately leads.
Understanding your audience, their challenges and questions helps you to identify the educational content that is going to be valuable to them.
Your competitive landscape
When you have understood your objectives and audience, understanding the competitive landscape is important.
As part of the journey so far, you’ll have identified some important content areas that you can address and educate your audience. When you have identified these you then need to understand how well these areas are already being addressed.
I often run searches on a variety of topics, only to find that the information out there is relatively thin. I end up having to piece together lots of sources of information to build up a detailed picture. If you find this in your research, it can present a great opportunity for building out more comprehensive and easy to use information for your audience.
Own your space
If you find that there are already some amazing resources out there that you would struggle to do better than, is there a worthwhile niche that hasn’t been covered, or do you need to find alternative opportunities that aren’t so well covered?
Ideally you want to find a space that you can own and make your own. This isn’t always possible, but if you can find it – it can make a massive difference.
If that isn’t possible in your market – can you be in the top 5? If the answer is yes and being in the top 5 will represent a great opportunity. Go for it.
Create the best content on the web
The purpose of this blog post is really to answer whether quality or quantity is more important when it comes to SEO.
If you are reading this, then the chances are you aren’t a media shop or a billion dollar organisation. If you aren’t, you’ll never win a quantity battle. You have to go for a smart move and focus on quality.
The approach I take is – can I create the best content on the web to answer this question? Even in our very well covered industry the answer is surprisingly often - yes.
By taking this approach you will naturally focus on quality over quantity.
Why does the quality approach work better when it comes to SEO?
Google is clever – very clever. They have built an artificial intelligence system, it is probably the largest data resource in the world and it is constantly learning.
Google make their money by providing highly relevant results when searchers ask questions – that keep us coming back for more.
In simple English, the key things that Google looks for to help it present the right results for your search queries are:
- How relevant is this content to the question?
- How relevant is this content to the searcher’s intent (what is the specific question they are asking, where are they based, what sites do they like, what content types do they prefer)?
- How much do we trust this content?
- When people visit this content, how engaged are they with it?
- How much do other people and websites trust this content?
By working to create the best content on the web your content will naturally score well against these questions and criteria. Here’s how:
- You’ll be creating content, specifically to answer questions that your audience has
- You’ll make your content very relevant to your searchers intent, because you have really thought about them. You’ll be approaching your content from their perspective and with them in mind
- Your content will perform well in regard to trust signals. You’ll reference other quality sites, you will attract links from quality sites and your content will be shared on social media
- Because the content is really good quality, your audience will engage well with it, return to it regularly and spend more time on your site
An added benefit is that because you have taken the time to craft great content., you’ll keep an eye on it and return to it over time to refine and improve it.
Yikes - Creating quality content takes time, I’m worried I won’t be getting in front of my audience enough
Yes, creating really good quality content does take time. The chances are, that to be the best of the best you’ll need to think about things like:
- Good quality custom images
- Illustrations and guides
- Video
- Downloadable resources and content
- Research
Ideally you’d be able to launch everything at the same time. But, real life isn’t always neat and tidy like that. A great way to approach this is to build your content over time.
You can release it in versions, adding to and improving it over time. You may not get the best result from day one, but you will be on a clear journey to your destination.
Or you can release the content as a series. Most people don’t want to consume everything in one go. So, you can plan out a series that you can deliver week by week and month by month.
The advantage is that you can build up an engaged following, who you’ll build trust with over time, and after a while you’ll have the best content out there, without breaking yourself or the bank!
We have loads of content already – what can we do with it
There are lots of businesses out there who already have loads of content. If that sounds like you the good news is:
You have lots of opportunities that you can build on.
Start by running a content audit and understanding what content is working and what isn’t. Also look for things that are already ranking in the top 50 search results and ideally low first page and second page.
Identify how you can organise your content into topics.
The aim of doing this is to identify opportunities to improve content. If you have medium to low quality content that is already performing OK, just imagine what it can do if you transform it into the best content out there. The best content on the web!
You don’t need to do it all at once. Make a plan for the next 3 or 6 months, to improve that content over time. Then get to it.
By organising the content into easy to navigate topics and then improving and refining it into the best content available on the web, you will be rewarded with high rankings and a large increase in good quality relevant visitors to your site.
Don’t forget your conversion paths
When creating great quality content it can be easy to forget about the end goal. Getting great quality leads and making sales.
By creating great quality content, we will be getting more relevant people to our website. Those people will be consuming our content, whether it is written, visual or video and they will be building their trust in our business.
Traffic and trust is great – but ultimately, we are after leads and revenue.
To encourage your visitors to take action, you need to give them a logical next step to take with your business.
Examples include buying something, downloading something or making an enquiry.
The thing is that you want the next step to be logical and as easy as possible to take. Don’t make them feel pressured or go after the hard sell. Hold their hand and make it a simple and comfortable next step.
If you keep that in mind with each item of content that you produce, you’ll get great results from all the visitors that you are getting to your site.
Summing up
- Quality is much more important than quantity
- By focusing on quality, you’ll naturally appeal to search engines and make SEO much easier
- You can address quantity concerns, by making improvements over time and breaking down larger items into a series
- Organise your content into easy to navigate topics, to make it easier for users and search engines to understand your content (it will help your SEO rankings)
- Breaking content down into easier to consume pieces, and releasing it in stages is a great way to keep in front of your audience regularly, while at the same time building a great quality content
- Choose a battle you can win and work on creating the best content on the web
