Content marketing hasn’t been a thing for all that long, compared to other types of marketing. But for as long as it has been around, one argument has consistently been heard among its many practitioners: quality vs. quantity. In other words, is it more important to focus content marketing on the quality of the content or the volume you push out?
Quantity was the big thing ten years ago. Not only that, but you could also make a compelling case that quantity was the only thing that mattered. You cannot make that same case today. A lot has changed in a decade. So much so that today, focusing exclusively on quantity can actually be harmful.
Updates All the Time
The content marketers of a decade ago wanted quantity for the purposes of maximizing keywords. It made perfect sense at the time. The more keywords they could get out there, the greater the chances of landing on page one. So the goal was to post new content every day.
Google responded to this strategy by rewarding regular updates. After all, they were building their own information database back then, too. Their algorithms needed quantity to do what they did.
We essentially had a situation in which quantity was considered the most important factor. Post every day. Make your posts at least 500 or 600 warns long. Make them keyword dense and do enough keyword research to identify the most competitive keywords for that particular industry and topic. It worked.
So what changed? Volume.
Modern Information Overload
From a purely technical aspect, quantity still serves a valuable purpose to search algorithms. Every bit of data helps. But Google has moved beyond mere quantity to place a heavy emphasis on quality. Why? Because modern consumers are suffering from information overload.
Take this post. It is not the only one discussing this topic. There are likely tens of thousands of others offering similar thoughts. How is this post going to stand out against all the others? That’s a different topic for a different post, but the point being that readers have more options than they can deal with. Google knows that. So these days, Google would rather have content creators reduce the quantity in exchange for better quality.
Google Pays Attention
Google algorithms are sophisticated enough to pay attention to the content web users consume. It matters to those algorithms when a piece of content languishes on the net for weeks or months and no one consumes at. If the content isn’t being viewed, Google is not interested in it for ranking purposes.
Quality matters because it matters to web users. And what matters to web users matters to Google. Therefore, we are now in a position where it is better to spend the time and money on producing quality content instead of trying to push out quantity alone.
Here’s how Utah SEO specialist Webtek Digital Marketing out of Salt Lake City, UT defines quality content:
- It is purposeful
- It targets a specific audience
- It is well researched
- It is not generic
- It is relevant and informative
- It presents verifiable data
- It is technically sound (spelling, grammar, etc.).
Giving greater attention to quality means being willing to not obsess over reach. It is better for a piece of content to reach 1,000 people who actually want to consume it than 10,000 who will scroll right past it.
None of this is to say that content marketers should not strive to produce new content on a regular basis. Regular updates are necessary. But fewer updates are okay when the content being produced is of much higher quality.