In the world of SEO, it is very easy to lose the forest for the trees. Sometimes it seems like the entire industry is only focusing on one thing and its importance for a site’s SEO. That one ranking factor gets analyzed, over-analyzed and blogged to death by the industry. One such ranking factor is content. “Content is King” is replayed over and over online, and while that is true, some sites are cutting corners because they think it’s just a numbers game; the more content they pump out, the better. That isn’t true.
Contrary to SEO myth, there is no “right” amount of content the search engines are looking for to make a site rank well. It doesn’t matter how many words you have on a page, how big your site is, or how many blog posts you can churn out in a week. More content doesn’t automatically mean better results.
Some black hat SEO firms will recommend that clients outsource their content overseas because they can get a dozen articles written for cheap. But if there is one thing to remember about SEO, it’s that you get what you pay for. When you pay $10 for an article, what kind of quality can you realistically expect to see? Chances are little to no research went into writing the article, and most likely the person on the other end was writing to hit a word count, not to actually write something useful.
Let’s say you run a company blog and are publishing a minimum of three blog posts a day. If they are three, great and informative blog posts, good for you and your staff! But if you can only manage to squeak out a paragraph or two, then what is the point? What value are you giving your readers if you aren’t actually saying anything? You may be routinely updating your blog with fresh content, but quality is far more important the quantity.
The same thing can be said for your website. How many pages on your site are full of fluff? Could you find a way to consolidate a few pages so you have one page that is really useful and informative for your visitors, as opposed to three or four pages that are just okay? Having a dozen extra pages on your site doesn’t do you any good if those pages don’t have the content to back up their existence.
Don’t treat the content you publish on third party sites as just another way to get links or “look good” to the search engines. Creating more content doesn’t mean you are doing a good job with your SEO if you are writing great content in the first place. Don’t get sucked into the hype of “more, more more!” Focus on creating great content that is going to provide real value for both your brand and the readers.