As Plato says, “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” This adage speaks to the overall goal of content marketing. It’s easy to blog frequently if what you’re saying isn’t intelligent, but is that really what’ll bring in frequent traffic?
Though it’s great to post frequently on your website’s blog, in reality, the secret to good content marketing revolves more around high quality content and less around frequent posting.
High Quality vs. High Quantity
Posting high volumes of content is a great element of content marketing. However, the “great element” part begins to suffer when the company posts so often that the quality of the content suffers.
As it turns out, high quality content, no matter the quantity, will always carry more weight with search engines than a large amount of low quality content. This is thanks to the Panda update to Google’s algorithm in 2011, which was implemented to significantly decrease the number of poor quality articles making their way to the top of search results. Thanks to this update, the higher quality content will win every time. Here are some of the benefits of delivering high quality work over high quantity work.
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More and Longer Page Views: High quality content is the best type for enticing more, and longer, page views. When you have an article worth reading, most readers will read past the first paragraph, and then share the article with their friends via social media. When you have low quality content, people will likely stop after the first paragraph, and avoid content from that website in the future.
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Higher Credibility with Search Engines: The overall goal of SEO marketing is to get in the good graces of search engines – especially Google. To do this, you must adhere to the Panda update by delivering quality content. Search engines seek to avoid spam, duplicated content, keyword stuffing, and sketchy links. They search out content with good grammar, spelling, readability, relevance, and quality links to deliver to their searchers.
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Expanded Audience: Your goal with any piece of content you produce is to go viral. Obviously, this will not happen every time, but if you have the best quality content possible, it’ll happen more often. Your content will be shared across social media platforms, in homes, and on mobile devices, extending your company’s reach to a much greater audience.
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Connection with Your Audience: Furthermore, you’ll be able to make a stronger connection to your audience with higher quality content. If you put a large focus on delivering relevant content in a manner and voice to which your audience can connect, they’ll gain greater respect for your brand, and your customer base will stabilize and increase.
How to Create High Quality Content
As you can see, quality content is something worth subscribing to, but how do you make it happen? Remember that the word “quality” can mean a lot of things based on your particular niche and target audience, so be sure to take that into account. Otherwise, use these tips to help you make your content better than ever.
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Consider the Length: The jury is still out on the proper word count for your content. However, the lack of attention span that accompanies today’s Internet generation indicates that most users want content that is concise and loaded with good information.
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Use Imaging: A picture, video, or infographic really can speak a thousand words when it comes to content marketing. In fact, 40 percent of people will respond better to a visual representation than they will to text, so any article that’s accompanied by visual media is sure to meet higher standards than those lacking it. Likewise, make standalone imaging a major part of your content strategy as well.
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Include Credibility: Try to get content that’s written by those with a level of expertise necessary for what they’re writing. If it’s a news article, writers with copious amounts of writing experience are considered more credible than first time writers. If the article is more academic in nature, the writer should hold a degree or other credentials that make them qualified to write on the topic. When readers see who wrote the article, it helps them trust both the article and your brand.
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Make it Readable: People want content they can read and understand that isn’t riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes. To help ensure that your content matches the reading level of your audience, you can get a readability score by inserting the URL, or text of your article, into tools like Readability-Score.
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Make it Sharable: Social media shares may not be part of Google’s algorithm, but they are what give you more page views and extend your audience. Sharable content is generally concise, relevant, audience-friendly, and often click-baity.
Should You Aim for Frequent Content?
Many still have the goal of aiming for frequent content, but should that be their goal? The answer to that question is somewhat complicated. It’s fine if you want to deliver a lot of content, but it probably shouldn’t be your number one goal. Make high quality content the priority.
Once you’ve mastered the art of producing high quality content, if you still want to deliver frequent content, determine how you’ll make this happen. Put a solid plan in place for delivering that much high quality content, whether it’s hiring more experienced freelance bloggers, pulling members of your company team to write it, or investing in an SEO company.
