The old adage of Quality over Quantity gets thrown around a lot in content marketing, but does it have any merit?
Odds are you’ve heard of content marketing as being a sound strategy for your inbound marketing campaign. Unfortunately, there are companies out there who view content marketing as merely a way to improve their search engine optimization. Because of this, they tend to use content as a vehicle for their keywords, which often results in a large quantity of content without much quality. While search engine optimization is an important facet of your website – and using keywords throughout your content is a great way to get it seen – the quality of your content is of much more importance, especially over the long term. Releasing a few pieces of quality content every week is going to do a lot more for your brand than releasing poor quality content stuffed with keywords every hour, no matter what you might think.
So how exactly can the quality of your content drive web traffic? Glad you asked! The following are three important elements of quality that each piece of content should have.
1. Overcoming the Sales Pitch
The most important thing about the content you create is that it is informative in some way to your target audience. This is where many companies go astray. There are two common mistakes that companies make – they don’t care that much about providing content that helps their readers because they are too focused on keywords, or they revolve their content around a service or product. Nobody is going to want to go read through something that is stuffed with keywords and obviously has little to no value. And no one is going to want to read what is essentially an ad for your business.
You need to provide something that is helpful to your reader. How exactly does this help your web traffic? If your content is poor, you won’t have very many people returning to your website. The keywords may drive new web traffic, but that traffic is only passing through. High quality, informative content will have readers returning to your site for more, thereby not only increasing web traffic but also brand loyalty.
2. Make it Relevant
In addition to being informative, the content you create has to be relevant to your target audience. When using keywords, you are hopefully using keywords that your target audience will use in order to search for information relating to your brand’s products or services. This means that when they read your content, they expect it to be relevant.
For example, if you run a sneaker company, then an article about celebrity culture isn’t going to be relevant to your target audience. Now if your article is about the type of sneakers a certain athlete wears and why he or she wears them – that is much more relevant. Keeping your content relevant will help you to keep readers coming back as well as establish yourself as an expert within your industry, which can be incredibly helpful in spreading word of mouth amongst your readers.
3. Sharing is Caring
First of all, you need to make your content physically shareable by providing share links to the main social networks. This way, when a reader likes what he or she reads, it will be easy to share the content on their social media page by just clicking a button.
Secondly, your content has to be worthy of being shared. It’s basically why you want your content to be informative and relevant. If you are so worried about keywords that your content isn’t informative or relevant, then it won’t be very sharable. If it’s both informative and relevant, then readers may want to share it with their friends, family, and colleagues. When they do this, you open up your brand to an entire social circle – thereby increasing your brand awareness by more than you can imagine.
The more people that read a piece of content shared on a social network, the more people will venture over to your website in order to check out your brand.
Striking a Balance
As you can see, the quality of your content is much more important than quantity. You want to provide value in the content you create. Releasing a large quantity of content can increase your search ranking on Google, even with the new Google Hummingbird algorithm, but it won’t do anything for your web traffic over the long term unless it is of high quality. Obviously, finding a balance between the two is important. Only releasing one piece of high quality of content every once in a while isn’t going to help increase your web traffic. High quality content needs to be released as regularly as possible, as long as quality isn’t sacrificed.
