It can be a tough world for those starting out with blogging or content writing. The conventional wisdom is that you need to write new content regularly both for SEO benefit and to keep users engaged. For those that follow this advice, this means that the content you write is put together relatively quickly. This is not an effective content strategy.
[box type=”gray”]Engaging your users is important. Drawing SEO benefit from the content you write is important. Sacrificing quality to write regular content is detrimental to both your users and your SEO efforts.[/box]
The key to both engaging new users and retaining existing users is writing compelling content. It doesn’t matter if you are writing several new articles a week if nobody wants to read them. One article that you pour your heart and soul into is going to be far more engaging than 4 lackluster articles that you could’ve produced in the same amount of time.
Moreover, the biggest component of effective SEO is link building. If you are writing content to build links, you want that content to be damn good. As with the above example, writing 20 average articles in a week isn’t going to draw anybody’s attention, as the articles are going to be no more than filler. Spend a week writing 1 article about something you both know a lot about and care about, and your potential for both links and engaging new users is much, much higher.
Assume a hypothetical scale where 1 is the worst possible piece of content you can imagine and 100 is an absolutely awesome piece of content. Intuitively, I would assume that somebody writing 20 articles in a week would average around 30 on this scale for each of those articles. For somebody spending a lot of time writing only 1 article, the scale position would more likely be at the 60-70 mark. Articles with a scale rating of 30 get few/no links, and perform similarly in user acquisition and retention. Articles with a scale rating of 60 or 70 are going to be gaining both links and interested users.
Producing something irreplicable and unique
The point I’m trying to make is that there is currently too much focus on pumping out content irrespective of its quality. Think about how awesome your content can be if you meticulously put in hours of work over the course of a week finding cool information, creating amazing graphics and tables, and just generally producing something irreplicable and unique.
Put effort into your content. Write better, even if it means writing less. You will get better results, and you’ll likely enjoy the creation process a great deal more.