Content Marketing Strategy: Is Quality Finally More Important Than Quantity?

In the early days of Internet, the sheer vastness of the web was impressive. Whatever you were looking for, people were discussing it online – even the most obscure topics you could think of. Back then, the quantity of information blew us away.

But are you still impressed by the size of the net? 

Today, it seems like every topic has been covered from every viewpoint possible. Only last month, over 76 million new blog posts and over 9 million web pages were added to the Internet (on Wordpress alone!) Chances are you won’t find new, revolutionary content on all these pages. On the contrary. Most pages probably resemble something published a few minutes earlier. 

If we Google some random phrases we see how many times it has been covered online. 

• “How to tie a tie”: 479 000 hits
• "Best way to clean windows": 423 000 hits
• "Best movies of 2017": 589 000 hits
• "coca cola mentos": 143 000 hits
• "how to catch a cheater": 993 000 hits

The numbers speak for themselves. If you wish to add something unique to the web, you have to be creative. 

The Future of Online Content 

Looking at what content is liked, shared and ranks well in search engines, quality is now more important than ever. And this actually reflects what people look for online. We’re not interested in a random person’s random opinion about something. We want thought-through, credible information from people we trust.

The remaining billions of pages we don’t pay too much attention to.

Take Spotify as an example. At first it was amazing that most music ever put on a record was available for streaming. But when we got used to it, well-crafted playlists and suggestions from people we trust became more interesting. In the end, people seem to prefer quality before quantity.

(However, if you still are amazed by the vastness of Spotify, I recommend the site Forgotify where you can listen to millions (!) of songs that have zero streams.)

As the web grows, a fraction of what’s produced will provide something unique. Only a few will be viewed by more than a handful, and a lot of pages are probably never viewed after they’re published. The situation is almost like the old “if a tree falls in a forest” question. 

Time to Revise Your Content Strategy?

The key for a successful content strategy won’t be to create hundreds of keyword-specific articles, but rather to create only what people need. Chances are that you already have enough pages from a quantity perspective. Now it’s time to work with what you have.

If you’ve been hording content on your website, perhaps a blog that has been active for a decade or so, you might want to start refining old pages.

In this excellent blog post from Hubspot, Pamela Vaughan describes how she managed to optimize old posts making them up-to-date. Instead of adding new pages to the web, she managed to generate new traffic and conversions by reusing old content.

When you create new, original content – which still is the motor for generating traffic – move away from goals about quantity. It’s simply more effective to make one quality piece than several pieces where you just repeat something said before. Use unique data (or investigate old data in a new way), have unique opinions and be personal.

Furthermore, content promotion will be increasingly important going forward. You simply need to lead the visitors to your site – just being online it is not enough!

Before posting this blog, I Googled "content quality and quantity". The phrase received 21 400 hits. Chances are that someone wrote this exact same post just a few minutes ago. :-(