Is content really king
The most common ‘words of wisdom’ you hear when you read about getting more visitors to your website is ‘add quality content’. You add hundreds or thousands of pages of quality content, interesting yet with a personal touch, and the visitors will come flocking in.
But is it true? Well yes, to a point. But this leaves a couple of little problems.
1. Big sites tend to have certain pages or sections that attract far more visitors than others. I am confident that on a 1,000 page site I have - which is all carefully crafted and hand-written content, and took ages - some of the pages have never had a visitor, and many others have had very few. So I was perhaps sometimes wasting my energy.
If I had spent more time on analysing keywords, to find out what people are really looking for, I could perhaps have a 200 page site that attracts 90% of the traffic, or even a 40 page site that attractes 80% of the traffic.
2. Witty and original as we all are, it is usually very difficult to simply write thousands of pages of interesting and original information. So in reality most don’t. We try and put a new slant on ‘existing’ information, or present in a different way, or in a more personal style. But it is really old information.
Unless you are writing about ‘ongoing events’ such as news or sports, which automatically provide an unceasing flow of new subject matter, at some point you will get writer’s block.
Now let’s approach the same question from a different angle. We know that a site that is at the top of page 1 in google will get (approximately) twice as many viewers as the site in the number two position. And this continues to reduce dramatically as we move down the page, and onto page 2.
Where is this leading us? Well, it suggests that a smaller site, but ranked higher, will get more traffic, than the site where all the focus has been on ‘content, content, content’ rather than site promotion. And this has been my experience. The smaller site may not get more traffic in ‘absolute’ terms, but the ratio of number of visitors to number of pages (or time spent) is often greater with small sites.
I know this as much by accident as design. When I have a good idea for a site, I tend to buy the domain name, put up a good site of say 25-50 pages, until my immediate thoughts on the subject dry-up, then leave it. I do site promotion but add little new content, while the site gets out of the sandbox (another subject) or starts to showup in the SERPS. Sometimes I go back later and develop the site, others I haven’t yet. But for the amount of effort put in, the small sites often do disproportionately well.
Note: I am not talking about MFA or article bank sites, just ’small’ quality sites compared with ‘large’ quality’ sites!
So in conclusion: yes, I think that quality content is important. But no, I don’t believe it is the ‘be all and end all’ that is sometimes suggested - you need to focus at least as much time on site promotion, and on trying out new ideas.