I’m sure you’ve been in this situation.
The Challenge of SEO Publishing
You’re launching a new site, or maybe a new section of your existing site. You want to get traffic from search engines, but the only way you can do that is to publish content, and there are lots of niches you’d like to cover. Maybe it’s a price comparison site; maybe it’s something else entirely. But either way, the pressure is on to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible.
But if you just start publishing whatever you can think of, you’ll end up with low-value pages that don’t convert users and won’t be found by search engines. You need both scale and quality.
The problem is one of judgment.
How do you build a system that produces high-quality content at scale?
As I wrote yesterday, SEO is about providing context. It’s not about keywords. It’s about understanding what people want and then meeting their needs.
That means, for example, knowing which keywords to target, and why. It also means understanding the competition and figuring out how to beat them. And it means creating original content that provides value beyond what others have already offered.
It’s not enough to write an article that contains the right keywords. The information has to make sense, and the writing has to show that you know what you’re talking about. If you don’t, your page will be ignored by both users and search engines.
Balancing Scale and Quality
In my experience, the best way to create a system that produces good content at scale is to start with a lot of articles, then refine them over time.
This seems counterintuitive because we often hear that the more content you produce, the better your rankings will be. But that’s based on a misunderstanding of how search works.
The real reason that quantity matters is that it gives you the chance to hit some keywords. If you produce a lot of content, even if it’s all thin, you’ll get a few hits here and there. Then, when you go back and improve those pieces—adding depth, correcting errors, updating outdated information—you’ll get more visibility.
This isn’t just about quantity, though. As Google continues to reward sites that provide in-depth, well-researched information, producing a lot of thin content without the substance behind it will fail to attract either users or search engines.
A friend who runs a major news site told me recently that he tries to keep his top 100 most popular posts updated every three months, checking for factual accuracy, adding new insights, and removing any outdated information. He says it’s important to keep the top posts fresh because they’re the ones that bring in the most traffic.
There’s a lot of judgment involved in choosing which posts to update first. There’s also a lot of work, but the payoff is worth it.
If you can find a way to test your content against search results and then go back and revise it, you’ll see your rankings rise dramatically. That’s because you’ll be showing Google that you understand what people want and that you’re delivering the right answers.
Takeaway
So, here’s the question: What’s your plan?
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