How Much Content Does Your Business Really Need?

As you may know, digital content marketing and SEO best practices are becoming ridiculously important for ALL businesses. If you don’t have an amazing website with high-quality information on it, you’re going to lose people very quickly. Why? Because the similar business next to you has a better website.

However, unless you have a huge content marketing team, it can be a challenge to keep up. You may ask yourself whether it makes sense to quickly push out as much content as possible or to take your time crafting a few brilliant pieces.

Quality vs. Quantity

Ah, the age-old debate. I’ve seen businesses go back and forth on this a lot: Is it more important to have the most content or the best content? SEO specialists might say that you cannot be successful without having thousands of articles for your customers to find, but you should also know that both Google and your customers know the difference between clean, professional, thought-provoking content and a string of words you published in an hour.

As a writer, I’m a bit partial to quality over quantity because I believe my skill set should be highly valued. As someone who works full-time in digital marketing, I also see the strong value in pushing out multiple blogs in one day. Really, businesses need to find the perfect combination of both quality and quantity content both to help their websites rank well in Google searches and to attract more customers.

What Defines High-Quality Content?

Quality content is content that is at least 800 words (for a blog post) but preferably more, is 100% free of grammatical errors and typos, is relevant to your readers, and provides something new and beneficial. Everything you write isn’t going to necessarily be new information to the world, but you can word your messages in new ways.

A huge way to provide value is to always state “why.” Let’s take a business as seemingly simple as a clothing retail company for example. You can write as many posts about swimsuits as you want, but your piece about “which swimsuits give you the most bang for your buck” is going to perform a lot better than your piece about “which bikini color looks the cutest.”

How Much is too Much?

I hate this answer, but it really depends on your business. If you’re in the business of carpet cleaning, you probably don’t need more than one blog post per week. If you run an online magazine, then you probably do need to publish at least ten pieces per day. However, if your business falls somewhere in the middle — as in, you’re not an online publication, but you offer a good or service that everybody wants or needs, you’ll want to land somewhere in the middle and post about once per day. Most businesses can get away with posting every other day.

Now, this isn’t to say that carpet cleaning is not important, but, you also have to think about how much there is to say about your good or service. If the information is not new and is not interesting, there aren’t going to be people looking for it and you’re going to waste your time. If there were 100 different types of carpets that could be cleaned in 100 different ways, then we’d be having a different conversation. Even online retail businesses (like that clothing company with the bikini blog) should be posting once per day. Anything from a blog about recent fashion trends to extended product reviews can do a business good for SEO and for social media attention.

Content Length

Don’t forget that your high-quality and quantity content cannot be ten 300-word blog posts. I mean, it can, but it’s not going to go very far. Readers will get bored, skim quickly, then leave your website, and Google will “ding” you. The Google “bots” will see your word count and assume that it’s not a high-quality blog. I mean, think about it — what’s gonna give you the best information? A 300-word post, or a 1,000-word post? Google knows.

How to Match High Quality with High Quantity

Now that you’ve realized how much web content your business actually needs, you might be getting stressed. It’s not as crazy as you think, though. One writer who really knows what he or she is doing should be able to write a blog for you in no more than two hours. If you hired one person to manage your content marketing, that person could write at least two blogs per day (more than most small businesses need), plus manage your other content needs, such as product descriptions and even email marketing. You could hire someone to write for you on a part-time basis, you can hunt for guest bloggers who will write for free in exchange for free products or links to their websites, or you could hire freelancers (like me, shameless plug).

A good freelancer will cost you about $100 per $ 1,000-word blog post. Or, I suppose you could hire some college students who are broke enough to charge you $25…just don’t expect that content to go anywhere for you.

Finding High-Quality Content

Too many people who haven’t written since their last college class seem to forget that writing is a unique skill. Well, writing WELL is, anyway. Too many businesses hand website content writing off to whoever is on the marketing team instead of finding a professional to write and optimize their content. Finding the right professional is not easy.

From a marketing standpoint, you have to find someone who really understands the messages your business needs to present to the world. Your writer needs to understand your business’ “why” just as much as the CEO does. That might mean it’s time to invest in a long-term solution: either hire a full-time content writer (even if it’s a remote position), or hire a go-to contract writer instead of hiring a different freelancer for every project.

Your content is not going to write itself. It’s time to take that next step for your business.