Is all this "You need high-quality content" talk just bs? It feels like it sometimes.

Does anyone have any thoughts on just how high-quality your site's content needs to be?

When I started writing content for a digital marketing agency, it was pretty bare bones. They'd give me a title and I'd cook up 800 or so words. The next step was just guessing at a few generic keywords and throwing them in the title and sub-headings (we weren't even thinking much about h1's and h2's), and making sure we used them again in the first paragraph after the headings.

Now, we're trying to be more sophisticated about it: Keyword research, meta descriptions, customized URLs, properly using title and H2 tags, writing 1,100-word posts, and trying to dig deeper into the topic with each h2 (rather than just re-hashing the keyword).

And, it just seems like the brute force worked better.

Now, a few caveats: (1) We provide content for a few clients, and I don't have great reporting for all of them; (2) We got the most results with clients where we were using these techniques on maybe a dozen or so case studies a month, vs. 4 blog posts a month, and (3) We started evolving our content strategy a few months ago, so all the posts where we used those old techniques have had more time to gain traction.

But still, every time I even pop into any reporting, it seems like the older stuff keeps doing better, and in some cases we're showing dips in search visibility.

Meanwhile, when I do an incognito search for many of the topics I'm writing about, it seems like all the top results don't follow all the recommendations about posts being more than 1,000 words, properly using H1 and H2 tags, internal and external links, etc.

I'm sorry if this is vague, but I'm just moving into more of a content strategy/SEO position

But, I'm curious if anyone else has come across this phenomenon? Is it possible that simplistic strategy + volume is still better than high quality content? Or, does it take longer to gain traction, or vary from industry to industry?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

submitted by /u/jacktheconqueror
[link] [comments]

from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/ck9kq5/is_all_this_you_need_highquality_content_talk/>