How Much Content Does a Site Need and What Should It Be?

One of the most popular questions businesses tend to ask when discussing SEO is

How much content do we need?

And that aligns with our general need to bring any SEO discussion down to numbers.

Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, discuss content quantity and how to create a comprehensive content SEO strategy.

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Historically we had numbers for everything: Amount of pages, content length, keyword density, etc.

This is understandable because SEOs are dealing with a machine and a machine understands numbers best. And our job is try and reverse-engineer what a machine (i.e. a search algorithm) likes most.

However Google moved away from focusing on numbers long time ago, and so should SEOs.

Google is no longer finding pages by directly matching keywords in the search query to keywords in a web document. Google understands search intent and semantics, context and relevancy.

There’s no longer a question of “How much”

There’s a question

“What is needed to satisfy a certain search intent”

or

What will make my site useful for my target customer?

And that is an on-going effort that’s never really done.

No industry is stagnant: There are new competitors, new customer needs, new trends – there’s always something changing and a good SEO content strategy should be able to keep up.

Types of Content You May Need for Your Business

There’s a lot of various types of content you will need for your business website, including:

• Informational content to help your target customers discover your site when they are at the very beginning of their buying journey
• Content for product pages (much of that could be user-generated, like customer reviews)
• Content for category pages (only if that content can help your target customers make a good choice. No fluff content here!)
• Trusted and viral (i.e “linkable”) content that will attract links to your site
• Newsworthy content that could help your site generate traffic from Google Discover, etc.

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Hire ninjas if you need help creating a solid content strategy that will match your users’ intent, rank well and attract backlinks.