Content quality vs. quantity? Google’s John Mueller shares advice

All businesses have finite resources. It mostly comes down to how well businesses use those finite resources to compete with other businesses in the industry.

Content marketing is no different.

You can only produce so much content with the resources (time and money) you have, which leads to an important debate, i.e.,

Should you create fewer but stronger pages (that target a bunch of related keywords), or should you create lots of pages (different pages for different keyword variations) and cover as much ground as possible?

Someone recently asked the same question to Google’s John Mueller:

“I have a question about the ecommerce website. We create content based on the keyword suggestions, autocomplete by Google to include more content around the one main topic.

For example, the main topic or transactional intent is smartphones, and we’re going to create tech-related content around the smartphone, like blog posts.

Should we really need to create separate content or separate keywords around one topic, or is just combining all different keywords in one intent and optimizing all our content around this intent?”

The act of balancing

John Mueller simplified this and boiled it down to “balancing” between the two strategies.

“You can do it either way. It’s more of a strategic decision, I think.

In general, what you are balancing is making pages that are specific for individual topics and making pages that are more general but where you have fewer pages. So you’re kind of balancing many pages versus fewer pages”, said John.

Analyzing competitors

John also mentioned that the strategy should take into account what your competitors are doing.

“If you have fewer pages, generally those few pages tend to be a little bit stronger. Whereas, if you have a lot of pages, then it’s like the value is spread out a little bit more.

So if there are specific topics where the competition is stronger, then you want to have very strong pages, so maybe fewer pages.

If you are targeting areas where the competition is not so strong, then maybe having more pages is fine. So that’s kind of the balance that you would try to take there.”

Pick one?

In the end, John mentioned that if you have a new website, perhaps it’s a better idea to start with fewer but stronger pages.

“If you’re starting out, probably having fewer pages is a good idea so that you can be as strong as possible in that area.

And then over time, as you see like we’re very good here, you can split off individual pages for more niche topics.”

How do you execute your content strategy? Do you rely on fewer but stronger pages, or do you like covering as much ground as possible by creating lots of content?

Let us know.