You’ve heard people like me mention stats like the average piece of content that ranks on page one of Google contains 1,890 words. But that doesn’t mean writing in-depth content that is 1,890 words will automatically get you more search traffic. But first, let’s go over how content marketing is changing. And no matter what popular term you are going after, you are going to have a lot of competition. They don’t rank as high on Google compared to some of the posts I wrote earlier this year (or in previous years), yet they are still the most popular ones because they are unique. Whether it is data that people haven’t seen before or something based on a personal experience that people can learn from, the articles that are unique and can only be written by you will perform the best. Not just by Google, but by people. So how do you write unique content that contains data and has personalized stories? But other people have generic content and do well… Yes, there are tons of blogs with generic content that rank well. People love reading about new trends and strategies as long as you have new data to back up your claims.
Have you heard the saying, “content is king?”
Well, of course, you have. But creating more content won’t necessarily get you more search traffic.
You’ve heard people like me mention stats like the average piece of content that ranks on page one of Google contains 1,890 words.
But that doesn’t mean writing in-depth content that is 1,890 words will automatically get you more search traffic. It just means that the average web page on page 1 contains that many words.
I bet you are going through the scenario below…
You keep writing content but, for some reason, you aren’t getting the amount of search traffic that you would like to be getting.
Don’t worry, I know what you are going through, and I will tell you the solution. But first, let’s go over how content marketing is changing.
Over 440 million blogs exist
The latest stat I could find on the web is that there are currently 440 million blogs.
But if you consider Medium and Tumblr (and other similar sites), that number is surely over a billion because just Tumblr alone has over 400 million blogs.
So, what does that mean for you?
Because there are so many blogs, it’s going to be hard to drive awareness.
There are roughly 7.5 billion people on this earth and the number of blogs is growing faster than the population. So, if you assume there are roughly 1 billion blogs, that means there is one blog for every 7 and a half people.
That’s way too many blogs!
So why should someone read yours instead of the others?
Why doesn’t content marketing work as well as it used to?
Because there are so many blogs, you have tons of competition.
Whatever you are thinking of blogging about, the chances are there is already someone (or tons of people!) already blogging about it. Seriously!
Even if you are planning to write about news and current events, the chances are some other blog is going to beat you to the story… even if it is by an hour (or a few minutes).
With there only being so many popular keywords that people search for, there are now more websites competing to reach the top of the rankings.
Currently, Ubersuggest is tracking 619,718,788 keywords globally. During the last 30 days, only 24,593,402 of them generated over 10,000 searches.
And no matter what popular term you are going after, you are going to have a lot of competition.
For example, I rank on page 1 for the term “SEO” (at least in the United States). But I am competing with a lot of sites… 581 million to be exact!
If you want to go after one of those 24,593,402 keywords, you are going to face a lot of competition.
Sure, you can also get a lot of traffic from long-tail phrases, but even those are getting more competitive over time.
How does your content strategy need to change?
As I mentioned above, whatever you are writing about, chances are someone is already writing about it.
When I started my first blog, Pronet Advertising (which no longer exists), the first post I wrote was called, “Winning the Search Engine Marketing War.” It was 412 words long, contained no images, and had no links. But that was way back in 2005 and content marketing was much different back then.
If I published it today, it would do terrible. Back then I didn’t have a personal brand, no one knew who I was, and the post still did pretty well.
Heck, the standard social channels like Facebook weren’t even being used by marketers.
Do you want to know why it did well? Because it was new.
Back then, people never read a post about winning the search engine marketing war. It was fresh and people wanted to know more. The fact that it was short didn’t matter.
Now, when you publish new content, there is a good chance that people have already read something similar. Because of that, why would they want to link to your piece or even share it?
Even worse, only 8 out of 10 people read headlines but only 2 out of 10 will click through. That means people feel your content isn’t interesting or that they already know a lot about the subject matter of your content.
In other words, if you don’t write something new and amazing, it won’t do well.
It doesn’t matter if you made your content 1,890 words, bought some social shares, or weaseled your way into a few backlinks… no one will care if it isn’t something original and unique.
Just look at the search phrase “SEO tips.” There are 3,630,000 web pages competing for that term.
And…
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