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When it comes to building a niche site, there are plenty of different avenues you can take, and depending who you ask, you’ll likely get a different answer regarding which has the highest potential for success.
One factor that many people get hung up on is quality vs. quantity. Is it better to make your articles as good as humanly possible, or it is better to just throw as many darts at the dartboard as possible and hope that at least a few of them stick?
Of course, the answer to this question is really somewhere in between those two extremes. While you want to create high-quality content for your blog, you also need as many lines in the water as possible to give yourself the highest chance for success.
In this post, I’ll go over the benefits of each approach and show you what my team and I focus on to land in the sweet spot to grow our sites as quickly as possible.
Why You Should Focus on Quality
First, let’s take a look at why it’s absolutely important to put some focus on quality on your site. After all, if your site is of poor quality, you don’t stand much of a chance of succeeding in the long run.
When you create a new site, you want to do anything and everything you can to prove to Google and your visitors that your site is worthwhile. You also want to create something of value, something that provides a unique experience.
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One of the best ways to accomplish these things is to produce high-quality content. By high-quality, I mean thorough, detailed articles, with images, links, clear headings and subheadings, all on a site with a clean user interface with easy navigation.
Creating a great looking site with an easy-to-use user interface, then populating that site with articles that not only look great, but also provide unique content that isn’t already available on the web, can put you head and shoulders above your competitors.
And that’s why many people say to focus on creating high-quality content. By producing content of the highest possible quality, you can create separation from your competitors. This separation not only works initially as visitors land on your site, but also future-proofs your site by making it more difficult for others to compete with you down the road.
There are a few problems with putting too much focus on quality though. For one, producing high-quality content simply takes a lot of time, which means you won’t be able to produce as many articles as you would otherwise.
Also, if your targeting is off on those articles, it doesn’t matter how good your article is, it might never show up high enough in the search results to get clicked. This is a real problem that you have to consider, unless you intend to build backlinks to your site, which I don’t recommend.
That brings us to why you also have to consider the other side of the coin: quantity.
Why Quantity Is Also Important
While the quality of your site and posts is obviously important, it’s equally as important to simply produce as much content as possible. Think of it like throwing darts at a dartboard. The more darts you throw, the higher the chance that one hits the bullseye.
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Believe it or not, a good portion of the articles that you write will never get any meaningful traffic. This is a hard pill to swallow when you first start out, but it’s something you just have to come to terms with.
It doesn’t matter how good of a job you do with your keyword research and competition analysis. There are just some variables that we can never account for, and Google will rank your articles as they see fit, not necessarily based on the quality of the articles themselves.
With that being said, the more posts you can add to your site, the faster your site will grow, simply because you’ll have a higher likelihood of getting some good traction in the organic search results with some of your posts.
As you start getting traction, Google will start to trust your site more and start ranking your other posts higher as well. It’s a snowball effect that’s hard to achieve without a significant amount of posts on your site.
A site with more posts also has some other benefits, such as providing the viewer, Google, and even ad networks the appearance that your site is not a work in progress. This is important because some people won’t stick around if they land on a site that looks like it was just launched.
A larger site can also lead to more pageviews per visitor, as you simply have more relevant content on your site for visitors to see. This can also help your site grow as those initial visitors will engage more with your site than they would on a smaller site.
How to Balance Quality and Quantity for Optimal Growth
We’ve established that both quality and quantity are important, so how do you balance the two to help your site grow quickly while also providing a great experience for your visitors?
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My team and I handle this through prioritization. We focus on quality where we think it’s most important early on, then come back to some of the other areas to improve them down the road.
For example, when building a new site, there are a few things that you want to make sure are in place, such as good navigation and a clean layout. However, you don’t necessarily need a fancy logo, a paid theme, or even categories on your site when you’re only getting a trickle of visitors.
Instead of focusing on some of those items that are either costly or take a lot of time, get your site to a presentable state, then move on to creating content, which is what will get the traffic flowing.
Speaking of content, while you want to meet a certain level of quality for all of your posts, not every posts needs to be perfect to be successful. To hit the sweet spot between quality and quantity, let your competition determine the quality level.
For example, if you’re going after a keyword like “how to ride a bike,” the competition would be very high. As a result, you would absolutely need to produce the best piece of content on this particular topic to have a chance of succeeding (although this particular example is likely out of reach for almost anyone).
If on the other hand, you’re targeting a keyword like “where to leave your bike while shopping at Walmart,” you can rank an article very easily without much focus on quality, simply because there’s almost no competition at all.
By letting your competition determine your quality level, you can find a balance between quality and quantity, where you’ll spend more time on some posts to make them as good as possible, where others you can knock out quickly with just a baseline quality level.
Using this approach will give you the best of both worlds and allow your site to grow quickly without the quality of your articles holding you back in any way. Over time, you can also go back to those lesser-quality posts and improve them to bring them up to par with your better articles.
That’s actually what my team and I do. For the majority of our posts, we don’t add images (aside from a featured image) or links, and we often keep the posts relatively short (just enough to top the competition).
We keep track of everything in a spreadsheet and go back to the lower-quality posts after they’ve proven that they can bring in some traffic. At that point, we add images, links, etc. to bring the quality level up to where we’d like it to be.
If one of those lower-quality posts was a complete miss and never brings in a trickle of traffic, we simple leave it alone and don’t waste our time on it. Instead, we put our focus on the posts that have proven to bring visitors to our sites.
Final Thoughts
There are always going to be some people that say that the best thing you can do is to produce the highest-quality posts out there, and while that might be true in a perfect world, focusing too much on quality means you won’t be able to produce as many posts.
By finding a middle ground, you’ll give your site the best chance to succeed. As it grows, you can go back and optimize your posts even further to lock in more of the benefits of creating high-quality content.
