Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about what drives more traffic, quality content versus quantity. Neil, as someone that produces a ton of content and also quality content, what are your thoughts around this?

Neil Patel: I've done the quality route, or that's the main route that I took, in which I don't publish as much content, I try to publish high quality articles. I even look at the articles at [inaudible 00:00:49] and I redo them and make them like 9-10,000 word guides. I've done all that stuff, so when people read my content, they're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing."
But if you look at my traffic numbers, let's say compared to someone like HubSpot, they crush me, because they produce more quantity. It doesn't matter if you want high quality or high quantity, ideally you should have both, but the thing that wins in the end is quantity. Business Insider, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, if you look at all the top blogs on the web, everyone can say their articles aren't the highest quality, but they're producing so much quantity, they pretty much rank for everything out there.

Eric Siu: Yeah, you know what's interesting, I talked to one of the managing editors at a site that does about eight million visits a month and I said, "Okay, well, how did you get it to eight million?" And she said, "It's easy, we just hire a bigger team and you produce a larger quantity of content." And that means opening up for guest posts as well, because as we know, guest posts can get spammy sometimes, but yeah I mean, it's quantity there.
We used to focus, internally, more on the length of the content. Neil's written some case studies about this, showing different graphs on why the number of words makes a big difference, which is why you see like a Wikipedia in the top three results. BackLinkr also did a case study too, but at the end of the day, when we look at our own data, when we're publishing more quantity and actually things more related to news, we actually find that our traffic is going up. A good example of this if you're in the marketing space, if you look at a Search Engine Roundtable, or if you look at a Search Engine Land, it's the same thing as at TechCrunch, they're just publishing more and more ... or a larger amount of quantity, and that leads to more traffic, ultimately.

Neil Patel: It's up to you on what route you want to take. I recommend that you first start off producing quality blog posts, and then from there you can figure out how to scale that up. Ideally, maybe you can get to like five posts a day that are high in quality. That's going to be really difficult but you can shoot for it, right? I was counting the other day how many posts TechCrunch did in a 24 hour period, and I bet it ranges per day, but during that 24 hour period, they did 59 posts, which makes sense on why they're not all high quality; there's no way to write 59 high quality posts in one day. Do you need that much content? Probably not, but what I recommend doing is going to [inaudible 00:03:07] or SEMRush, putting in your competitor urls, see what's driving their search traffic; start from there. Just write all of their blog posts and make better versions of them.

Eric Siu: That's it for today, but we do have a special giveaway. This is a heat-mapping tool called Crazy Egg, which is Neil's tool. Neil, what's Crazy Egg?

Neil Patel: Crazy Egg is a visual analytics tool that shows you where people are clicking, where they're not, it shows you how far people are scrolling down your page, or where they're not scrolling, that will help you to determine if your call to action buttons are in the right place, your messaging is. You can even make quick changes to your site using a wiziwig. You can see how people are navigating your site through mouse recordings, and of course, if you want to run AD tests, you can also do that with a few clicks of a button.

Eric Siu: So, if you want to get access to this giveaway, we're giving away a one year annual subscription of Crazy Egg, and we're doing this every single week. If you want to get in on this, there's actually multiple entries. To learn more about it just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and we will see you tomorrow.

Neil Patel: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing stratergies and tactics, to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.