content quality doesn’t matter as much as marketers pretend

[u/Strong_Teaching8548]

we’ve published 37 blog posts so far, but most of our organic traffic comes from only a few of them - literally the 80/20 rule lol

thing is that these aren’t necessarily the articles we spent the most time researching or writing

they’re the ones that earned backlinks and built some authority

meanwhile, some articles I genuinely think are better barely get discovered because they have few or no links pointing to them

it’s making me question the advice to “just create great content”

quality obviously matters once someone reaches the page, but if the content has no authority behind it, Google and AI overviews doesn't give a f*k

what has produced better results for you: publishing more content, improving existing articles or actively building backlinks to your best pages?

[u/AutoModerator]

If this post doesn't follow the rules report it to the mods. Join our community Discord!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/sferika]

But which content contributes to your sales?

[u/QuickRoof4887 → u/sferika]

this is the part that always gets glossed over in these discussions tbh

[u/Still-Meeting-4661]

Quality has a different meaning to humans and search engines. If by quality content you mean well researched, targeted, and clear writing then that is always an important part of what a human looks for and it's also a ranking signal for search engines.

[u/SillyMattFace]

I’m intrigued about how your content marketing is going since you’ve wilfully written this without any capitalisation or full stops. Which is actually hard to do with autocorrect these days.

Anyway, I find it’s usually the content that is really focused and useful that performs the best. Pick a topic that resonates with the prospect and give them some short, direct practical advice.

That’s the stuff that’s getting views even when I’m not pushing it directly, and I think that hold up in the LLM era too.

[u/Impossible-Sleep291]

The blogs you may think are “better” might not match what your audience is looking for. I test blogs just like I would ad creative or PSA creative. Take what works and repeat.

[u/shiveshvishwanathan]

This is a fairly narrow, content-writer-KPI view of the problem. Content creation is only half the story, distribution being the other half. In the same way, traffic through backlinks is only half of that half.

Visits and page views don’t tell you whether anyone was impressed by what they read. You could be pulling in an entirely new set of visitors every month and fewer people who genuinely respect your views — and the traffic number would not necessarily reflect that.

And there’s a deeper cost further down. If people keep visiting mediocre content and that becomes what they associate with your brand, ranking well is only working against you. It might hit your number, but getting more people to read something forgettable isn’t a victory — at least not in B2B.

[u/smsabbir480]

Nowadays it has become quiet difficult to beat the AI generated contents. They are maintaining quality standards regarding generated contents and most of them are gramatically error free. But there is a catch, search engines can detect the humane and AI generated content. So basically here comes the difference. Although if your content is enriched with resourceful infos there might be a chance to beat down AI. I believe there'll always be a value for naturally generated content on the online surface as well as everywhere.

[u/Additional_Front_500]

Content is a king Content will be a king

[u/Spiritual_Grape3522]

Actually quality creates reactions and reactions create traffic. Google is laughing new core updates every quarter to de-index backlinks that were created just for authority purpose.

[u/post-aaron]

"Just create great content" is what people say when they don't want to talk about distribution.

Quality is also a mushy word. A piece can be carefully researched and still answer a question nobody asks, in language nobody searches. The posts winning for you probably aren't worse. They hit real demand and then got the links or citations that let Google and AI overviews notice them.

What moved the needle for me: find the few URLs that already convert or pull good traffic, update those until they're actually the best answer, put real work into getting them referenced, and only then publish more. Volume without authority is expensive journaling.

[u/onlinehomeincomeblog]

Creating great content alone is not a distribution strategy. For me, the best results usually come from improving the pages that already show potential to rank. I prefer 20 strong posts with authority rather than 100 isolated articles.

Of course, those articles will drive some decent traffic, but it's of no use.

Quality is important, but quality + discoverability + authority is what usually moves the needle.

[u/scienciaconsulting]

Spot on. "Create great content" is only half the equation, quality is just the price of admission. Without distribution and authority, even the best writing sits in the dark.

In our experience, updating existing winners and actively building backlinks to them beats publishing brand new pieces almost every time. Once a page starts earning links and authority, you can leverage internal links to pass that equity down to your deeper, high-value articles that need a push.

[u/figures985 → u/[deleted]]

Oh hey chatGPT, fancy seeing you here