Quality And Quantity: What Matters Most With SEO And Why?

In business, projects often boil down to a question of volume versus quality. Should you focus on producing more work? Or better work? In an ideal scenario, you could produce tons of high-quality work at all times. In reality, you most likely have to find a compromise based on various factors, such as time, project priorities, and budget. 

Let’s look at some of the key components of SEO so you can better understand whether you should focus your efforts on quantity or quality.

Backlinks

Backlinks are an important part of any search engine optimization strategy. Backlinks from high authority sites show search engines that your site offers quality, relevant content, and increases the authority of your own site. So, is it better to have a lot of backlinks, or high-quality backlinks?

Backlink Quality

What is a quality backlink? A link from a website with a domain authority of between 40 to 50 is about average. A DA score from 50 to 60 is good, and any score over 60 is considered excellent.

When it comes to backlinks, what you want to avoid is having a lot of low-quality or spammy backlinks. Having a lot of links from very low quality sites can actually lead your website to be less trusted by search engines and ultimately hurt your rankings.

Extremely high-quality backlinks (60+) can be difficult to come by, since they are from highly trafficked and trusted sources. So, you don’t want to spend all your time chasing a specific “unicorn” backlink from one or two top-tier sites. You should absolutely keep trying to get those elite links, but that shouldn’t be your whole focus.

Backlink Quantity

So, how many backlinks does your site need? Many sites on the first page of Google search results have hundreds of thousands of quality backlinks. That’s intimidating for someone just starting out. But you don’t have to try to compete with that right out of the gate. Focus on building a link strategy that will gain you quality links over time. As you create more content and share it online, your site will organically develop new links to support your link building efforts.

Under no circumstances should you buy a bunch of backlinks. That’s a blackhat strategy that can get your website penalized by Google. 

Backlink Strategy Recommendation

When it comes to backlinks, more is always better…except when it isn’t. Here are the takeaways for the backlink quality versus quantity argument:

1. Stay far, far away from spammy or blackhat-type links.
2. Focus the majority of your efforts on adding backlinks from sites in that 40 to 60 DA range.
3. You’ll never be done adding backlinks to your site. It’s an ongoing process that should be integrated into your long term marketing strategy.

Content

The internet is basically a ravenous beast that is constantly looking to consume more content. But it doesn’t want just any content. It wants the good stuff. So, should you feed the content beast with more words? Or higher-quality words?

Content Quality

We’ve all visited websites with terrible copy or read poorly written articles online. Sometimes the flaws are obvious and at other times, it’s difficult to tell exactly what makes content uninspiring. The key components of good content are: originality, provides value, backed by sources/proof, interesting, follows grammar and style rules, uses appropriate tone, and readability. 

Content that is high-quality is likely to rank higher in search engines, as well as encourage organic sharing and receive backlinks from relevant and high-authority websites. But high-quality content can take a long time to develop, which can pull resources away from other important tasks.

Content Quantity

Everyone who is marketing a business wants to appear knowledgeable and experienced, and having a blog with only one or two posts doesn’t inspire much confidence, even if those two posts are good. Plus, content is a central component to search engine rankings, so having more content will support your SEO efforts considerably.

Content Strategy Recommendation

You’re not going to get Neil Gaiman-quality writing on a middle school English class budget. But creating high-quality content can take a huge investment of time and other resources. The best strategy here is go with a few extremely high quality posts as foundational pieces, and direct the rest of your resources to churning out useful, interesting content at the best level you can.

Essentially, you’ll want to determine how much content you want to put out and then create as much good content as you can afford on that budget.

Keywords

Keywords are a key component of online marketing. 

Keyword Quality

The quality of the keywords you choose is going to be a major factor in your SEO success. Choosing highly competitive keywords will make it much more difficult to achieve rankings. Choosing keywords with low search volume may get you to the first page of results, but if no one is searching for those terms, then you’ve invested a lot of time and money for no return.

The majority of your success will rely on choosing correct keywords, so a focus on quality is essential.

Keyword Quantity

Choosing keywords isn’t always about more. Rather, it’s about choosing the right amount for your particular SEO strategy. If you’re a small business with limited resources, trying to rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords is a waste. So, the quantity of keywords you choose should be reasonable for your business’ SEO strategy. As you achieve rank or decide to discard specific terms, you can always add to your keyword list in the future.

Keyword Strategy Recommendation

Though both quality and quantity of keywords are important for a good keyword strategy, the quality of your keyword choices will have a much bigger impact on your optimization efforts, so choose wisely.

So, when it comes to quantity and quality in SEO, which one wins? The answer: both. Quality and quantity are both essential elements of a winning SEO strategy. So, blend quality and quantity as much as you can for your SEO efforts, and your website will reap the rewards.

Interested in learning more about how quality search engine optimization can impact your business? Download Regex SEO’s “How To Create Content That Ranks In 2020” guide.

Guest article written by: Regex SEO is a Houston-based digital marketing agency offering a comprehensive array of digital marketing services. Created to help our clients achieve online success, and built on a transparent, data-driven process, we utilize cutting edge technology and industry best practices to improve our clients’ online visibility. Our fully custom digital marketing strategies are based on the needs of each business, and we pride ourselves on supporting the success of businesses throughout Houston and beyond.