You’ll find lots of blogging advice scattered all over the internet. Maybe some worked for you whereas some didn’t. Did you ever think why didn’t the others work for you?
The web world is such a place that everyone can come up and throw their opinions. However, you’ve to be careful about who you follow or look up to for blogging advice.
There’ll be many debates in this particular post, and it’s my intentional plan. This post is controversial and I know many of you may not agree with me but I respect that because all of you have your individual opinions.
In fact, the idea I’m going to share right now might sound strange but wait…. This will actually help you blog better.
You may have got many blogging advice and blogging tips till now and may have followed them step-by-step without much success. I’m not saying that none of you have got success but most beginner bloggers are confused about the exact advice to follow in order to rank your blogs and beat the competition given by top blogs.
So, without wasting much time, let me tell you the worst blogging advice that you may heard many times till now with the guarantee that it will help you rank in the search engines.
The Worst Blogging Advice is – Write Quality Content
Yes, you heard that right!
And, I can say it as many times you want to hear – blogging is all about quality content – this is the worst blogging advice.
Now, you may say what made you say this, Mainak? Well, when I started blogging, I too believed in the same thing that blogging is all about quality content. I thought that if I write quality content, Google would rank me in no time and I’d have lots of traffic to my blog (sadly with no conversions :)).
So, that’s when I started analyzing my Google Analytics very minutely and what my visitors were actually wanting from me. This analysis made me understand the true definition of quality content and exactly the kind of content I should have.
I understood quality doesn’t matter to get traffic and engage with your visitors.
What is “Quality?”
According to Oxford Dictionary, the term “Quality” means, “The standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind”.
So, it’s kind of a judgment to compare your piece of content to others.
In my opinion, quality is a relative term. What may seem of quality to you may not seem to be a quality post to others.
So, the term “Quality” is non-existent.
Wait before you hit the Back button in your browser.
On the contrary, I’ll ask you to read through the rest of the post because I’ll show you how you must be blogging ultimately to get the most out of it and how you’ll turn the worst advice into the best advice you’ve gotten ever.
Forget everything that Google say and other top bloggers say.
They don’t care about quality content, even if we assume the term quality does exist. If you search for some high competition keywords in Google, you’ll find that tons of articles have already been written about the topic.
For example, if you search on “blogging tools”, you’ll see that there are plenty of articles already written. Most blogs are sharing quite the same tools – EverNote, Windows Live Writer, Diigo and so on but each article written from the unique angle. So, do you call this “quality” where each of them is providing the same information?
Some of you may say yes whereas some may wonder about it.
If you take the time to read each of the blogs, you’ll find almost similar tools they are pointing out to.
So, do you think Google ranks a page based on quality content?
If you’re searching for topics you’re wanting to write about that no one has written, you’ll never find any. Either one or the other has covered almost all topics.
Email marketing, make money, traffic generation, link building – just name it and you’ll find almost every topic covered.
So, does that mean you have nothing to write about. You’ve to close your blog down and try getting a job.
NO. I’ll now tell you what content you can write that will bring you traffic and help you rank in Google more easily.
The Best Blogging Advice is – Write Relevant and Helpful Content
According to Google Hummingbird update, Google will not show up results based on the exact words typed but will try focus on the meaning of the words and show up relevant results helpful and needs for the searchers.
Before I proceed further to explain why you should write relevant and helpful content, let me explain these two terms as explained in the dictionary.
The term “relevant” means “closely connected or appropriate to the matter in hand”.
The term “helpful” means “giving or ready to give help”.
Every time you write an article, you think twice before publishing whether it’s of quality or not. Is that so?
From now onward, don’t think about the quality. Think if it will be helpful for your targeted audience or not, if it is relevant to your targeted audience or not.
So, if your blog is about traffic generation, your target visitors must be those who are looking for practical tips to increase traffic. So, write content that shows your visitors the right way to improve traffic through different ways. Give them practical tips and strategies, make them do homework, and ask them if you were really helpful to them.
Google does not look for quality content but it looks for relevant and helpful content that answers all the questions searchers type in their query box. So, if Google finds all these elements in your article that answers the query typed by the searcher, it will show up your article in the SERPs.
The best way to understand that you’ve written a helpful content for your readers is that they will automatically tweet it or share it or favorite it without having to convince them.
The Relation between Google and Helpful Content
Google is not a human that understands quality. If I were to assume that quality exists, say, you’ve a blog on traffic generation niche and you write an article of 2000+ words on WordPress. Assume that the article is without any grammatical errors. Will the readers of your site be as interested with this article on WordPress as they would have been by reading an article from you on traffic generation?
If the visitor doesn’t have interest, they won’t engage on your blog and ultimately it’s your loss.
Why?
Google can track the amount of time spent by a visitor on your site. It can track your bounce rate. Since Google uses these metrics like these, you can rank even a 3-month old blog that has great traffic and engagement above a blog that has no engagement.
On the other hand, there’ll be traffic and engagement on your blog if the incoming traffic (i.e., your visitors) find your content helpful, exactly answering their questions and solving their problems.
So, engagement is of primary importance when it comes to ranking in Google, not quality content, because I already proved above that “Quality Content is non-existent”. And you can only get engagement with relevant and helpful content.
So, now you should stop worrying about publishing quality content but publish only the content that’s relevant and helpful to your audience.
These two metrics are only judgmental of the term Quality.
The next time you read an article, think – Is the article relevant to you? Is the article helpful to solve your query? If yes, then heads up – I’m sure you’ll visit the blog again in the future to get an answer to another problem, if it arises in that niche.
For example, here at PastMasterBlogger, I discuss about starting a blog, growing a blog, ranking a blog, bringing traffic to a blog, and finally making money through the blog. That is I focus to solve the problems faced by beginners and intermediate bloggers. If someone’s starting a blog, he or she can find resources here to start a blog. If someone already has a blog but hasn’t reached the heights of success, he or she can find helpful articles here. But advanced bloggers cannot find much helpful stuff here.
So, if I’d to write about advanced internet marketing here, most beginner bloggers and intermediate bloggers won’t find it much helpful because the things will go beyond their heads and they’ll finally leave.
You’ve to go step-by-step. First read A, then B and then C and so on….. If you try to read Z at the beginning, there’s great possibility of failure.
The ranking of a particular article depends on many other factors too. Natural inbound linking and on-page SEO also matters a lot. It’s very important for beginners bloggers to do on-page SEO right from the starting of their blog.
So now, do you know why I say quality content is the worst blogging advice?
Leave comments and let me know if you think quality content has helped you rank and increase engagement on your site or relevant and helpful content has increased traffic and engagement of your site? And yes, I am also eager to hear if you have received any worst blogging advice yet.
Mainak
Vow, you did prove your viewpoint very well with the help of acclaimed definition of quality. But the problem is with its interpretation. If something is relevant and helpful can’t we say it of quality. So one has the right to differ by you very well explained what you want to say and that is why a big BRAVO to you.
Thanks a lot for sharing this wonderful post with very awesome arguments.
Yes Mi Muba, exactly if something is relevant and helpful, we can call it quality. That’s why you can see there’s a sentence in the post that says “These two metrics are only judgmental of the term Quality.” – the two are “helpful” and “relevant”. Other than that, there’s grammar and spellings but minor errors are sometimes ok, after all, we are humans and we are bound to make errors.
Wishing you a wonderful week ahead. 🙂
Mainak.
Hi Mainak,
I will not argue with you on this post because you have a solid and well-defended point.
Yes, quality content is relative because one can still write an off-topic content with little or no style and grammatical error. This “quality” content may still not serve the interest of the reader.
Instead of using “quality content” it would be better we use “relevant and helpful content”. The latter readily meets the needs of readers, and this should be essence of every blog!
In kingged.com, this comment was left where I upvoted this post.
Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to convey in this post Sunday. And oh, welcome to the blog and I’m so happy to see you here 🙂
You know, sometimes I have seen articles where there were grammatical errors but the information contained in the article turned out to be really helpful to me. The grammatical error was not to the extent that made the sentence not understandable but little mistakes in voice and tense. I don’t think in blogging, grammar matters too highly, but making it understandable for the readers is what plays a major role.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. 🙂
Hi Mainak!
Your point of view about the real meaning of QUALITY is mind provoking. Not all of us know how important quality is, and sometimes it is underestimated.
The post here is incomparable and you provide us strong information and data presentation. Relevant and helpful has something to do with quality, since quality is about relevancy and how it is helpful to a person.
I must say you have a smart, well-researched and insightful write-up. I will concur with you!
Blogging needs quality and that is about relevancy and helpfulness.
Awesome to sum it up!
Hi Metz,
Thank you for the inspiration and wonderful comment. 🙂
And the last line of your comment says it all “Blogging needs quality and that is about relevancy and helpfulness.”. That’s want I wanted to sum it up in this post. Being helpful takes you far as a blogger and the you gain more trust. And, I think trust is one word which cannot be bought with money, it has earned through work. And this is what I faced in my real life – it’s a true story. Everywhere I read quality, quality and quality, and that’s was the worst advice I got in my career. Very few talked about helpful content.
Hi Mainak,
I loved your approach. You are absolutely right. Google loves engaged content because bots and robots don’t understand the meaning of “quality”. Also some of the crucial off-page SEO factors the Google ranking,
But I would also like to point out that if your article is helpful and informative, several readers will share the URL itself on forums, blogs and several other places. This can increase the number of quality backlinks and thus improve your Google presence.
Also, I would like to know from you that this post of yours has got around 2000+ LinkedIn shares. How did you achieve that? Can you please share?
Hi Kaustav,
Because of the off-page factors that Google considers for ranking a page, helpful content stands out more than quality. And so truly said, that only when they find it helpful, they do consider sharing.
And thanks for the request. I will definitely share it in one of my upcoming posts. 🙂