How much content do you need to succeed at SEO?

How much content do you need to succeed at SEO (bearing in mind the premise: the more content you have, the more keywords your site has a chance of ranking for)?

The short answer is: “All of it!”. You cannot write enough content to satiate the web.

Global population (and therefore possible audiences) continue to expand, and will continue until at least the end of this century according to the UN (8 billion in 2022, and up to 13 billion by 2100).

But how much content do you add to your own (or your prospects’) sites to increase internet presence? One article a month? One a week? One a day?

The point is, we need to continuously get attention if we want to stay in business (as do our clients), so we need a benchmark (along with something that makes sense and is doable).

Whatever our answer may be, if we’re a solo copy or content writer, I doubt it will be anywhere close to Barry Schwartz’ daily output (founder of Search Engine Roundtable and contributing editor to Search Engine Land).

Here’s what he recently said in his newsletter:

“I often like to write up to 10 pieces of content daily… so why do I limit myself to writing [just] 10 articles a day? …so I don’t write too much!”

Barry has to force himself to stop after 10 articles in one day. When was the last time you wrote 10 content pieces in a single day?

And if you did, did you come away thinking, “hmm, I need to stop for today in case I start writing too much”.

My pieces are typically around 400 to 500 words, so 10 would be up to 5,000 words daily. I just checked one of Barry’s pieces, and it was just under 400 words. So his output per article is not too dissimilar from mine.

You may also be wondering how such short pieces could possibly work? That’s down to writing for your audience. But, and here’s the added benefit, it may also get picked up on Google News.

If there’s one thing about convincing Google your pieces are newsworthy, it’s to persistently put out multiple pieces every day – just like a newspaper (this stuff is so obvious when you think about it).

Another way is to follow Neil Patel’s advice and write one massive well researched article a month. Construct it in such a way as to beat the competition in terms of authority and what Google calls E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), and you win.

But if you want to take over the world completely, do both. Short form content for news, long form for traffic growth.

Either way, most of us need to up our game if we want to get the attention we so desperately need.