Which one is best for seo and traffic purposes

[Wayne]

I know long form content is best to an extent. The question is how long is too long.

head term = 450,000 global searches

this particular head term has at least 49 subtopics.

#Strategy 1
If I wrote an Ultimate Guide, each subtopic can easily have more than 2000 words. So as you can see if I were to write this guide the word count could easily be 100,000 words.That's just for one post.

My thinking is I probably won't rank for the head term very soon, but would rank for a shit load of long tail keywords.

I think I can still treat each subtopic as individual posts in a sense. When doing backlinking, I could easily mix up the anchor text. eg. if the head term is SEO, I could use appropriate anchor texts to help rank the term.
or...
or I can build anchor text rich backlinks to rank a subtopic eg. link building. example.com/seo#linkbuilding

Wouldn't it be easier to rank for subtopics by following this kind of anchor text strategy?

I personally would think so, as the more links you build to the page the more the UR increases.

I have seen before competitors ranking for a subtopic above those who dedicated a page to the subtopic itself.

I would think the reason why it ranks is because it's topically relevant in Google's eyes.

#Strategy 2
Create a dedicated page for the head term.
Create a page for each subtopic

create chapters on your head term page to link out to all subtopic pages. because of their interlinking, they all would be topically relevant.

This would probably give a better user experience. Also, individual pages could maybe rank for individually? I think it would be a little harder to build up Url Rating in this way.

Conclusion
What do think? what strategy will benefit more in the long run?

Does strategy 1 even make sense? If I build up massive authority to a strategy 1 page I would probably rank for long tails that I didn't even know existed.

How would you approach it?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Wouldn't it be easier to rank for subtopics by following this kind of anchor text strategy?

I don't think so. Some hot shot with a more powerful domain can come through with laser targeted content and take those long-tails from you. Especially if he decides to do some link building to those pages too.

I know what you mean though, about the power combining from all of the links on the monster page. But monster pages don't necessarily offer more to the user in Google's eyes either. Think about the pogo-sticking (where a user hits the back button to go back to the Google search) that might occur when someone realizes they have to hunt through 100k words. Google measures this and will de-rank based on it.

You could use a table of contents and header jump links. Google will often include those in the SERPs where it says "jump straight to _____ part of the page." That might help, but I think the power of the laser focused on-page is going to be stronger than that plus the links.

create chapters on your head term page to link out to all subtopic pages. because of their interlinking, they all would be topically relevant.

This is what I would do. I'd explain each sub-section in summary and link to the full exploration on the sub-topic. Then on those I'd link back to the big post. This way, you're not only hyper-focused with your on-page but you'll be sharing juice among all of the pages. That whole "silo" will rise together. And once you dominate like that, no "hot shot" is going to take it from you.

 

[Wayne]

@Ryuzaki thanks for the feedback. I wanted to write the article but had some conflict in how to approach. I was thinking of making a table of contents widget to scroll down the sidebar for better navigation and UX.

But...

I see your point of view.

Your second statement makes a lot of sense about being hyper-focused. I don't know why, but I didn't think of silo'ing, linking back to the big post. Keeping it in a closed loop. Awesome.

 

[Tucky]

I think one thing you MUST do when writing a very long article is to make it visually appealing, so plenty of images and graphics, bullet points, headers and a solid colour scheme. Otherwise, people will get bored of tons of words and just give up.

 

[Wayne]

I think one thing you MUST do when writing a very long article is to make it visually appealing, so plenty of images and graphics, bullet points, headers and a solid colour scheme. Otherwise, people will get bored of tons of words and just give up.

@Tucky That's the whole idea. My posts are usually visually appealing.

But....

Having visual appeal on a 100k word article will not be enough. I agree with @Ryuzaki to instead create hyper-focused posts. Coupled with your suggestion, the foundation will be pretty solid.

As @Ryuzaki said "And once you dominate like that, no "hot shot" is going to take it from you." #evillaugh

 

[CCarter]

100,000 words

(Watch The Video - It Is Perfect: http://imgur.com/MLG9k9l)​

What's the point? 100,000 words of content is approximately 250 pages of a book.

Think about that for a moment, 250 pages.

To put that into perspective the King James Bible is about 783,000 words.

"A Game of Thrones" the first book in the series is 295,000 words.

Lord of the Rings: "The Fellowship of the Ring" (first book) is 186,000 words.

Stephen King's "The Gunslinger" is 55,000 words.

The book of Genesis (Bible) is 32,000 words.

Are you telling me that you, YOU and/or your writers/editors, plan on writing more than triple the words of the Book of Genesis - on your topic? Are you being realistic?

If you guys are just "writing for the numbers" you guys are missing everything... It's like being in a kitchen and trying to cook dinner with science beakers and thermostats and microscopes. There is an art to engaging users and you aren't going to get to your goal of generating traffic with this line of thinking.

If you @Wayne don't listen, I would rather not have some newbies waste their time trying to write novels of content that just become a wall of text and generates no results cause they are microscoping their dinner.

You are missing the audience, if you are going after the populous they aren't going to read 100,000 words on a topic unless they TRULY love the subject - even then... Most people don't get past Day 5 of the Digital Crash Course cause it's a ton of content (ironically they get to about Day 5, when all the gems are deep within the later part of the course, and those first 1-5 days were thrown together just for complete newbies).

And what's crazy is most of you guys aren't writers. So I'm not sure how you guys are going to write a novel worth of content on your topics - at the very least editing and reading the content so you know what's on your own website.

Having "more numbers" is not the answer to getting Google traffic.

On top of that you are wasting a ton of time trying to do all the link building yourself.

Lets do the math, if you were to create 1 link every 5 minutes in a 24 hour period you would have created 288 in a day. I doubt most people are going to do 24 hours stretches of link building, but it's stupid either way.

If you were to simply create a content piece that answers your audience's questions and peaks their curiosity within 1,000 words - add images (infographics perhaps), gifs, and advanced content pieces (interactive javascript content - think mortgage calculators for websites back in 2007), you would create something worth "talking about". A hot new topic or way of looking at data for example will get "talked about" and the magic "sharing" happens, and you'll go semi-viral in your niche and have 10 to 1000 people spreading your links around the internet for you. That would result in exponential growth for your "link building" campaign.

This strategy of "writing 100K words" and then "manually link building" is going to burn you out, and the results are going to flat-line and you'll be miserable with your strategy - it's why most SEOs fail. This is a death spiral if you aren't doing things to generate traffic to your content TODAY - waiting up to a year for "SEO" to kick in is what clobbers most newbies when starting out. It's also extremely lazy.

Honestly think about it, you could write 300 words of content, put up some gifs, and then talk about that content piece on a sub-reddit with 1000 to 100,000 subscribers and generate 50 - 100,000 visitors in a single day... (even at 100 visitors a day at 10% newsletter signup = 3,650 audience base for your niche in a year - not bad when you can send a newsletter and get 500 to 3600 people to come to your site and read your latest piece of content. Permission Based Marketing). Hint: Reddit isn't the only website that has your potential audience members where you can generate traffic TODAY!

Instead you are going after 100K words of content to waste time trying to "trick" Google into getting you more visitors. And it is a "trick" at this point cause it's clearly not a tactic with the end user in mind. Do you think in the end people are going to read your wall of text? If not, what's the point? What's really the point?

If you are selling a product, I doubt more than a handful of people are going to read 100K words.

If you are just an affiliate they'll probably scroll then hopefully click through or click on an AD just to leave the wall of text - I guess that could be what you are after, but again someone with some interactive JavaScript content or better content bait can come along, go viral with 300-600 words and clobber you since you are so "hyper-Focused" on the Google algorithm instead of thinking about it at a higher level.

At a higher level - everything is a traffic source - EVERYTHING.

 

[Wayne]

@CCarter what a shit storm you're bestowing on me. I like.

Yes, I agree that was a shit theory.

What struck me though was what you said: "This is a death spiral if you aren't doing things to generate traffic to your content TODAY".

Focusing on SEO is a curse that many newbies struggle with including me. I do see your point though.

Sitting on my arse waiting for traffic to kick in is kinda missing the point. Thanks for the straight talk @CCarter.

Maybe I should experiment with traffic leaks and make it a case study. After all getting feedback like this can only help.

Thanks. Much appreciated.

 

[turbin3]

In addition to what was mentioned above, another strategy that often seems to work very well for this sort of purpose is developing a more progressive UX and flow of content. Think about it from the perspective of a user. There is literally almost no one that will sit there and consume that volume of content at once, or ever. Maybe the volume of content applied on the site would be a benefit...for the site. Maybe it can be broken down into enough of a variety of topics of opportunity, that it may still make sense to create over time.

However, it would probably be better broken into significantly smaller and more realistic "chunks". Through it, build silos. Through the pillar piece, maybe reference some of those lower levels in the silo, and correspondingly the lower levels reference the pillar piece, or whatever you feel is best. That's nothing new, though.

The point I really wanted to make was an actual example to put things in perspective. The keyword is high competition, though search volume is low and under 5K. Conversions in this niche are guaranteed to net a 5 to 6 figure revenue annually, so high value with corresponding competition. Here's the breakdown of words of content for page 1:

1. 4,000
2. 20,000
3. 150
4. 1,000
5. 4,000
6. 1,500
7. 7,000
8. 4,500
9. 3,800
10. 700

Excluding #2, that's a ~3K average of content across the first page. So #2 did 13,000% more work...let that sink in. All it got them was 1 leg up on #3, and probably not even entirely due to that effort. They could have stuck with the page 1 average or slightly above/below and probably been solid, while significantly minimizing the use of content creation resources.

Also, totally unrelated, but interesting and also demonstrates the principle, here's how page speed stacked up:

1. 500ms
2. 25 SECONDS
3. 200ms
4. 300ms
5. 900ms
6. 700ms
7. 600ms
8. 800ms
9. 1,900ms
10. 2,200ms

The simple principle I wanted to demonstrate is, in both cases, extreme ends of the spectrum did not result in extremely different outcomes. Simply brute-forcing volumes of content appears to have been an exercise in futility. In speed, well how maddening would it be to see a competitor literally 12,000% SLOWER than your page....that is beating you?! This hints at the reality that there are often far more variables at play than simply brute-forcing the extreme end of the spectrum on one or a few particular variables.

Considering all of that, as @CCarter mentioned, I'd definitely recommend more strategically thinking about, testing, and utilizing much higher-ROI tactics that will allow you to achieve more with less. Maybe it's a traffic leak in some cases. In others, maybe it's building out a quality silo or improving the UX with existing content. Test. Measure. Analyze. Adjust accordingly.