Content marketers “know” that you need to publish “epic content” day and night, seven days a week, until your fingers are raw. The belief is so pervasive that it’s almost taken as a given. And there’s some truth to it. I recently commented on a study by Adestra at Northcutt.com. It demonstrated that the word “Daily” offers more clicks and fewer unsubscriptions than any other email subject keyword they looked at. But things aren’t always so cut and dry.
Here. Take a look at this graph:

Quick Overview

Now, these numbers shouldn’t be impressive (I hope). They come from my personal science blog, after all. What I want you to pay attention to is what I was doing, and what the results were. Here. Let’s zoom in on a specific date range so I can make my point.

Zoom in specific date range

I choose this specific date range because it was a period of time when I introduced a weekly update called “Friday Roundup.” I felt like I had been slacking off on my personal blog, and I wanted to introduce a weekly feature to keep myself committed. As you can see, it didn’t work so well. For three straight months, my organic traffic dropped.

It took over half a year for it to return to normal, presumably because the sheer volume of the content was starting to pick up the slack with pure long tail.

So, what did I do in March to make this happen?

From March 2003 onwards

Just a few things:

• I stopped doing my “Friday Roundups”
• I published a 4-part series to top anything in the search engines about “The Theory of Relativity for Kids”
• In May, I published the best possible post I could about a very niche mathematical subject

That’s it.

And, low and behold, my traffic kept growing. Surely I must have been link building like mad since May, right?

I used Ahrefs Site Explorer to check backlinks

Huh, that’s interesting.

So, I published less content, I did zero link building, I did less work, and my organic traffic quintupled. What happened here? I believe it comes down to two factors:

1. The Front Page Effect

Whenever people take the concept of “domain authority” seriously I have to fight to avoid rolling my eyes. Don’t get me wrong, things like Ahrefs’ Domain Rank can be a nice, quick and easy way to estimate the value of a link from a site, but I have my doubts that Google actually leverages any internal measure of “domain authority” when it ranks pages.

Instead, what you have are links. You have links from external pages, and you have links from internal pages. I don’t believe links from internal pages are actually treated any differently than links from external pages. I’ve certainly never seen any convincing evidence.

Ever wonder how Google can “magically” tell the difference between a high quality front page and a pure crap subdomain? It’s probably not some advanced machine learning algorithm. It’s because there’s no link from the “legitimate” domain wordpress.com to the low-quality subdomain bob-in-his-broken-down-garage.wordpress.com.

They might as well be different sites. And as far as Google’s algorithm is concerned, I’m convinced they pretty much are.

When I started publishing weekly updates, there was no Google filter that said “Wait, Carter is publishing more content, and it’s not quite as good as what he used to publish.” What happened was much simpler. My weekly updates pushed my keyword-targeted, in-depth articles off the front page. Instead of a high quality link from the front page of my site, these pages now had links from the archive and tag pages.

In March, I simply went back to filling the front page with keyword-targeted content. This was more successful than it had been in the past, because I’d accumulated more, higher-quality links. Careful keyword research had told me exactly what to write about, and I made sure to beat every other search result as far as the quality and depth of my content.

The lesson here is clear. If you want a piece of content to rank for a relatively competitive term, you should probably have a link directly from your home page. It’s best if that link is contextual.

2. User Behavior Metrics

While sometimes I feel like SEOs give Google too much credit, we can’t ignore the sheer quantity of data Google has to work with:

• They use Google Toolbar data
• From ex-Google employees: “Google definitely uses Chrome user data and can track every click within it.”
• They statistically analyze SERP click data
• Bounce rates (“pogo-sticking” really) affect search results

I suspect that Google automatically “split tests” its SERPs to achieve the optimal user behavior data. The gradual growth in traffic I’ve seen over the past four months doesn’t make sense otherwise. I’ve seen pages rank for terms they weren’t ranking for before, and this growth occurred through the summer months for very educational topics. If Google were using static signals like links and keywords, there’s no reason to expect rankings to improve over time in the absence of any SEO changes.

Just take the time to optimize your pages for users. You can expect your content to gradually pick up organic traffic, even with zero additional links. (Notice I didn’t say zero link building.)

Why am I so confident user metrics had anything to do with it? Well:

This is the only piece of content I’ve produced with a significant number of visits and an average time on site over two minutes. Before I published it? No growth without new content. After I published it? Site-wide growth. (My site-wide average time on site is about one minute.)

I’m not exactly saying anything new by claiming you should focus more on quality than quantity. But it’s nice to be able to point to 5 blog posts that quintupled my traffic, while 9 months of weekly posts did nothing but sink it.

There’s a caveat here, though. For user behavior metrics to give you any kind of boost, you need users. Creating “epic content” isn’t going to do a thing for you unless you have traffic. That means you’ll need to target high traffic, low competition keywords, and have enough high impact links to rank for them. Google’s algorithm doesn’t have an epic content fairy.

Stop Chasing the News and Start Producing Resources

Unless you have the time and money to become a full-on media company, I don’t believe you should waste time trying to keep up with the news. While it’s certainly important to stay relevant, and to reference current events, it’s a waste of time to throw away a blog post dedicated entirely to something that recently happened in the news.

Take a look at the most popular sites on the web. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia…these aren’t “news” sites, they’re resources. I’ve mentioned before that tools and communities are the key to the web.

You don’t necessarily need to create the next Facebook or Wikipedia to dominate your niche, but if you give people something they can use, something that they will refer to over and over again, you’re almost always going to do better than the guy who’s trying to stay cool by regurgitating the latest industry gossip.