When I start talking to clients about content marketing, listing off the various approaches to reach their full audience, I’m often posed with a question. It’s typically something along the lines of:
“That all sounds great – so which one of those should I do?” or “which is better for rankings? Blogging or articles?”
The concept and question itself is where the problem starts. Clients often ask me this type of question and it’s like asking a personal trainer “which is better for my overall health – working my biceps or my abs?”
You really shouldn’t look at content marketing as a “this or that” option. Instead, focus on building a content strategy that encompasses all channels.
This is extremely important because one type of content or another is only going to reach a select portion of your audience. The best way to complete health is a full body workout; the best way to maximize the reach with your audience and get the most response/visibility from an SEO perspective is to build a strategy that works in all aspects of content marketing.
To answer the question: “What is more important to rankings, a good article or a blog post” – both.
During a similar discussion on LinkedIn, an individual asked about whether it was better to link articles to the home page or to just do blog posts with internal linking. In response, I saw someone mention that linking to your home page isn’t the best idea. This is false. An ideal content strategy has you building out content for various phases of your buy cycle:
1) on site and off site content for the entry phase of the buy cycle, people just kicking tires (send it to your home page)
2) visitors already somewhat educated looking for more specific information on a product or service (send it to an optimized resource page to further educate that’s deeper in the sales funnel)
3) long tail traffic that is ready to convert almost immediately (send it to a specialized landing page)
Whether that is on a blog or an article is irrelevant. Well-written, properly optimized content designed to provide value is going to gain a lot of steam in the search results – especially if you develop keyword silos specific to the various stages of the buy cycle and build your content around that.
If that content gets picked up and starts hoarding social proof, the algorithm will spot those social signals and provide a lot more value. It’s quite easy to get a quality blog post written on a brand new blog to trump even the most authoritative article sites when you bring all of this together.
Don’t waste time trying to decide which type of content is best – Focus on quality content through multiple channels and you’ll get the results you want.