For the past few months I've been consistently using a couple of cultural references to describe the that that we are in, digital content-wise:
- We are in Deadwood. Made famous by the 20-year-old HBO prestige drama — if you haven't seen it, ask your elder millennial and gen X writer friends — Deadwood was a gold rush town in contemporary South Dakota where entrepreneurial types could get rich quick and avoid the law, mostly. But once the population got too big and the government sets it eye on law enforcement and tax collection, the once-wild west reluctantly became more civilized.
- Digital content industries run parallel to the Hollywood studio system, almost exactly 100 years later. We've just figured out how to capture theater on camera. Now we're on the way to a more robust and (hopefully) creative-centric sophistication in production. I don't necessarily think Mr. Beast is our Charlie Chaplin, but I'll happily oblige whichever creators are successfully breaking and rebuilding media industries.
The norms are changing. What used to be acceptable in the wild world of digital content will take a back seat to regulation and, simultaneously, sophistication. Prove me wrong!
As in many Augusts on this side of client service, I am wildly busy and behind on everything. I owe you something, and it's on my list. Video content for The Content Technologist courses is on hold as I embark on some really exciting client projects. These courses are written! And I intend to complete them! But I have to put them aside until I get a handle on my schedule.
Thus, this week's issue is a significant revision of a Content Technologist classic: Why do I hate 'blog'? Let me count the ways.
–DC
Does "blog" do your website content justice?
A version of this post originally appeared in the May 14, 2020 issue with the email subject line "Why the ongoing obsession with blogs." It has been revised in 2024 with a brand new introduction and several new and edited examples.
Brands of all shapes and sizes invest a ridiculous amount of money in content—much of it for “content marketing,” but also for all the other types of content: UX content, customer service content, entertainment content, creator content, whatever you want to call it. Organizations pour money into content creation, often paying writers and creators significantly more than they would make at publishing or media companies. Including generative AI tools in the category makes the market valuation of the industry balloon even more.*
As a career editor, I’m happy to receive a tiny fraction of this gargantuan amount of money so I can keep cobbling away in front of a screen and feeding my cats. I believe in good content, attempting to lead by example. When I collaborate with clients, I research before deciding on structures and formats.
But what drives me absolutely bonkers, especially as the industry grows, is the complete lack of attention to or creativity in how websites organize, architect, and create content for our audiences. How do we expect audiences to find and read our content if we can't be bothered to research and build better structures?
Whereas in legacy publishing, constant attention is paid to how content is labeled, structured, and found, digital content marketers seemingly expect the feeds and algorithms to do it for them, rarely claiming ownership of their brand’s home base: their website.
*Easily Google-able research firms valued the 2022 content marketing industry between $2.3 billion and $413 billion, but I can’t repeat those numbers with a straight face. Creators certainly aren't getting that money.
The bad, the worse, and the bloggy: Where cookie-cutter website navigation goes awry
Because for most B2B websites, even companies supposedly “winning” the content marketing game, the top navigation looks something like this:
Home | Products | Solutions | Case Studies | Resources | Blog
Sometimes, this format has evolved into something like:
Home | Products | Solutions | Case Studies | Customers | Resources
Clicking through to the Resources section reveals a similarly basic list, based on content type (typical):
Blog | Brandname Podcast | Brandname Videos | Brandname glossary
A couple of examples from the wild to prove my point:
Cookie-cutter examples are ridiculously easy to find.
Although many SaaS brands say they are in the business of supporting content marketers and creators, dumping oodles of resources into developing individual assets that they will reuse in social media feeds and post for users to find via Google, they clearly have never creatively considered the Gestalt of their website. They’ve never considered that none of those labels mean anything, especially not the one that says “Blog.”
Why does this navigation get mimeographed? Perhaps it’s because designers believe they are following Jakob’s Law, which like many of the famous eponymous laws of business design, is not a law and doesn’t actually apply here.**
Perhaps it’s because marketers and web developers erroneously assume that websites are an advanced and established medium, and there’s no need for clear labeling and information architecture. They think the work has already been done for them, then blame the algorithms for shoddy performance.
Most likely it’s because bad SEO advice has lured them in with dopey templates and consensus thinking, infused with a fundamental lack of creativity that can’t be shattered no matter how many times they read that Rick Rubin book.
Because no matter how strong the brand colors are used or how handsomely writers are paid (ha!), as long as your content is stuffed in a single typical feed — “typical,” as in organized by content type — an audience is never going to return to build a relationship with our brand.
As an annoying and wise chef once said as I attributed a dish’s quality to a dull knife: a poor carpenter blames his tools. If you don’t reposition the camera, you won’t change how your audience perceives the story. If you don’t have a clearly labeled table of contents, no one will know what is in your book. There are other paths forward beyond the very few that have been explored in digital design.
And maybe I'm alone in this, but if your website navigation sucks, I’m gonna assume your product design sucks too.
If you put all your content into a single feed called “blog,” I’m going to assume your brand is only interested in the bare minimum of “demand gen” and “lead gen” and doesn’t actually care about building a relationship with an audience. And if you don't care about the audience, you certainly don't have a strong grasp of the business of content.
**See similar abuses of Moore’s law and Occam’s Razor, among the many wielded when an argument's viability is running on fumes.
Why do we blog?
The newsfeed was created as an easy way for frequent website visitors to see the most recent content you published. It was created for a web where users bookmarked and visited the same websites over and over because search engines were really not that good until 2005 or so.
Media organizations saw minimal potential in the early web, thinking that people would never abandon their precious newspapers and magazines. They published news, but didn’t dive head-first into blogs right away. When they produced blogs, no one got paid for anything, for better or worse.
Blogs were for the columnists of the web, scrappy zinesters who didn’t aspire to jobs at lifestyle publications, programmers who wanted to show off what they could do, citizen journalists hellbent on taking down Dan Rather, bedroom teens creating a space for themselves to overshare their diaries and share favorite songs (hi that was me).
Blogs were created in the era of RSS feeds and that holy grail of web content consumption, Google Reader. And as much as I wish we still had Google Reader and found an adequate replacement, that feed-based universe has been largely abandoned by all but enthusiasts.
What a blog assumes
From this environment of rogue columnists and experimenters, the traditional newsfeed or blog feed design, where a single page displays all most recent content, assumes:
- You have a regular audience of readers who will regularly seek out content and updates from your business
- Your audience wants to read niche news from your industry outside of traditional media channels
- Your audience will regularly share content from your blog on their own channels
- Your audience reads content on the web outside of news websites and social media
It’s a system that was popularized by the developer-lite instances of Wordpress, Squarespace, and Wix. These content management systems were designed to be low-code for non-developers to spin up sites on a web that didn’t need much customization beyond colors and basic themes. They enable creators to make “pages” and a single feed of “posts.” “Pages” are static and not updated regularly, while “posts” are dynamically generated and easy to update.
Wordpress, for all its ubiquity, has not evolved much in the past ten years for these types of websites. Sure, you can add plugins (most of which just weigh your site down), but cookie-cutter Wordpress sites remain more or less the same: “Posts” can be handled by multiple authors, while “pages” are handled mostly by the website developer. Since it costs money to add content to “pages,” all new content is relegated to “posts” or “blogs.”
These sites are easy to build but aren’t necessarily a great solution for a business that wants to invest in its digital presence.
Why a traditional inbound strategy is no longer as effective
The traditional inbound marketing strategy involves regularly producing content, posting it on a blog to be crawled by search engines, distributing it on social media channels, then collecting email addresses from forms and hitting those email addresses up with sales messaging.
Around 2015, we (marketers, developers) told every business that they needed a blog that posted four times a month so you could distribute on social media channels and “get SEO.” Blogs became this catch-all for content that didn’t "fit" elsewhere in the website.
What the web receieved was a pile of empty words and agencies that kept using silly formulas like “You need 11 posts per month and 800 words per post and 3 images per post.” Those numbers are bullshit and don’t add up to a commitment to quality content. The catch-all winds up distracting from the focus of the website in the first place.
Many marketing agencies still recommend blogs out of habit because they don’t have the development resources to get creative with their content, or because they have a limited number of writers who can churn out content, or because they’re not really creative thinkers and still think that attracting new prospects is a reliable formula that can be entered like algebra.
SEO-first entrepreneurial types still use the "blog" format because... I don't know, they've never tried another way of thinking or worked with large brands who actually know how to structure content more successfully. They're out of VC investment and are risk-averse to altering website structures. Or they're still catering to decade-old ranking factor models of how SEO works, instead of acknowledging that Google has always maintained: build a good website that people like, not algorithm-first pages. Build for the whole, not for the parts.
But as of 2024, “we have to blog for the SEO” inbound strategies are based on a completely outdated understanding of how algorithms process and how people read content. Those strategies misread the current state of search and entity development. They “work” for a short time, attracting the bare minimum of quick-answer seekers who will never visit the website more than once, but more often they’re often smacked down with whatever core algorithm update is on the horizon.
Other blogging assumptions that have gone the way of the dodo
Classic inbound content strategy relies on the following assumptions, all of which are now mostly out of date. Outdated assumptions include:
- People will bookmark your website and regularly click on the “blog” page of your navigation. Look at your analytics for returning visitors and time on page on your blog homepage. Based on many, many websites from the smallest businesses to the largest cultural institutions: I assure you that users spend zero time on your blog homepage, and if they visit, they look at one post and never visit again.
- More pages on a website is inherently better for a site’s SEO presence. The simple fact that more = better hasn’t been true in SEO for some time. You do not need a huge, thousand-page-deep website to rank well anymore. And now that Google’s preemptively suspicious of abnormally large websites, per Kevin Indig’s 2024 research, .
- More words on a page are better for blogs. Not if those words are redundant, quickly written, poorly edited, or straight-up boring. Google’s algorithms can determine value over empty words. (Check out anything ever written about E-E-A-T for more information about this.)
- Google will only see new content if it’s in a blog. Nope! Keep your sitemaps updated and Google will see your content no matter what. Better yet, list your newest, best content on the homepage, and people will know to return to find it.
- Promoting content on your own social feeds will boost traffic. Will it shock you if I told you that some of the biggest brands in the world get next-to-zero click-throughs for their social content across social networks? Creating socially native content, or what Sparktoro’s Amanda Natividad calls “zero-click content,” has been a social media standard for the past few years. Algorithms — and people — tend to favor social posts with added value or personality. Platforms are greedy and don’t want you to go elsewhere. Social channels might net newsletter sign-ups and brand searches, but they're not necessarily drawing in traffic on each individual post.
- Creating four or eight or sixteen blog posts per month will add up to big returns later. Maybe? Maybe one of two blog posts per year will be take hold? But all those other words will go to waste. Fact: if one or two writers churns out four blog posts a month about your product, those blog posts are probably going to read like redundant churn. The cardinal rule of UX still applies — you are not your end user — but bare minimum, if you wouldn’t read it because the content is bland and boring, don’t publish it.
So what should you create instead of a “blog”?
The strategy of inbound: An audience who visits your website once will likely be so captivated by your content that they will visit again and become a customer.
The reality: Content without a voice or a point of view rarely draws repeat visits. So invest in content that adds value, that you would actually read regularly. Create work that captivates, that everyone is proud of, that surprises and delights, that is 100x better from every crappy blog post out there.
Regularly producing content still works. But relegating it all to a “blog” section no longer makes much sense. Instead, I recommend one or more of these tactics:
- Do content research before you redesign your website and developing your information architecture. Research search volume, entity value, intent. Gather user feedback. Find the 3-4 content areas where you want to go deep. Use those to create deep resources within your website content, not just a blog. Topical, not typical, navigation is much more user- and SEO-friendly. Imagine being able to understand what a topics a website covers at a glance! Personally, I love ZDnet and It’s Nice That, but there are many ways to build website navigation and architect information.
- Regularly update all of the pages on your website when you have new information. Incorporate the content you might put into a “blog” into your website content. It’s web! You can update it whenever you want, and new users will discover your content! (I know, crazy, right?)
- Better yet, make your homepage a destination and tell people how often you add content. Social media feeds are still around, but people like to visit websites that regularly post good content, whether they’re killing time at work or second-screening while watching TV. And, anecdotally, repeat direct visitors strongly correlate with better SEO and business results.
- Work with a developer to create multiple content feeds if necessary. Collaborate with your content strategist, UX expert, marketing team/agency and developers to establish solutions that make the most sense for your audience and the customers you are trying to reach.If you produce multiple products, create an update feed for each product. Only publish product updates on those feeds.If all of your blog content was previously “how to” content, create a section of your website with templates specifically for How To content.Just avoid throwing your garbage in a catchall.
- Make a plan to publish an in-depth resource once a quarter, rather than a blog post every week. Make something that solves a complex problem for your audience, something they will want to come back to. Don’t just publish a Q&A with an industry expert. If you’re going to do the research of having a Q&A, use that content to inform a longer, more in-depth piece, multifaceted sourced feature. Go bigger. Get creative.
- Work with content creators who have unique perspectives: writers, editors, illustrators, videographers, or agencies that provide those services. Content is an investment in quality and voice. (Tip: many media workers and creators are out of work right now. If you have the budget to hire someone to create original, truly unique work, now’s a great time to invest in creative partners who can help you with surprise and delight.)
- If you have a unique voice and are more worried about creating connection with an audience than dominating every search query, create a newsletter. Email newsletters now are what blogs were back in 2005; it’s where your columnists and strong voices can live and create and explore with a minimal investment.
- Or if it makes more sense, develop a podcast or a more unique presence on Instagram or YouTube or Discord or all the other platforms the kids are into. Go deep into one channel. Algorithms and promotion on all of these platforms are so complex now that you’ll need to do a lot of homework and talk about which ideas are good and really hone your voice to build a presence. But now might be the time to research and go deeper.
Most of all — incorporate your “blog” content. Fold it into your brand. Don’t let it sit at the end of your navigation with all the other cookie cutters.
We’re at the beginning of a new age of content marketing: one where standing out and looking sharp matters. It's no longer enough to simply show up and publish. To counter the effects of generative AI, which is by definition predictable, do something minorly unpredictable. Stand out. Or, just tell people what your website is about. It’s not about products and solutions. It’s about the unique topics and expertise that differentiate your brand.
Deborah Carver is the publisher of The Content Technologist.
Content tech links of the week
- A Content Technologist win! I am beyond thrilled with the new Southbank Centre website. Collaborating with the talented folks at Storythings, we conducted audience research and established some strategic content approaches for Southbank as they considered their new website redesign. That research informed the Southbank team and Substrakt's design and development of the new site. It's a glorious collaboration... now all I have to do is revisit London to see Southbank Centre in person.
- Anti-monopolist Matt Stoller breaks down what is likely a landmark U.S. Federal Court ruling on that hobbles a longstanding tech loophole: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It aligns with my personal read on the law, which is that if a company like TikTok regulates its user-generated content in any way, it's ultimately making an editorial decision that makes the platform, not single users, responsible for the harmful content it promotes.
- Generative AI expert and excellent LinkedIn follow Christopher Penn breaks down why software can't reasonably measure "AI SEO." Chris reads the patents and understands the tech deeply, his predictions are based in the reality of how these tools work.
- Do you like semiotics, knowledge graphs, or clever interactive tools? Check out Semioscape and play around with how computers connect topics (not keywords).
- CalArts professor and master information architect Jorge Arango goes deep on why the details of IA matter for user experience design.
- Also in user experience: A solid explainer of signal detection theory from UX consultant Lawton Pybus.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.
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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI
Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.
Sure, in summer '24 this section has turned into Did you listen?, but who's complaining? It's an absolutely stellar year for music. I'm ehh on Father John Misty's whole catalog, when Mr. Tillman hits, he hits the Leonard Cohen disco dance night hard.