Big Companies' Vanity Traffic: The Surprising Value in Bad Content

Ryan Law has a vast experience spanning over 13 years in various roles such as a writer, content strategist, team lead, marketing director, VP, CMO, and agency founder. He has notably helped improve content marketing and SEO for major companies like Google, Zapier, GoDaddy, Clearbit, and Algolia. Additionally, Ryan Law is a novelist and has created two content marketing courses.

As companies expand, they face several challenges that can lead to a decline in content marketing quality:

• Extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval: These can slow down the content creation process.
• Content watered down: To fit a generic 'brand voice', content may lose its specificity and appeal.
• Misalignment between search and content teams: This can lead to content that doesn't effectively target the right keywords or audience.
• Lack of content leadership: As early employees leave, there may be a void in strategic content direction.

These factors contribute to more complicated content workflows and a shift towards producing content that drives traffic but may not directly contribute to the bottom line.

Despite not directly converting, 'vanity traffic' can offer several indirect benefits for large companies:

• Strengthen domain authority: It can improve the search performance of other pages on the website.
• Boost brand awareness: It can lead to serendipitous interactions and get the brand in front of new audiences.
• Deny competitors traffic: It can reduce competitors' share of voice.

These benefits are amplified when spread across many pages and can have a significant cumulative impact on revenue and brand positioning.

Post-IPO companies target a broader audience to sustain growth rates and expand their total addressable market (TAM). This broader audience includes not just end users but also institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, and regular investors. The content serves as a form of advertising that can influence these stakeholders in ways that go beyond direct product purchases, such as investing or influencing share prices. This strategy creates a secondary marketing funnel that adds value to the company in the long term.

Producing content with high-traffic keywords, even if considered 'bad content', is strategic for several reasons:

• Minimized content costs: Big companies can produce content at a lower marginal cost due to established processes and use of freelance writers.
• Saturated relevant topics: Companies that have been blogging for a long time may have already covered most relevant topics, pushing them to explore broader ones.
• Efficient sales processes: Companies with established sales processes can make even small conversion rates work in their favor.
• SEO competition: It's important to occupy SERPs to prevent competitors from dominating and creating a significant gap.

In essence, this approach is about securing digital presence and denying competitors the opportunity to claim uncontested search engine real estate.