I’ve recently come across an interesting observation concerning content. The articles which prove most useful to me don’t attempt to answer every conceivable question; instead they deal with the one question I actually have, and then they cease.
That may sound simple, but it’s surprisingly easy to get it wrong.
There’s always a tendency when producing content to include more things such as an extra section, another example, a further keyword, or yet another related question. Eventually, what started as a simple article becomes 3,000 words long and the original question ends up somewhere in the middle.
I now see this from a different point of view: when somebody is looking for a particular answer, I believe the main thing that content should do is to answer it clearly, rather than making them work through ten paragraphs to get to the point.
It doesn’t have to be that the content is short. There are some subjects which actually do require depth. However, each section should justify its inclusion. Experience has shown me that when I remove the sections which don’t really contribute, the content generally becomes more useful rather than less so.
Even now, with the presence of AI search, people are receiving answers more quickly and have become less tolerant of content that takes a long time to get to the point. It does not follow that every piece of content has to give a short answer, but rather that we should be more careful about what we include.
As far as I’m concerned, producing good content doesn’t involve attempting to deal with every question a reader may possibly have; it’s about addressing the one they actually have and making it easy for them to know their next step. In some cases this means providing more details; in others it means directing them to another resource; and on other occasions it’s enough simply to stop once the question has been answered.