It goes against most traditional thinking and even feels a little weird to write, but it’s a fair question to ask: what’s the ceiling to content marketing? If you’ve worked in or around the search engine optimization (SEO) field for some amount of time, then you’re probably familiar with the phrase “content is king.”

Simply put, this is the notion that content marketing largely revolves around the unique content you create and put out into the world so that Google and other search engines can find, index, and ultimately rank you. In reality, there’s a multitude of different factors that come into play when it comes to Internet marketing and the content you consistently create is one, important piece to the puzzle.

You only have about 10 seconds to grab someone’s interest online. A recent article from Search Engine Land’s Matthew Barby explored this idea in a piece that was aptly titled “What they don’t tell you about SEO.” One of Barby’s main points was not that content isn’t important to content marketing (of course it is), but rather emphasizing other aspects of the SEO process that can have just as big of an impact, if not more, on your results and rankings.

One of the factors he points out that many SEOs and digital marketers seem to inexplicably forget is the promotion aspect of the business. You can have a piece of the highest quality, completely original, credibly sourced content, but at the end of the day, if no one looks at it and it doesn’t drive any real traffic, it’s providing you with significantly less value than it potentially could if marketed and promoted correctly.

One of the stats he uses to illustrate this point comes from a study looking at the blog posts that generated the most leads on the website HubSpot. What it found was that 46% of all leads came from just 30 posts out of nearly 6,000 overall (0.5% of the 5,970 to be exact). The rest of the 99.5% of posts generated the other 54% of leads.

While only ranking and benefiting from a portion of posts is a common occurrence in the world of content marketing, it does emphasize the point that it’s not necessarily all about how much “stuff” you can churn out, but rather where (and who) it ends up reaching.

Currently, only about 55% of companies conduct any online user experience testing, despite the fact that there are approximately 12 billion searches per month on the web in the United States alone. SEO is still a very young and developing field, and it’s important to keep an open mind to new ideas as they come.