Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Going through this guide will allow you to fully understand content velocity and what it means for SEO. You will understand why the rate you publish quality content matters and how to avoid common pitfalls.
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Content velocity is the rate at which a publisher publishes new content. Search engines see websites with a large amount of original content covering a topic as a sign of topical authority. This makes content velocity an additional SEO criteria to consider.
Content velocity includes the speed at which a publication can create, publish and update content. Typically content velocity is measured by the number of new pages an organization can publish in a given period of time while maintaining its content quality standards.
There are four main issues publishers face when considering their content velocity:
Sometimes referred to as a hub and spoke model, a pillar and cluster content strategy helps develop topical authority, leads to better content organization while allowing production at scale.
Without a pillar and cluster strategy, publishers will struggle to meet their content and search engine performance goals.
Given the glut of content on the web, publishers need a way to stand out and grab the reader’s attention. Personalized content for each user is one way to do this.
Personalized content for individual users translates to higher conversions and more engaged visitors when they land on the homepage. Consumers are more likely to buy from sites that personalize their content so maintaining a level of personalization at scale is incredibly important for conversions. McKinsey states in their article, The value of getting personalization right – or wrong – is multiplying, “research shows that personalization most often drives 10 to 15 percent revenue lift.”
However, personalizing content while looking to scale up at the same time is a difficult task.
Scaling is difficult. There is only so much time in the day and so if you’re increasing your content velocity to match or exceed a competitor, then you’re likely going to need to hire or outsource the work.
Increasing your content production means you’ll need to have somebody spend more time overseeing that content. Keeping additional writers on the same page about the tone of voice and quality standards becomes increasingly difficult with each writer you add to the team.
There will always be a shortage of talented writers. Finding those talented writers is difficult and so, when you do find them, they come at a premium.
If you plan to scale up your content creation you’ll need to consider how much you’re willing to spend on creating that content and if you can afford the number of quality writers you’ll need to match your content velocity.
More frequent content means Google is going to index the site more often. A high content velocity has a snowballing effect as well. When quality content is consistently published at a high rate Google begins to see the site as a topical authority, allowing your content to rank for those topics.
Publishers can achieve topical authority by structuring their content into clusters with a central pillar piece surrounded by supporting articles. Google will have a far better understanding of content arranged in this way and will push these pages further up the SERP rankings.
To understand more about how search engines use internal links to better navigate a website’s content, check out our detailed module on interlinking.
With a constantly growing number of content creators, it is very difficult to rank a one-off article. While content quality remains of primary importance for SEO, combining content quality with content velocity gives publishers the winning edge when trying to climb up the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Now that we understand what content velocity is and why it matters for SEO, let’s turn to the mechanics of publishing content at scale.
Knowing your competition’s content velocity is the first step to ascertaining your own publishing frequency. Publishing at scale is resource-intensive, so you’ll want to calibrate your efforts in line with those of your niche to use your resources most efficiently.
Here’s how to do this:
Pull a list of URLs from your competitor’s site using any of the major SEO tools with this feature, such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc.
Enter the list of URLs into a tool such as Screaming Frog and extract the published data and word count from those articles. Word count is not required for calculating content velocity but will give you an additional data point to work with.
Use Excel or Google Sheets to sort the Screaming Frog data and determine the number of articles being published for a given time period — typically a quarter.
You can now repeat these steps for all your competitors to determine who has the highest content velocity and who might be ahead of the others.
Because you also extracted the word count with Screaming Frog, you can also estimate the cost of content creation from your competitors by multiplying the per word (or per hour) rate of content creation in your niche with the word count. This gives you an idea of what it might cost to catch up to or even exceed their content velocity.
Word count alone does not prove content quality, but knowing the effort your competition is putting in will give you a better idea of what standards you need to meet as well.
Similarly to Screaming Frog you can use competitor content to also assess competitor content, but it also takes it to the next step by providing you an estimated breakdown of the organic search site traffic by URL and average ranking which you can use to prioritse the exact content to focus on.
Use the trending line data to also provide you an estimation of the content frequency needed to outpace competitors.
As previously noted, maintaining a pillar and cluster structure with a good internal linking strategy is a major challenge facing publishers seeking to step up their content velocity.
One method of combating this challenge is by properly planning your content. Perform your keyword research well in advance and group your topics into appropriate clusters. Be sure to avoid too much closely related content as this can confuse your readers and cannibalize your keywords.
For more on keyword research, check out our dedicated module on the subject.
Maintaining an optimized internal linking structure will ensure better SERP results and more effective SEO efforts. Having your plan laid out will allow your writers to create the content faster as well.
This is a tactic that can help you scale up your content creation efforts quickly. If you are creating content across multiple channels, this becomes even easier for you.
If you run a weekly podcast or a YouTube channel, you can take that content and spin it into articles for your site. This not only allows you to put out content faster, it also brings down your content creation costs.
There are a couple of processes we advise implementing when it comes to scaling up your content velocity.
Having an established workflow for your team allows for a structured and streamlined approach to content creation. This keeps the entire team and anybody onboarding able to follow along and get work done efficiently.
When creating a workflow be sure to have open and honest input from your entire team. Start at a high level with overarching tasks such as SEO research and content writing. Then break down each high-level item into smaller details.
Begin documenting checklists of all required steps in each task. Include items that ensure a seamless handoff from one team to the next where appropriate.
Allow some time to pass and then schedule a time for feedback. Speak with team members involved in tasks where bottlenecks are occurring. Find out why they are happening. Perhaps there is an additional step that could be implemented earlier in the chain of events to prevent the bottleneck.
Then begin to iterate and optimize. Be adaptable and willing to change and try new things
A good writer will naturally understand the direction you want to take your content. They can work without much hand holding and deliver high-quality work. Above all, a good writer will capture your audience and make your brand stand out from the crowd.
A bad writer leads to:
Sure, you can cover up a bad writer’s mistakes but it will come at the cost of another team member’s time or more money spent. Bad writers will not understand the nuance of capturing your tone of voice and how to engage with the readers.
There is massive competition to stand out from an ever-increasing number of content creators as we discussed above. Hiring good writers will help you do just that.
Increasing your publishing velocity is not without potential traps. Avoid these mistakes to execute your content strategy effectively:
There are three main reasons publishers fail to meet their content goals:
Senior management should rarely be involved in content reviews. Reviewing your content can be handled by writers and editors and involving senior management slows down the entire process. Management personnel are typically busy and when publishing content as fast as possible you don’t need an unnecessary step slowing down the process.
Editing and revisions are necessary. Too many revisions are not. Your content needs to be valuable to readers, which leads to Google picking up on good user experience (UX) signals, but it doesn’t need to be revised to the point of slowing down publishing. You will see diminishing returns with each revision and they come with an opportunity cost of not publishing enough new content.
Having too low a budget for writers is going to result in content that needs a lot of editing or requires constant micro-managing. Asking too much of your writers, for too low of a budget will cost you time and money in the long run and you won’t get the results you are looking for.
We now know that publishing with a high content velocity is beneficial for SEO and organic traffic to your site. That does not mean quality or direction can suffer, however.
Publishing content at a high rate is beneficial because you can become a topical authority with properly structured pillar and cluster content. You can complete more of these content hubs due to your publishing schedule.
You have to avoid publishing off-topic content or having unstructured content. You won’t see the benefits you would otherwise see. Covering topics outside your area of expertise can do more harm than good as it can confuse readers and make for poor conversions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) powered content writing tools such as Jasper and Copy.ai make it easy to write sentences and paragraphs within seconds. For this reason, several publishers end up using them to create entire articles in the mistaken belief that it will help them scale up their content fast.
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that AI technology has not advanced enough to replace a skilled human writer. While Google might not be able to identify AI-generated content straight away, very little AI-generated content is good enough to compete with higher quality, more valuable, human-created content.
It is important to remember that Google’s stated mission is to have “more content for people, by people in search.” For this reason, AI-powered content creation tools should be used carefully and sparingly, if at all.
Gizmostory — which primarily covers TV series, anime and movies — scaled up its content velocity in the summer of 2021. The result of their effort makes for a fantastic example of executing high content velocity.
In June, Gizmostory published around 21 articles, which attracted 38,000 organic visitors that month.
In July, the site began ramping up its publishing volume, delivering 101 new articles that attracted more than 170,000 organic visitors.
By once again increasing the number of articles published in August to 617, the publisher again received a bump in its organic traffic, this time to 401,000 visitors.
This trend continued in September, when Gizmostory published 1,092 new articles that month, increasing its organic traffic to almost 684,000 visitors.
WTSkora covers the world of football from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Region. The site saw initial success over its first six months in which the site grew to 100,000 in organic traffic.
In the seventh month, the site experienced technical issues with its match center, which it promptly removed. Through this process though, it noticed its competition publishing with a much higher content velocity.
WTSkora decided to increase its content velocity and raised the number of daily stories from 40-60 to 120 stories per day. They saw an incredible 122% increase in monthly organic traffic, climbing from 90,000 to 200,000, and peaked to 350,000 users in 2022.
We’ve understood in this module what content velocity is, why it’s important for SEO and seen evidence of its potential.
We’ve examined some key tactics to ramp up content velocity, beginning with a fair assessment of the competition, then planning your content in advance and, finally, creating content using topic pillars and clusters.
We’ve also seen some of the common pitfalls that publishers fall prey to when looking to scale up content, and understood how to avoid these.
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