We’ve worked with dozens upon dozens of brilliant clients over the past eight years at ércule. Incredible strategic minds and breathtaking writers.
Nearly all of them struggle with publishing at a consistent pace.
I’ve been banging the drum for a steady, sustainable, ambitious publishing schedule this whole time. Lately, industry data has been validating my hunch: content velocity correlates with organic search performance.
So let’s talk about it:
- How it influences traffic
- How you can measure it
- How you can steadily increase it
Content velocity is a systemic issue. In order to publish at an ambitious rate, you need a content system that is built to last.
What do I mean by content velocity?
The name is pretty self-evident but here’s what it means to me in specific:
- Speed. How quickly you can produce a piece of content from strategy stage to publication and distribution.
- Cadence. What kind of speed you maintain over time. If speed is all about capacity, cadence is all about practicality.
- Volume. How much content you are producing per month or per quarter.
As you can imagine, these are all pretty closely related.
Quality assurance is part of the process
The goal is not to simply increase content generation. The goal is to produce and distribute valuable content more rapidly and consistently.
Slop won’t win you any real, lasting conversions – this is true for AI slop and good old fashioned artisanal slop. Slop is slop. Allow me to take an even wider view: the ultimate goal is to have a content library in which every page is relevant, accurate, current, and helpful for your audience.
So quality assurance is part of the production process that we’re trying to optimize here. In that sense, content velocity is a measure of your content system’s overall efficiency.
Velocity correlates with search performance
Check out this topic report. It groups content performance by core topic. (This reporting is a standard feature in the ercule app.)
In the example below, a brand’s inbound traffic for a certain topic is trending steadily upward over the past year.
We love to see that. Now check out the next chart in their topic report. It shows the volume of content published on that given topic, month by month, for the past year.
In other words: publishing cadence for a specific type of targeted content.
They published heavily in the first month of the year but didn’t get a steady cadence going until several months in. The increase in cadence correlates with the increase in traffic cited in the previous chart.
(To really get in the weeds, check out this video walk-through about content velocity.)
Your audience demands fresh content, too
Content with recent publication dates seems to be cited more often by LLMs. This is a big deal. But also: actual human beings want current, cutting-edge content!
And that’s who we’re writing for: people. Google is trying to woo them as well, so it makes sense that they show the publication date for each listing in a SERP. 👇
Think about your own habits… If you were researching an industry topic right now, which page would you click on: the post from 2025 or the post from 2022?
Ideally, the publication date for every page in your library would be nice and fresh. You achieve this when you publish a brand new post and when you update an existing post. Both tactics are necessary. Content maintenance is just as important to your content velocity equation as content production.
Ways to measure content velocity
You can use the graph in the ércule app like I showed above. It tracks the volume of published pages, per month, over the past year.
There’s also more in-depth analysis that you can run with some DIY spreadsheet work. I’ll show you some of mine. (You can watch this screencast to get really in the weeds with me on this stuff.)
Topical publishing chart
Here’s a report I made in a spreadsheet. It, basically, does this:
- Pulls in the publication date from a company’s CMS.
- Classifies each page by topic.
- Graphs the data.
In the chart below, the width of each line speaks to the volume of publication.
👆 The colored bars each represent a specific topic (and the gray bars are “miscellaneous” topics).
Strategic vs non-strategic publishing
The format of the next chart is the same as the one above. It pulls in CMS data then categorizes and quantifies. But this one gets a little more granular:
- The timeline is tighter. Showcasing daily and weekly publication velocity.
- The topic analysis is more nuanced. And it’s comparing strategic topics (colored lines in the chart below) vs non-strategic topics (gray lines in the chart).
As you can see, the website featured above is publishing every single day. Very cool. But this chart shows that they’ve got a big problem: most of the content is not strategic.
That’s basically what this ércule app chart is showing also: how frequently you’re publishing about the topics that matter most to your brand. (It’s leaving out the non-strategic stuff.)👇
In order to build authority with anyone (be they search bots or potential customers), we’ve got to publish a variety of content about some core topics.
The format of the content can (and should) be varied: blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, thought leadership, all of it is great. The one consistent through line should be the subject-matter.
Tips for increasing your (strategic) content velocity
The list of factors that slow down content teams is long and ever-growing. Detailing them all is too sad. Instead, I want to share two methods that reliably help my clients clear their content pipelines.
Focus on a few essential topics
I think the sweet spot is 5 - 10 core topics. Within each topic you can write untold numbers of targeted pieces that explore the nuances of the subject, your audience’s relationship to it, and the ways that your product engages with it.
Keeping that focus will help you build authority faster. It also simplifies the (many) steps of the production process – from the early planning phases to the creation of social platform copy. And if you can get the entire team aligned on a short list before you head into production, you’ll have fewer questions and objections to answer from stakeholders along the way.
Here’s an example of a strategy document. This one is even a bit long, in terms of focus topics. As you can see, in the left-most column, we’ve got nearly 15 topics.
In terms of content velocity, there’s another big benefit to having a tight topic list: it emboldens you to say no. If someone on the team wants to write a random one-off post that they dreamt up in the shower, you can refer to this approved topic list and remind them of your collective priorities.
Set clear approval guidelines
An overly cautious approval process is a surefire way to drag your velocity down and drive you nuts in the meantime.
There are plenty of smart reasons to have a cautious approval process. The legal team at your business can explain them to you ad nauseum but not every single topic you write about requires extreme caution.
So, figure out which topics need it and which ones don’t. Set clear approval processes for both groups. That way, you’re able to build up your cadence with less sensitive material while waiting for the more sensitive stuff to sludge its way through approvals.
You might approach this discussion in a few different ways. Here are two that I’ve found useful:
- Funnel stage considerations. Intro-level content is less provocative. Maybe we can skip the hardcore product marketing review for this stuff.
- New vs repurposed content. If all new product-focused content requires stringent review, then so be it. Once it’s approved, however, you could use that messaging to write a variety of different posts. Tell new stories with the approved product messaging and skip the hardcore product marketing review.
Repurposing can be a huge boost to velocity, especially with some careful AI support. The product team just published a whitepaper at long last? Let's remix it to write a handful of new blog posts that answer different questions, supplement some existing data, and pick apart the major conclusions.
How often should we be publishing?
Clients ask this question all the time. I don’t have a uniform answer because the ideal content velocity is different for every team. For a lot of newer companies – especially if you're series A or series B – one post per week on a strategic topic is great.
As you get bigger, you're going to want to publish more. Some of our clients have the content system dialed-in so well that they’re going from an idea to a completed blog post in 24 hours. Brings a tear to my eye…
Next steps
Find a way to collect the data: what’s your publishing volume been over the past three months? Six months? The more data you have, the more effectively you’ll be able to understand your operations. But there’s nothing wrong with starting small.
It’s all about building a content system that is fundamentally strong. The more efficient it gets, the less time you’ll have to spend on any of these tasks. Any measured increase in strategic content velocity is a win.
