Your chances of increasing website traffic will grow with the quantity of content you publish that is relevant to your target audience. This is when content velocity will come to your rescue.
Content velocity is a metric used to measure the frequency at which you produce and distribute content. This balances quality and assists in effective digital marketing.
This post will give you more information if you want to learn more about content velocity. You can find out what content velocity is, how it affects SEO, why it’s important to track it, how it’s calculated, and much more. So, let’s dive in without further ado!
What is Content Velocity?
Content velocity is the frequency at which new content is created and shared by a company or individual over a set period.
This metric reflects the amount of content a brand produces within a certain timeframe, which can significantly impact how well the target audience responds to marketing and communication efforts and how engaged they remain.
To maintain a high content velocity, your brand or organization should consistently produce and share high-quality content. Producing “thin content”, or low-quality content, won’t enhance your efforts and may even get filtered out during the marketing process.
The key challenge is that simply meeting the minimum content requirements isn’t enough. If you’re comparing yourself to competitors and want to outperform them, you’ll need to create more content than they do. For example, if they publish five articles weekly, you should aim for at least seven.
However, your content must meet a high standard rather than being just average. Ultimately, content velocity is about producing as much or more high-quality content as your successful competitors to gain market share and maintain a long-term advantage.
There is no standard score to determine the ideal content velocity. To reach and engage the target audience effectively, it’s important to strike a balance between content quality and quantity.
When it comes to social media, you have to consider how often to post Stories or posts to maintain a consistent presence without overwhelming your audience. The ideal content velocity might vary depending on the industry, audience, and goals.
Why Should I Monitor Content Velocity?
It often happens that focusing on quality can reduce the number of posts, and vice versa. Therefore, one of the many reasons to measure content velocity is to strike a balance between the two.
Monitoring content velocity is important for the following reasons, among others:
SEO
By ensuring that a website is consistently updated with new and relevant information, monitoring content velocity can help improve SEO efforts. Therefore, the more content quality you publish, the more likely it is that search engines will crawl your website’s pages and give it a higher rating in search results.
Audience Engagement
Customers today expect a seamless convenient, and personalized experience while conducting any online search. If you give your audience stuff they find simple to read and understand, they will keep coming back to you.
By monitoring content velocity, you can track how your target audience is responding to your content. This will also allow you to boost engagement by optimizing your content development and distribution strategies.
Competitor Analysis
Content velocity might greatly benefit you if you want to publish and produce more content than your competitors while avoiding being outranked.
You would always want to know what your competitors are up to in your field. The easiest method to achieve this is to learn about their content strategies so you can edit and publish your ideal blog posts and adjust your content marketing efforts accordingly.
Organizations can keep tabs on content production and distribution by tracking content velocity. This might offer insightful information on market trends and best practices—and you will gain competitive advantage.
Allocate resources
There is a good probability that your ranking on SERP will be ruined if you provide less web content than your rivals.
By monitoring the content velocity, you can gain insight into the resources you require, the frequency at which you publish, and the pace at which you develop content to beat your competition.
Budget Planning
To compete with your competitors, you will need to know how much they spend on their content. Producing content is not limited to written works.
YOu can create content such as videos or audio. Focusing solely on written content can be a repetitive task so can always explore other content, as long as the key goal is to keep the audience engaged. Organizations can more efficiently plan their content marketing budget by being aware of the content velocity. Additionally, you can monitor whether or not your competitors’ material is generating any traffic.
Budget planning can help you better understand the resources needed to develop and deliver content regularly.
How Does Content Velocity Impact SEO?
Content velocity can significantly impact SEO because search engines like Google value new and relevant information.
The following are ways in which content velocity can impact SEO:
Ranking
You should be able to produce useful and relevant content if you want your website to appear high on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
This brings up the point that one of the basic SEO elements that will directly impact your ranking is relevancy. Generally speaking, search engines seek out high-quality, topic-relevant content.
They may tell that a website is active and relevant by seeing frequent updates to its content. Tracking the content velocity of your page will help you understand how frequently your target audience is accessing and engaging your content, which can improve its ranking in search results.
Visibility
Putting relevant keywords in your high-quality content makes your website more visible. Regularly updating fresh content with targeted keywords increases the chance that it will be found by the target demographic, which can increase a site’s search engine visibility.
User Engagement
Simply put, the more relevant content you publish on your website, the more you can expect to engage your users.
By doing a content gap analysis, you will be able to provide fast and frequent content updates and additions to your content.
You can also encourage users to spend more time on a website, which is a key factor in search engine ranking algorithms. This will also lead to users coming back to your website, providing you with repeated user traffic.
So, How Can You Calculate the Content Velocity?
Now that you know what content velocity is and why it is important, you must wonder how to calculate it to improve your game. However, there is no straightforward way of calculating content velocity as it is quite complex.
Generally speaking, you can determine content velocity by dividing the entire volume of newly written content by the length of time. This could include the number of daily, weekly, or monthly new pages or posts. These can include PPC, social media posts, videos, podcasts, and so on.
For example, if an organization produces ten new blog posts in a month, its monthly content velocity would be ten posts/per month. Similarly to this, a website’s content velocity would be 100 videos/per year if it added 100 new videos per year.
You can calculate content velocity in different ways:
The Manual Method
This is the traditional way to check the velocity of your competitors’ content and one of the most obvious ways.
Step 1: Visit your competitor’s blog or resources page, check the date of publishing of each article, and add to a spreadsheet.
Step 2: Collect as much data as you can, then separate it into different columns. For example, the publish date of the article, the targeted keywords, word count, etc.
If you have difficulty finding the date, you can simply press Ctrl+F and type “Published” after opening the source code, and the dates will be right in front of you.
Once you design your blog calendar with the details mentioned above, it will give you a deeper comprehension of the resources required to meet or exceed your desired result.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a well-known tool that can be used to extract additional data from your competitor’s website.
Step 1: Log into Ahrefs.
Step 2: Go to Content Explorer.
Step 3: Type the blog URL of your competitor on the search bar provided.
Step 4: Select the time period of the blog. You will then see detailed data on the exact date of publication, the frequency of social shares, and word count, including other insightful data.
SEMrush + Screaming Frog
With the use of the combination of SEMrush and Screaming Frog, you can learn more about the number of pages generated, the average cost per page, the average number of words, and other factors.
Step 1: Go to SEMrush Organic Research and narrow your selection to blog pages. (if you are looking for blogs)
Step 2: You will get the result in front of you, which you now have to export to Screaming Frog.
Step 3: Open Screaming Frog and set up a custom extraction. Finally, you will now have data that will include the publish date of every blog article that has been published.
While calculating content velocity will allow you to improve your performance, you should understand that content velocity is not just about the quantity of content. Even a high content velocity cannot ensure success if the information is poorly produced, researched, or irrelevant to the target audience.
How Often Should You Blog?
The blog’s objectives, the business’s size, the resources available for content generation, and other factors influence how frequently a blog is updated. In line with the particular objectives of the blog, the frequency of blogging should also be modified. For example, if the goal is to generate leads, it may be necessary to publish more frequently to keep visitors engaged and drive conversions.
Therefore, if you run a small business, aiming to publish one new blog article per week is a decent place to start. This frequency is manageable and provides regular fresh content for search engines and visitors.
It might be possible to publish more regularly, depending on the size of the organization and the resources available. It may be best to create five to ten fresh blog posts daily if you are working with a large firm.
Instead of rushing to create a lower-quality post on a more frequent basis, it would be more beneficial for businesses with limited resources to concentrate on producing high-quality blog posts less frequently, perhaps once every two weeks.
You can also set particular objectives and strive toward them. Therefore, three to five posts per week will increase organic traffic to your website, while one to three posts per week will be ideal for increasing brand awareness.
Ultimately, the frequency of blogging should be based on what is manageable and sustainable for the organization while still achieving the desired results. Regular and consistent blog updates are more important than the specific frequency, as search engines and visitors both value fresh and relevant content.
Tips for Creating Personalized Content at Scale
It might be difficult to produce targeted content at scale, especially after analyzing the content velocity of your competitors and realizing that your brand isn’t performing up to par. Making tailored content at scale is the simple solution to this problem. Numerous approaches can assist businesses in achieving this objective. Here are a few tips:
Create a framework:
Creating a framework for your work is best before beginning any task. You should, therefore, make a plan in advance for effective content management. You should use a content calendar to deliver the best results.
Consistency is the key:
If you’re reinventing the wheel with every piece of content, it’s going to take longer to achieve your content creation goals. A blog calendar can help you write consistent content by organizing your writing ideas and setting deadlines for publishing across multiple channels.
Creating a blog calendar can guarantee a steady flow of ideas and a structured plan for publishing, resulting in consistent and well-thought-out content.
You can also make use of a tool like Adobe Experience Manager to scale your content creation.
Update your old content:
Despite what some people may think, there is no harm in repurposing content that you have already shared. Your brand is more likely to rank higher the more frequently you update your content. You may increase the volume of the content you create and publish while also expanding your audience by repurposing your existing content. This will help your company expand and serve as an excellent inbound marketing strategy.
By using these tips, businesses may produce engaging content at scale, which can help them forge closer bonds with their target market and boost the efficiency of their content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Many companies write articles for the sake of writing them. The point to consider is whether or not increasing the number of blogs they publish will actually improve their content velocity. Although it won’t be simple to understand every component of content velocity, it is also not that difficult. By evaluating and planning the amount of content you should publish, content velocity in SEO is an excellent strategy to outperform your competitors. So, to stay ahead in the game, consider producing balanced content using content velocity.
FAQ
1. Why does content go viral?
One of the main reasons why content goes viral is the topic that you choose. If you have written a blog post about a subject being talked about a lot while you are writing it, there is a high chance that your content may go viral. It will also depend on the number of clicks your blog post acquired, which can depend on several factors, such as the headline you choose, the quality of your blog post, how readable and visually appealing it is, and how engaging your content is.
2. What are the SEO benefits of content velocity?
Content velocity is beneficial in increasing your website’s chances of being seen. This happens because your audience will more likely return to your website if you upload more quality-driven content with relevant keywords. In the end, this will increase the number of links pointing to your website. When your link is used and results in a higher rank on search engines, this step will help you gain extra viewers from a different website as well.
3. How can start-ups use content velocity?
Content velocity may help start-ups increase traffic, create leads, and raise brand awareness. They can use these metrics to produce quality content regularly, distribute it to a larger audience, produce a high volume of content to gain the trust and credibility of their target audience and make informed decisions about the development of new content.
