Content Velocity: What It Is, How to Calculate It & Why You Should Care

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• What is content velocity?
• Why does content velocity matter for a business?
  • To stay ahead of competitors
  • Improving SEO outcomes
  • Better user experience
  • More Value
  • Maximum use of resources
• Calculating content velocity
  • Manual Audit
  • Ahrefs
  • Sitemap
  • SEMRush & Screaming Frog
• How often should you produce quality content?
  • Pre-determined goals
  • Organic Traffic
  • Brand awareness
  • Resources
• Final words

Introduction

Before today you may have never paid attention to content velocity. But this is about to change. 

“Content is king.”

It is the most overused statement in the Internet world. We do not disagree, as content holds the most important degree in this digital day and age. But, when it comes to maintaining a fine balance between quantity and quality, we often end up focusing only on one. In both scenarios, you are falling behind your competitors. 

Let’s take an example here.

• Team A produces 10k words every week without considering the quality. 
• Team B produces 5k words of high-quality content but does it only once every week. 
• Team C produces 10k words every week while keeping a close tab on the quality of the content. 

In all these scenarios, Team C is the clear winner of user attention, as Team A is producing the highest word count, but it is delivering sub-par content in all the articles to its user. At the same time, Team B is clearly losing the attention of its users even after creating high-quality content, as its competitors are producing more word count while maintaining the same quality.

Now that you know the problem, it is time to discuss the solution. 

What is content velocity?

Content velocity is the measurement of content an organization produces within a month, quarter or year. It is basically a calculation of content produced and published by an organization over a particular period of time.  So, to measure content velocity, one should track publish dates and create content accordingly. You can keep a content calendar to monitor publish dates.

Content Velocity is an important aspect that a business should be aware of at every given time to understand its standing better. It is not just the calculation of average word count but also the measurement of the speed at which content is created and published over a period of time. Content velocity includes content in all sizes and formats.  It could be a blog post, changes in existing content, new content creation, or any other modification.

An organization needs these metrics to compare itself with its competitors by knowing how much it is putting out its own content against theirs. Basically, tracking content production.

Why does content velocity matter for a business?

With a sudden boom in Internet usage and the after-effects of Covid, every brand is pushing out content in various forms across different channels. 

It is all about digital entertainment now, with brands spending heavily on publishing as much content as possible that meets customer expectations.

The competition is fierce, with every brand doing its best to grab users’ attention. We can all agree that, in the end, it is all about capturing the user’s attention. Content velocity becomes essential for many reasons in a continuously changing marketing environment and how users perceive a form of content.

Here we have discussed why content velocity matters for your business.

To stay ahead of competitors

We are more invested in what our competitors do than our own strategies, and rightly so. It is important to know every step of your competitors to stay two steps ahead of them. 

Get an edge over your competitors in a competitive landscape by keeping an eye on their strategies. If you have multiple competitors publishing content 20 times a month, you have to as well. If possible, generate more content than them to stay ahead in the game. 

With content velocity, you can easily compare the amount of content your competitors are putting out and how much you should. 

Improving SEO outcomes

Content and SEO go hand in hand. Original and relevant content is vital for SEO. Search Engines rely heavily on content for crawling, indexing, and ranking. 

It is a well-known fact that websites with compelling content enjoy a certain advantage in SERPs (Search Engines Result Pages). By publishing top-notch content, search engines crawl and index more often.  So, content velocity matters in SEO as well.

Better user experience

Every business strives to provide the best user experience to its customers, which is a must-to-do in this highly competitive business landscape.

It is crucial to publish meaningful content in large quantities, as it will eventually improve the user experience and public image of the brand, leaving a remarkable impression on your consumers.

With personalized content, you provide your users with an enhanced user experience, thus improving the overall experience of your brand. 

More Value

Not just SEO, high-quality content adds value to your brand as well. In terms of value creation, your business needs more relevant content to communicate with its customers. With more content, you present yourself as a trusted brand among your targeted customer base. 

A brand that publishes at least five times a week will be more approachable for a user than a brand that publishes only once in a while or irregularly. Content velocity helps you understand where you stand as a brand and how you can use content to connect with your audience. 

Maximum use of resources

For any organization, the effective use of resources is crucial. Producing any content takes time, money and creative energy. With content velocity, you can determine not just your resources but also the resources your competitors are using.

It helps you better understand how your resources are being used. Also, it helps maximize the use of resources. You will have a better understanding of how many resources your competitors are using to produce content within a month. This way, you can try emulating the same and learn how many resources you need in a month to produce more content than your competitors.

You can also be more resourceful by splintering content and separating the same piece of content into multiple segments for different platforms. 

Calculating content velocity

Now that you’re aware of how effective and disruptive content velocity is, you need to know how to calculate it, as it is completely data-driven. 

It is important to understand the frequency of blog posts you are putting out in a period to understand whether you’re doing your best to stay ahead of your competitors and if you are completely utilizing your resources. 

It is a metric that influences your entire content marketing strategy. From blogs to Instagram stories, each aspect is a necessary component in the calculation of content velocity. 

Calculating content velocity is quite simple, yet sometimes can be very complicated. The simplest way to do this is by using SEO tools. 

Manual Audit

This is the simplest way to calculate content velocity. Whether you are researching competitors or you are calculating your own standing, manual auditing can be easily done with limited resources. Although it is a time-consuming process, it does deliver accurate results. 

Go to the website of one of your competitors, and pick a blog from every week, month, quarter, or year by their publishing date. Create a spreadsheet, put every detail down, and then calculate the amount of content your competitors are producing in that period of time. 

Scrape as much data as you can, including publishing data, word count, author name, keywords, and type of content. 

Ahrefs

This one is much easier and less time-consuming as well. Go to Ahrefs, and enter the URL of the blog page that you want to calculate. Choose the time period, and now you will have the exact date, word count, social shares, and every necessary metric for comparison. A lot of websites do not mention the author’s name. In that case, you can always go to the company’s LinkedIn page to check how many writers the company currently has to know what you are up against. 

It is a much easier process that will not require a lot of your time. Even if it did, it is a crucial metric and shouldn’t be treated as something cool to have but rather as an important business strategy. 

Sitemap

Another way to calculate content velocity is through a sitemap of a website. Although it may not be as accurate as the other ways mentioned in this list, it surely does the job. 

Some websites have a separate sitemap, making the entire process a cakewalk. On the other hand, many websites do not update their sitemaps, which can make this process unsuitable for many. 

SEMRush & Screaming Frog

Using Screaming Frog crawling is another way to calculate content velocity. It is an entirely different approach than traditional methods, but it does the job well and should be given a try. 

In order to calculate the content velocity of the competitors or any blog page, go to the SEMRush Organic Research page to filter down to blog pages. Export the list of all important pages and then go to Screaming Frog and set up custom extraction that will provide the exact publish date of every page. 

Voila! You will have all the necessary details to determine where your competitors are standing. 

How often should you produce quality content?

More content is not always the best way forward. Producing content every hour, day, and week can be overwhelming and won’t have a good impact on your user experience. 

In order to deliver quality content, you can’t keep producing content every day at the same speed. There are other aspects that require your attention. Having a clear idea of the amount of content is necessary for you to always be the center of your user’s attention. You can produce and publish content more often and strategically for engaging customer experiences.

So how often should you produce content? 

This important question can be answered with a simple aspect: competitor research. However, there is more to it than just following in the footsteps of your competitors. 

Pre-determined goals

When it comes to deciding how much content you should post, publish and produce, you need to have pre-determined goals. The goals vary from requirements to strategies. 

Once you are aware of your goals, it will be easier to determine your approach and content requirements. In the end, content marketing strategies are derived from a common goal within an organization. 

Here is how much content you should produce on the basis of your pre-determined goals. 

Organic Traffic

Every business has a pre-determined goal in mind while starting out with content marketing. The most common one is to get more organic traffic or create brand awareness, or both. 

If the main goal of your digital strategy is getting more traffic, then you need to churn out more content every day, week, and month. Be it one blog post per day or ten posts in a week. It is the same for social media as well. The more you will produce and publish, the more people are likely to engage with it. Although this way, you can only get more views overall, not on individual posts. Also, the scheduling of your blog and social media posts also play an important role here. 

Brand awareness

Content is often used to create brand awareness or communicate with customers. This is where high-quality content is crucial for a business, as it defines its overall brand image. 

Content quality plays a crucial part in the foundation of a brand. While creating content for brand awareness, you are directly communicating with your users, and that is why you need to deliver relevant content that your customers expect.

For brand awareness, you need to put out content that serves a purpose and is packed with relevant information rather than just being a filler. This way, you set out good expectations for your brand, thereby, creating a positive brand image. 

Resources

Your resources will determine how much content you are going to publish. It highly depends on the strength of your team and your current resources. You should have more resources to research and create content. More resources means better content quality.

How much are you willing to spend on content?

Once you have answered this question, you will be able to strategize better on how much content you should produce every week, month, and quarter. If the main objective of your content creation is to bring in traffic, then you need to churn out content more frequently and consistently. To do that, you will require a bigger team as well as experienced writers to maintain quality. You also need to update previous blogs to keep them relevant. 

Final words

Content velocity isn’t a common topic of discussion, but it is a crucial metric for content creators and businesses. After today, we are 100% sure that you will be paying more attention to this metric, as you are now aware of how crucial it is for a business and to your content marketing strategy. 

Regarding content, we pay very little attention to what we are putting out, let alone what our competitors publish. With content velocity, you will be more aware of the ways your competitors are grabbing the attention of the audience, enabling you to do better with the publication and production of your content.

FAQs