What is Content Velocity?

Content velocity is a helpful metric that can help you gain deep insights into your content strategy. If you want to learn more about how it works and what benefits come with measuring this, then you are in the right place.

The value of creating the highest quality content for your users and search engines is indisputable. However, it’s also important to know where you stand against competitors in terms of their online presence.

It’s become more important than ever to know how much content your competitors are producing and how often this is being published.

What is Content Velocity?

Simply put, the amount of content a brand creates in a given period is called its “content velocity.”

If you would like to compare your content velocity versus your competitors, you would compare the number of new content pieces over a set time period.

Is Content Velocity important?

There are many use cases for measuring and reporting on content velocity. For example, you might want to figure out how long it takes your team or company to publish new blog posts so that if the time begins increasing significantly over a couple of weeks, there is an opportunity for process improvement instead of just assuming everything else in life has sped up around us!

1. Do you have enough resources?

Despite the growing importance of online content, many businesses are still struggling to build a strong enough strategy. Often the missing link can simply be not having enough resources to produce content.

One way you can use this data is to show that your company needs more resources in order for it have successful material on all channels, particularly if your competitors do.

Imagine the scenario. Your competitor is ahead of you in the Search Engines. As a result, they are receiving more traffic and better qualified leads.

You then work out your competitor’s content velocity and find out they are producing double the content than you are in a set period. Your content is as good as theirs however they simply have more.

Leading to them gaining a better topical relevance in Google’s eyes. This vital statistic can give you a data driven metric to what type of resources your competitor has.

2. Estimate the cost of content

When you understand how much your competitors are spending on content, it can help guide and inform your own efforts.

Your competitors may be spending a lot of money on their content creation. Now you can work out roughly how much that is. This data might be just whats needed to convince your bosses how much they should be allocating to your content creation strategy.

How do you calculate Content Velocity?

Calculating content velocity can be very straightforward or very complicated, depending on your method.

If you take the simple approach, I’d suggest using a tool such as Ahrefs to filter out the set URLs from a website. This will be significantly easier if they have a sub URL structure such as /blog/. Export the list.

You could also use a free online sitemap generator then import it into an Excel spreadsheet and delete accordingly.

Either way, I would suggest you then import the data in Screaming Frog and set up a custom extraction. Using this method, you can extract the publish date which will usually be available in their Metadata or Schema markup data.

There a variety of other methods to measure content velocity such as setting up custom scrapers however I find these are overkill for 95% of occasions.

What data can you find?

• How much content your competitor released in a set time period.
• How many pages they created.
• How many words they wrote.
• Approximately how much they spent per piece of content.
• What keywords are they targetting.

What can you do with this information?

So obviously, just having this data isn’t too useful unless you use it your advantage.

First, you need to analysis the results and compare your content velocity with your competitors.

Then your organisation can decide if you need to carry on as you are or increase your content production. If so, then it’s a good idea to build a robust content strategy that will help you achieve your goals.

A content roadmap is an absolute must here and it’s highly recommended that you tie this in with in-depth keyword research so you can build a robust content roadmap and timeline.

It’s important to promote consistency in your organisation and to encourage everyone to stick to the timeline.

Conclusion

There you have it. A short overview of content velocity and how you can use it your advantage to rank higher in Google and beat your competitors!