Guess how many times “how to organize a blog” gets searched in Google? Yeah, none.
Categories vs tags type queries do a little better but users are talking about WordPress and Squarespace so I doubt they care about the intricacies of taxonomy.
So instead of focusing on organizing content, let’s talk about planning vs not and how you can get the best of both.
The case for not planning is pretty strong
I’m just now learning to build a daily writing (publishing) habit – something our clients have been doing for years.
It’s bee a good exercise – just starting to appreciate what all goes into it.
I can start to see how the personal-ness of a daily practice of publishing shared thoughts, that intimacy or whatever it is, can lead to bonds with an audience and that feels important and real.
More important than worrying about how many tags to put on the hygiene content blog post because that’s what my editorial calendar said to do at least.
If I put everything else out of my mind and focus on cultivating something real that way, I can’t imagine regretting it. This is what the people I follow and look up to most do.
They certainly aren’t writing for search engines.
The case for planning content is also strong
On the other hand, my background is in generating search traffic for lead gen/sales. The right mix of relevant high traffic posts is incredibly powerful. You can literally build a business around a well positioned post if you do it right.
You could be a top subject matter expert (SME) and I could know a bunch more about what and how your target audience is searching, what they’re looking for, at what scale, how competitively other sites are seeking to rank for those terms, and know what other junk is being put in front of these people when they run those searches.
Just because I looked and you didn’t.
The case for… both?
Once you have that magic number ( approx. 500 articles), assuming you have some other signals working for you, you have some really big traffic levers you can start pulling on.
So maybe it makes the most sense to keep your routine, keep growing your library of content, and then occasionally, take a step back and look at what you actually have.
Here are some questions you can ask:
- What’s weighing down your site and should be deleted and redirected?
- What’s currently silo’d that if freed up could lead to users staying longer, reading more, and ultimately subscribing?
- What’s ranking pretty well that could be ranking really well if dusted off, updated, re-shared and internally linked to more?
- What multiple posts with really similar ideas could be consolidated for more impact?
- What next highest potential adjacent topic would be worth planning a couple posts around?
We’ve helped answer these questions for organizations with as little as 50 posts and as many as 50,000 pages across multiple content formats.
The challenge I’m hoping to rise to is figuring out a rough framework you can use to go about answering some of these questions for yourself, so that’s whats next!
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