Content Management is like that underrated movie everyone should watch but doesn’t. SEOs often discuss content velocity and volume without mentioning what comes next. Managing content is the #1 factor to make sure your website will continue existing.
Why Content Management?
Content Management is your set of methods and tactics to manage the content on your website.
You can think of it as part of your content strategy since you also need to maintain your competitive advantage. Bigger websites need to be managed somehow as they have too much content.
Content Decay
Content Decay is a natural consequence of content. It will happen.
Managing your content allows you to detect it in time and block it before it snowballs into oblivion.
Then why people are struggling with it?
Because:
- Decay is subtle and sneaky, you must track it
- It can be a lot of work
- Some don’t have systems in place
Content Ops
A catch-all term to refer to strategy, curation, and creation of content of all forms.
Needless to say, it’s 2023 and content is one of the most important assets you can own.
Imagine having a library with all the cool information on a topic and people paying you to consult it.
That’s essentially content!
The issue is that many people publish content without a goal in mind or an understanding of how it works.
Every piece should serve some purpose.
Content Velocity
Not a big fan of this concept unless you actually mean it.
The practice of churning out a lot of content has many problems, one of them being strategic.
You see, stretching yourself too far means you create new weaknesses in your plan.
That’s what happens:
- You now have to update more articles
- Your competitive advantage is harder to maintain
- New clusters mean new competitors
Having a big empire translates to more territory to defend.
This is a concept that I don’t see discussed often but it’s crucial in Content Management.
The more articles you have, the more you have to defend them from decay and competition.
Example:
Let’s suppose website A has 4 main clusters, where 1, 2, and 3 are quite good and solid.
Internal links are good enough and they also got some authoritative backlinks.
Cluster 4 is the weakest of the bunch and was done in an effort to make more “money”.
A possible competitor with a new (or existing) website would immediately target the weakest cluster and do the same but better.
There is almost no reason to go after Cluster 1, the strongest.
It’s safe to say that you want to prune content that feels completely redundant.
In reality, the signals are more subtle but some good old pruning works, if you know what you are doing.
Don’t start a new cluster unless you actually plan to defend it.
N.B. I will go back to the topic of strategy + tactics in my future content.
Tools
As for tools, there are too many so I will give you my favorite picks.
- Airtable – Content Plans / Automation
- Notion – Second Brain
- Google Docs – Comfortable and easy to collaborate
- Grammarly – You know, why not
You can use more complex tools depending on the size of your content efforts.
The one I will always recommend is Airtable due to the flexibility and power it offers.
One of the most basic things you can do is move your content plans there to keep track of your pages.
Even the free version does a great job of helping website owners.
I’d also mention my personal scripts as “tools” because they aid management in several ways.
For example:
- Detect Content Decay at scale
- Find Opportunities
- Split pages into groups for later evaluation
- Discover what to Prune
The Lesson Here
Managing a business or a content website is like warfare.
You can’t simply publish more articles because you read that on social media by some guy. Strategy, tactics, and the resources you have largely affect the outcome.
Don’t post too much and focus on your area of excellence first.
If you can’t afford to manage something, then avoid owning it!
Analytics can help you to understand the current issues and work on future challenges. Something simple as a script can unlock massive value for your business and speed up decision-making.