How to Scale Content Production Without Dropping Quality

Scaling content sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just write more content more frequently.

If only it was as straightforward as that.

The art of scaling content isn’t to simply increase the amount of content, but to scale the impact of that content — more visitors, more clicks, more conversions. Like a snowball rolling down a hill gathering snow, you want to attract as much attention as possible. But if your snowball is rolling too fast, nothing sticks.

To build brand awareness and increase your customer base by scaling content, you need to strategically plan your efforts. Otherwise, you’ll spend hours creating reams of content that doesn’t hit the mark. So, how do you create more content without compromising value?

Check out these tips on how to scale your content production without dropping quality.

Why scale content production?

61% of companies claim content generates leads and over half of B2B businesses agree that branded content boosts sales. In other words, if you want more sales, you need more content. By scaling content, you open doors to new avenues of lead generation by increasing the visibility of your brand.

High-quality content is optimized for popular search engine search terms, bringing your content further up search engine results pages (SERP). When scaling content, the trick is to reach the top Google spot for as many relevant search terms as possible. The more search terms you rank highly for, the greater your brand’s visibility. In turn, you’ll see a growth in lead generation.

But, scaling content without a plan can lead to a severe dip in quality. Without robust processes to ensure high quality and punctual delivery, you’ll struggle to get content out on time that connects with your audience. Make sure you’re employing strict procedures to scale content without dropping quality.

How to Scale Content: A step-by-step walkthrough

If you don’t scale your content in a systematic fashion, the quality of your content will suffer. Follow these steps to scale your content without sacrificing quality.

1. Create a robust SEO content marketing strategy

The best way to scale branded content is to give the audience what they want. The best way to know what they want is to understand the trends and issues in your industry. To get an idea of the trends in your industry, you need to analyze current search patterns.

This is a two-step process:

Perform an SEO audit + backlink analysis
Perform a SERP analysis

How to perform an SEO audit

Enter your website into SEO audit tools such as:

Ahrefs
Ubersuggest
Woorank
SEOrush

An SEO audit will show you your top-performing keywords and related keywords.

image: app.neilpatel These keywords show you what content people were searching for that led them to your site. By focusing on this popular content and your top keywords, you can scale content by covering these topics.

How to Perform a SERP Analysis

A SERP analysis shows you the top results for your focus keywords so you can see the types of content people are searching for. Identify the top keywords from your SEO audit and type these into Google one at a time. Note the types of content that Google returns as this is the type of value your content should add to the industry.

By targeting these keywords, you accomplish two things:

You create relevant content that captures your target audience.
You simultaneously build a robust SEO content marketing strategy to increase your visibility for these keywords in Google.

Keep in mind that your content should appeal to humans first. That’s why 60% of organizations prioritize customers’ informational needs over promotional content marketing. So, make sure you’re focusing SEO content on solving problems not selling products.

2. Plan Content Clusters

Your content structure should show in-depth expertise in your field. This architecture should also provide a map for Google to quickly search your site to rank it.

Over 55% of content marketers use a pillar and cluster content strategy to achieve this. Pillar articles are long topic guides that solve industry-specific issues. These articles should be between 2,000–4,000 words. Within these articles, link to shorter subsidiary articles, known as cluster content, that explain the sub-topics in depth.

Using this structure as a guide, it’s easier to scale the volume of content as you know which topics to tackle next. Equally, the internal linking between your articles scales the quality of the content by enhancing SEO. The knack to a killer cluster strategy is to build a connected architecture, so the more links the better. Almost a quarter of content marketers use over 30 links per article.

3. Structure your Content Library to Scale

Quality is important. But so is quantity and regularity.

Posting 16+ blogs per month leads to 3.5x more traffic than posting less than 4 blogs a month. To build content volume without dropping quality, plan to produce content in bulk for each sub-category. Choose four key topics and add five pieces of content to each per month. Try adding a pillar article, a cluster blog, a video, an infographic, and a podcast, for example.

The sleep guide, Sleep Junkie, does this by categorizing content by the problems it solves.

image: sleepjunkie Notice how the bold, illustrated hero images teamed with SEO title tags makes the content clear to both readers and search engines. Content is released regularly to meet high monthly volumes. By doing this, Sleep Junkie ranks for nearly 45,000 keywords and reaches over 18,000 monthly visitors.

4. Organize your Content Creation Process

Plan your end-to-end content process to create an actionable content calendar. This will keep you on track.

It should look something like this:

Plan
Outline
Draft
Edit
Optimize
Upload
Schedule/Release
Analyze performance (SEO rankings, visitors, click-through rates, etc)

To keep the content creation process on schedule, you can use content creation and workflow tools. Consider a tool like Trello or Asana to organize your content creation process. Use content tools to plan and organize content, standardize practices, assign tasks, and streamline content creation. That way, it’s easy to identify and fix bottlenecks in the content scaling process in real-time.

5. Hire a Content Team

To scale quickly, outsource to content writing professionals. Let’s be honest, 53% of companies admit they need an SEO writer and 63% of marketers admit that interpreting marketing analytics is tough.

By outsourcing to a content team, you’ll save time and money. Top content writers are experienced at interpreting content analytics to produce high-quality content fast, so you’ll get epic ROI.

Just look at web optimization agency, Crazyegg. After hiring a professional content team, Crazyegg now has 337K+ organic keywords, a Domain Authority score of 90, 2.8 million backlinks, and 440K+ monthly organic visitors!

6. Diversify Content Production

Think beyond blogs — adding more written content isn’t the only way to scale your content production.

For example, why not try supporting written content with video? Video content is highly shareable on social media, therefore it can be recycled across multiple platforms to scale its impact and reach. You can hire a video designer, enabling you to scale your content without overloading your content writers. That way you’ll not only be producing more content, but you’ll be producing more diversified content that reaches different types of audiences. After all, not everyone’s a reader.

Not only that, but video content gets the point across simply; without the need for lots of written text. This means you can scale up your message in a more succinct and professional way.

7. Create Multilingual Content

Scale content by translating existing branded content so it reaches an international target audience. This enables you to penetrate different search engines and scale a global link-building strategy.

Consider these statistics:

40% of consumers won’t buy products in other languages
65% of people prefer content in their native language
73% want to see reviews in their native language

Doesn’t it make sense, then, to scale content by creating multilingual articles, videos, images, and so on. That’s how Shutterstock reached over 170 countries with its “Creative Trends” infographic. By making the graphic available in 20 languages, the image was shared all over the globe.

Be aware of cultural idioms and slang when producing articles for multilingual purposes. Many phrases don’t directly translate, so make sure you hire a professional translator when scaling content production across multiple languages.

8. Streamline your Content Release Process

Don’t let your content bottleneck at liftoff. Around half of companies use a content management system to organize content but these tools don’t always help when it comes to migrating content.

So much time is wasted uploading and fiddling around with formatting. Use tools that streamline the content release process by helping you check content quality, upload content, and schedule it easily.