What Is the Importance of Content Velocity for a Healthcare Website

Just when you thought you understood healthcare SEO and healthcare content marketing, along comes another new term —Content velocity.

Most traditional marketers don’t talk about it, but it’s arguably one of the most important factors in getting good search results promptly. It’s about how much content you create during a specific period.

Experts often measure content velocity in months, quarters, or years. For example, if you wanted to measure your content velocity over the most recent month, you would calculate how much you produced in 30 days.

In this article, we’ll explore how to calculate content velocity and why it matters, especially for new healthcare websites. We’ll show you how to publish more content more efficiently, so you can generate better results and rank higher in search engines.

Calculating Content Velocity

How you calculate content production is a matter of preference. Some people measure it in terms of pages, URLs, word counts, or other metrics. For healthcare SEO purposes, we usually measure it in terms of pages.

Your success depends on factors like:

• how much quality content you already have
• the current state of your SEO strategy
• the competitiveness within your space
• your average competitor’s content velocity

Why Content Velocity Matters in Healthcare Content Marketing

There’s an ongoing debate over quantity versus quality in the world of healthcare SEO and digital marketing. Any qualified healthcare content marketing agency will tell you that patients equate content quality with practice quality.

But here’s the thing: quality and quantity don’t have to conflict. When you choose a quality-first approach, it doesn’t have to mean low quantity. You can still produce quantity and quality at the same time and benefit from the power of content velocity.

Content velocity matters most in terms of:

Your Competition

Your competition is a defining factor. Everything you do relates to what other practices and websites in your specialty are doing.

Let’s say you have three competitors who post new content 8, 12, and 16 times per month, respectively. You should post at least 16 times per month to achieve competitive velocity. If you post 20 times per month, you’ll gain a competitive advantage.

By focusing on content velocity, you’ll have a better understanding of your competitors’ strategies and better insights into your competitive landscape.

Your User Experience

Your patient prospects live in a world where information is ubiquitous. They can access their preferred content when and where they need it. If your practice publishes little or no content, your patients will wonder why, and you’ll be invisible to prospects.

Content creation and transparency go hand in hand. The more content you publish, the more transparent you appear. And that elevates the overall user experience with your brand.

Healthcare SEO

Search engines crawl, index, and rank website content. The more content you produce, the more web crawler engagement you’ll gain. Over time, your commitment to producing more content will improve your SEO and search engine rankings.

Creating Value

Velocity is also about creating value. Quality content communicates your value to a very specific group of patients and prospects. The more quality you have, the more your patients and prospects trust you as a valuable source of healthcare knowledge and information.

Strategic Vision

If you are only producing content here and there, you’re missing a strategic vision. High content velocity forces you to develop one. Your vision will bring clarity to everything you do in practice marketing.

How Do You Publish More Content Faster?

Now that we’ve described what content velocity is and why it matters, let’s explore how you can achieve it for your practice. Here are some helpful tips for producing more content without sacrificing quality.

Start With a Detailed Roadmap

If you want to publish a certain amount of content, you need a detailed roadmap that helps you get there. When you create your roadmap, consider how much content you want, along with topics, keywords, word count, and publish dates. The more detailed your roadmap, the more likely you’ll follow through.

Create Specific Workflows

Producing content at scale requires a great deal of efficiency and specific workflows.

You’ll find that most workflow inefficiencies come from hand-offs between team members. They might complete the actual writing, editing, proofreading, and publishing quickly. But, if that work doesn’t go from your writer to your editor, proofreader, and publisher just as quickly, the whole process can slow dramatically.

Make your workflows faster and more predictable by reducing the number of team members involved. Having four different people review content before it goes live will lead to four revision requests and four opinions about the overall direction.

Document your workflows by creating standard operating procedures. This ensures your workflows remain intact even when there’s turnover on your team. As you develop efficient workflows, you’ll see your content velocity improve.

Work With Good Writers

Good writers can produce quality SEO-optimized content that makes your practice look good. Their availability should align with your content needs. For example, if you need your next blog in three days, you can’t afford to wait for a writer who won’t be available for three weeks.

Content writers should also be reliable. If you assign a project with a specific deadline, you should have total confidence that the writer will meet it.

Progress Over Perfection

When your goal is high velocity, you should focus on progress over perfection. It’s better to publish 100 blog posts that are 90 percent “perfect” than to publish 10 perfect blog posts. In the world of SEO and Google metrics, you’ll reap greater rewards and bee seen as more authoritative for publishing more good content than you will for publishing perfect content.

Learn How to Splinter Content

Producing anything creative takes time, money, and energy. That’s why content splintering is so important. It maximizes every piece you create for multiple uses.

Think of content splintering as a tree. That’s your main topic. Then, you chop that tree into smaller pieces. And each of those pieces can also be chopped up until one idea turns into ideas for all your platforms. For example, you could split up one 2,000-word blog post and publish it on multiple channels. You could use it for a podcast episode, a YouTube video, or a web landing page. You could even break it up into ten social media posts or several emails.

Longer blog posts are more suitable for a content-splintering strategy. The bottom line is you’ll gain greater versatility from a 2,000-word post than from a 1,000-word post.

If you’re interested in increasing your website’s content velocity and generating better results from your SEO and content creation investments, find a savvy healthcare content marketing agency that can help. To learn more, contact practice builders.