Content Velocity: What Is It & How Can You Use It?

Content velocity is a metric that measures the amount of content you've published during a given time. It's a business's ability to create and distribute high-quality content at a fast pace. And is a key content marketing metric and helps to allocate budget and improves SEO over time.

In this article, we explain:

• What content velocity is and why it matters
• How to calculate your content velocity
• How to use the data to estimate costs and resources
• Takeaways to start tracking this vital benchmark

Follow our step-by-step guide to measuring content velocity and learn how to leverage it for competitive advantage.

What is Content Velocity?

Content velocity is the measure of the amount of content a brand produces during a defined period of time. It's not just about producing a high volume of content; it's about producing high-quality content that resonates with your audience. It involves finding the right balance between quality and quantity, so you're not sacrificing one for the other.

Why is Content Velocity Important?

Content velocity is important for several reasons:

1. Increased visibility: The more high-quality content you produce and distribute, the more visibility you gain in search engine results.
2. Competitive advantage: If you're producing high-quality SEO content at a faster rate than your competitors, you have a significant advantage. You'll rank for more keywords and get more traffic.
3. Resource allocation: Measuring content velocity can help you make a case for more resources to create content, especially if you're ranking lower on Google compared to competitors.
4. Estimating costs: You can use content velocity to estimate how much money is being spent on content across your competitors, measure content marketing ROI and how much it will potentially cost you internally.

How to Calculate Content Velocity

Calculating content velocity can range from simple to complex. In its simplest form, you can do it using standard tools that most SEOs have access to like SEMrush and Screaming Frog.

Here's a basic step-by-step guide:

1. Get the blog/article pages that exist on a site using SEMrush, filter down to those pages using the URL filter function, and export the final list.
2. Take those URLs and put the list into Screaming Frog and set up a custom extraction. This will pull in the publish date that will allow you to analyze how often content is being created for a site during a certain period of time.
3. Once the crawl is run through the URLs, you will then have a list that pulls out the publish dates. That will allow you to pivot the data and see the amount of content that is being created for a given site during a certain period of time.
4. Repeat this process for all of your competitors and get the basic velocity metric to compare who is winning and losing.

To go deeper and provide additional layers of insight, you can also look at metrics such as word count. This not only allows you to see how long each piece of content is for a site on average but also estimate the cost a competitor is spending on each page.

How to Calculate Content Velocity with ChatGPT

Using ChatGPT, you can upload all the files exported from your SEO tools, and then ask it to calculate a content velocity score based on your data. Consider using a custom GPT where you can upload data from your CMS like Wordpress. You can then use the CSV files and prompt ChatGPT about it. Or even produce more content with a custom GPT like GPTWriter

Conclusion

Content velocity is a key metric in content marketing and SEO. It provides valuable insights into your content production rate compared to your competitors, helping you make informed decisions about resource allocation and strategy. While it can be time-consuming to calculate, the insights gained are invaluable for staying competitive and achieving success in your content marketing efforts.