Rethinking company's monthly content production process.

[SeoWebMechanix]

I'm trying to rethink my company's content production process. I believe that we're stuck using a formula that works but can surely be improved.

Our Current Process

It essentially boils down to posting a certain number of content pieces per month for each client. After the pages are approved and live, there isn't much thought given to them.

What We're Thinking

After taking a step back, we realize now that a lot of these clients have sites with a tremendous amount of content that is rarely, if ever, revisited. In hopes of creating higher quality content and avoiding having to write that certain number of pieces per month, we're investigating alternative strategies to ensure each client has fresh content.

What We're Looking Into

Page Edits/Refreshes - I'm beginning to wonder if we can get similar gains by simply refreshing the content that already exists. We can include additional keywords and improve the content in a fraction of the time that it takes to produce a new piece.

We're struggling to come up with a process for refreshing the content, however. Ideally we'd be implementing a process where content is revisited 6-12 months, but that still doesn't take care of the problem of creating too much new content.

Simplified Version

I believe that my company is creating too much content. Editing/refreshing seems like a better use of resources, but I have no idea how to implement a process and develop procedures.

Questions

1. What does your content production process look like? Do you produce a certain number a month, a quarter, as needed, etc?
2. How do you go about refreshing your content?

[SeoWebMechanix]

I believe that less quantity and more quality is going to be the answer in this situation. Rather than creating multiple new content pieces each month, we should create just one premium content piece and divert our other resources link building for that premium content.

This sounds like an easy solution but putting it into practice is going to be difficult. It's easy to say that we're going to focus our energies on doing more great things and less good things, however it's often more difficult and it's less certain.

Reasons for multiple content pieces:

1. We're constantly producing indexable content.
2. We're sure to cover more ground when trying to rank for longtail keywords within a niche

Reasons for a single premium piece of content

1. Better long term strategy
2. Helps with link building efforts
3. Reduces website swelling (contractors often don't need 200+ pages of content)

Has anyone else working on content struggled with this kind of balance?

[SeoWebMechanix]

Your article was a great read!

1. Google Sets (living on in docs) is a brilliant find. That's definitely going to be added to our process.

2. Making a page "media rich" is also the perfect way to describe what we need to be doing. Producing varied, resourceful content seems like the kind of long-term strategy we need when creating content (especially after Google's own debacle with "thin content".

3. I never got a chance to use the LDA tool. I recall reading about it a few months ago, becoming tremendously excited, then finding no trace of it on the SEOMoz tools section. What happened to it?

[EGOL]

What does your content production process look like? Do you produce a certain number a month, a quarter, as needed, etc?

We are a small company with all aspects of the web done in-house for a few websites.  Two people work full time on content creation and site maintenance.

How do you go about refreshing your content?

For our two retail sites there is no content refreshing... only new content creation.

On the information sites content is created daily... there is no refreshing other than genuine updates when content is out of date. However most pages of content have a list of related blog posts and lists of related articles.  These are updated several times per day as new content is added to the blog and as new pieces of content go live.  The homepage is updated several times per day with featured content items from a database.  The content does not change, just what is featured changes.

[SparkplugDigital]

In Danny Dover's book Search Engine Optimization Secrets he writes that each page on your site should be at least a little link worthy. If you think that updating or improving a page gives you a better chance of earning more links than creating a new page, then I would consider the former.

[firstconversion]

Interesting question, although very hard to give much specific advise without understanding a lot more about your site

1 You content production process should be driven by the keywords you are trying to tagert, woven into your site architecture; spewing out a lot of content randomly is a bad return v.s. targeted, educated content development

2 I wrote before on how to put together a process for improving site content http://unbounce.com/seo/a-5-step-process-for-content-optimization/ WIth the death of SOEmozs LDA tool, its a bit harder, but I think the learnings are the same

I think in general, smaller numbers of pages with better content is going to be much better than many mediocre pages (hello, panda!)

Cheers

S