You don't have a content problem. You have a nothing-to-say problem.

“We need to be posting more.”

I’ve heard that sentence, or a close relative of it, for 20 years. I’ve never once heard it followed by what they wanted to say. Ask the second question and the room goes quiet for long enough to be uncomfortable.

That silence is the actual problem. The publishing cadence isn’t a resourcing issue and it isn’t a channel issue. Volume is what an organisation produces when it doesn’t have a position, because output is measurable and a position requires somebody to commit to something.

Here’s the test, and it takes 5 seconds. Could a reasonable person in your industry read what you published and disagree with it? If not, you didn’t publish a point of view. You published furniture.

The distributor told you what it would remove

Google’s March 2024 core update came with 3 new spam policies, one of them called scaled content abuse. The wording is worth reading carefully. It applies to pages generated primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help people, and Google was explicit that it applies “no matter whether content is produced through automation, human efforts, or some combination of human and automated processes.”

Google said at the time it expected the combined changes to reduce unoriginal, unhelpful content in search results by 40%. By the end of April it said 45%.

Read that as a market signal rather than an algorithm update. The distributor of your content publicly announced it was removing 40% of the supply, and defined the removable portion as the part with nothing original in it. Whether it hit that figure isn’t the point. The direction is the point, and it hasn’t reversed since.

Meanwhile the cost of producing a competent 900-word article on any subject fell to roughly nothing. Median output now has no scarcity value and no distribution. Both of its advantages went in the same 18 months.

How organisations end up with nothing to say

Not through laziness. Through 3 mechanisms, all of them well-intentioned.

Publishing gets delegated to whoever has the least at stake. A position can only come from someone who has paid for one. When the calendar belongs to the person furthest from the customer, the safest possible output is the rational output.

The review process removes anything arguable. Every sentence with a sharp edge gets softened by somebody protecting a relationship. By the fourth round the piece is unobjectionable, which is another way of saying nobody has any reason to read it. Death by consensus is the most common cause of bad publishing I’ve seen, and every individual edit was defensible.

Cadence becomes the metric. Once “2 posts a week” is on a dashboard, the job is filling slots. Nobody gets in trouble for publishing something dull on time. Plenty of people get in trouble for publishing something interesting late.

The result is an archive that could be lifted wholesale onto a competitor’s site with no edits required, and nobody would notice. If that’s true of your blog, your blog isn’t underperforming. It’s working exactly as designed.

The bar

Two questions before anything goes out. I use them on my own writing and they kill more drafts than they pass.

1. Would I say this out loud to a customer who’s paying me?
2. Does it contain something only I could have written?

The second one is the load-bearing question. Restating public knowledge is what everyone else is doing, and it was already a weak strategy when it took a person a day. Now that it takes 40 seconds, it’s not a strategy at all.

Something only you could have written isn’t a high bar. It’s a specific one. It means your own numbers, your own failure, your own process or a position you’d be prepared to defend in a room full of people who do what you do.

What to do about it

Name the person who’d argue with it. Before publishing, say out loud who in your industry would push back on this piece and what they’d say. If nobody comes to mind, you haven’t written anything. Put it in a drawer.

Cut the cadence to what you can defend. One piece a month with a real position beats 8 with none, and it costs less. The 8 aren’t building an audience, they’re building an archive nobody has read, which is a liability now rather than an asset.

Publish your own data instead of the industry’s. You know your close rate, your rework rate, what a project actually costs you against what you quoted. Anonymised and careful, that’s information nobody else has. Everything you’re currently citing from a report is available to every competitor for free.

Write down the thing you keep saying on calls. Every operator has 3 or 4 opinions they repeat to every client because they’re right and nobody believes them yet. That’s your archive. It’s already written, it’s just been delivered verbally for years.

Let one person write it. Committee prose has no position by construction. If it needs approval, approve the facts and leave the argument alone.

The uncomfortable diagnosis is that most businesses publishing twice a week don’t need a content strategy. They need to decide what they think.

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Sources: Google Search Central, Google Search Spam Policies and Core Updates. Google Search Central Blog, What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies, 5 March 2024. Google, New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search, 5 March 2024, updated 26 April 2024.