Content Strategy: What Every Business Needs to Know

Why the old volume playbook stopped working

Google’s Medic update in August 2018 had pushed E-A-T, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, from an obscure phrase in Google’s quality rater guidelines into something every content team had to take seriously by 2019. Sites that had built traffic on volume, dozens of thin articles published every month, were the ones that got hit hardest, especially in health, finance and other categories where inaccurate advice carries real consequences. For a business deciding how to invest in content, that shift changed the calculation completely.

When content strategy is worth building around

Content strategy earns its keep for businesses that can speak from real experience or expertise in their category: a bakery that can write credibly about ingredients, a financial advisor who can explain a real client scenario, a software company whose engineers can explain how something works. If your team has real knowledge to share and the patience to demonstrate it consistently, 2019’s algorithm changes rewarded exactly that.

When it’s the wrong first move

If a business has no one on staff who can speak credibly about the topic, buying cheap, generic articles from a content mill was a worse bet in 2019 than it had ever been. Thin, generic content wasn’t just ineffective, it was now a liability that could drag down the credibility of everything else on the site.

What it costs now

Costs had shifted rather than dropped. Producing fewer, deeper pieces, backed by real time from someone who is knowledgeable in the subject, cost more per article than the old volume approach, but each piece needed to work far harder and for far longer to justify that.

The most common mistake businesses were making

Many businesses kept publishing on the same schedule they’d used for years without ever going back to prune or update older content, leaving a site with hundreds of thin, outdated pages sitting alongside newer, stronger work. Consolidating or removing weak old content, rather than only adding new content on top of it, became one of the highest-leverage moves a team could make in 2019, and one of the most overlooked.

A simple way to decide where to start

Audit what’s already published before adding anything new. Identify the handful of pages showing real traffic or credibility potential, invest in deepening those with genuine expertise and either update or remove the rest. Only after that cleanup does it make sense to plan new content, because a strategy built on top of a weak foundation just multiplies the problem instead of solving it.

More from the archive: browse the Content Marketing category or see everything published in 2019.