Why speed is a terrible content strategy

Let me tell you about a client conversation that made me need a brief lie-down.

A few weeks ago, a freelance client came to me with a mission. Bright-eyed, motivated, and armed with what he believed was a genuinely brilliant plan.

His close competitor had 87 blog posts on their site. He wanted 100 and he wanted them fast.

His logic, delivered with the confidence of a man who has just discovered the word “dominate”, was that more content online meant more authority.

More authority meant more traffic. More traffic meant more customers. Sorted.

Readers, I did not say what I wanted to say.

What I wanted to say was: “That is not how any of this works and also please let me finish my coffee.”

What I actually said, in my most diplomatic content-professional voice, was: “That’s an interesting approach. Can we talk about what you’re hoping each post will actually do?”

We talked. It took a while. And somewhere in that conversation, the outline for this post was born.

The competitor comparison trap

Here’s the thing about content volume as a competitive metric.

It’s seductive because it’s countable. You can see 87 posts. You can see 100 posts.

What you can’t easily see is whether any of those 87 posts are doing meaningful work, what their traffic looks like, whether anyone has ever shared one, or whether the person who wrote them is embarrassed by half of them and wishes they could delete them.

My client wasn’t looking at his competitor’s strategy. He was looking at his competitor’s output.

Those are completely different things and conflating them is the content version of counting how many books someone owns and assuming they’re smart.

You don’t know if those 87 posts are ranking. You don’t know if they were written in a sprint and forgotten. You don’t know if the competitor is now panicking about their bounce rate.

You just know there are 87 of them. So now you want 100, as if that’s a checkmate rather than a vanity metric dressed up in a spreadsheet.

The treadmill that goes nowhere

Publishing every day, or pursuing volume for volume’s sake, creates a particular kind of creative purgatory I’ve started calling the Content Treadmill. (Yes, I’m naming it. Watch me go.)

You’re moving constantly. You feel productive. You’re generating things.

But the ground underneath you isn’t going anywhere because each piece doesn’t get the time, depth, or promotion it needs to compound into anything as you’re too busy writing the next one.

I’ve watched writers do this to themselves. I’ve watched small teams do it to themselves.

I’ve watched clients request it from writers and three months later wonder why nothing seems to be working.

The answer is usually sitting in a folder full of 900-word posts that say the same three things in slightly different orders and have collectively attracted the Google equivalent of polite applause.

What compounding authority actually looks like

Here’s the genuinely interesting bit, and I want you to stay with me here because this is where publishing slowly and publishing well gets properly exciting.

Content authority compounds. Not linearly, not automatically, but it does compound, and it does so in ways that a pile of fast posts almost never can.

• A well-researched, genuinely useful post earns backlinks over time.
• Those backlinks build domain authority.
• That domain authority makes future posts rank faster and higher.
• A post that ranks for a useful keyword sends traffic to your other content.
• That content builds familiarity and trust.
• That trust converts into enquiries, subscribers and clients who already feel like they know you.

None of it happens when you’re producing content so quickly you can’t properly brief it, review it, promote it, or update it when it starts to age.

My client wanted to beat his competitor. What he actually needed was to write ten posts so good that people bookmarked them, cited them and sent them to colleagues.

Ten posts that answered real questions in depth, that showed off his expertise and that gave Google a clear signal about what his site was for.

That’s a competitive advantage his competitor wouldn’t be able to just out-publish.

The “more than my competitor” logic

Let’s be kind to the publish-everything impulse, because it comes from somewhere real.

It comes from the anxiety of feeling behind, of looking at another site and thinking it looks more authoritative than yours.

It comes from a world where everyone is loudly telling you that consistency is king and content is queen and something else is the prime minister (I’ve lost track).

But a competitor with 87 posts that are mostly thin, samey, and targeting identical keywords is not more authoritative than you. They’re just louder. And loud is not the same as trusted.

What my client’s competitor probably had, if we’re being precise about it, was a head start in terms of content history.

Some of those 87 posts were likely years old. That age and accrued link equity is real.

But you don’t overcome that by writing 100 posts quickly. You overcome it by writing content that earns attention, earns links and earns the kind of reader behaviour that tells Google this page is doing its job.

You can’t shortcut compounding. You can only start it earlier and feed it better.

The uncomfortable editing question

There’s another thing nobody mentions when they’re evangelising high-volume publishing and it’s this, who’s editing all of that?

My client’s 100-posts-fast plan didn’t include a serious editing budget.

It didn’t include a promotion plan. It didn’t include any thinking about keyword cannibalisation, content hierarchy, internal linking, or how a new visitor would navigate a site that had just had 100 posts dropped on it like a content piñata.

Fast publishing often means each post gets written, published and immediately forgotten in favour of writing the next one.

That’s not a strategy. That’s hoarding, but for blog posts.

I’ve edited enough content to tell you that ten well-planned, well-edited posts with a clear purpose and a coherent site structure will outperform a hundred posts that were rushed out because someone wanted a bigger number than their competitor.

What I actually recommended

In the end, my client and I landed somewhere sensible. We agreed on a content audit of what his competitor had, to identify genuine gaps rather than just chasing volume.

We built a plan around a small number of genuinely strong posts targeting topics where he had real expertise and where the competitor’s existing content was thin.

We stopped thinking about the number 100. We started thinking about what a useful post actually looks like, who it’s for and what someone does after they read it.

He published fewer posts. They were considerably better. One of them still generates enquiries.

That’s compounding authority. It’s slow, it’s undramatic, and it absolutely refuses to look impressive in a sprint.

But it’s real and it lasts and it beats a pile of 900-word posts that say the same thing slightly differently for as long as the internet exists.

Which, admittedly, might be a while.

So, stop counting your competitor’s posts. Start counting how many of yours are genuinely earning their place on your site. That’s the only scoreboard worth looking at.

If you’re looking for results rather than numbers, I can help.