A client sent me a spreadsheet last week. Four hundred and twelve rows, one per blog post, everything they had published since 2019. There was a traffic column. Somewhere around August it went flat and stayed flat.
They wanted to know what to publish next.
I wanted to know why they had published any of it.
The honest answer, once we got three cups of Ovation deep into the conversation, was that somebody in 2019 had said the word cadence and nobody had questioned it since. Twice a week, forever. A calendar with no argument underneath it.
A publishing schedule is a logistics decision, and somewhere along the way a lot of us started presenting logistics as strategy.
Google spent this fall making that expensive. The helpful content work and the core updates that followed did not punish blogs. They punished blogs that existed to occupy a keyword, which is most of them. If your post could have been written by anyone holding the same search tool, with no particular relationship to the subject, it now reads that way to a machine too.
Here is the part that gets lost. The fix is not fewer posts. The fix is a reason.
Three questions I put to every content audit now. One, what does this brand know that its competitors do not? Not opinions. Knowledge, earned by doing the work. Two, who is specifically worse off for not reading this? If the answer is a persona document, delete the post. Three, would you send this to one customer, by name, unprompted? That is the whole bar, and almost nothing clears it.
Salt & Straw writes about ingredients because they go find the ingredients. Patagonia writes about repair because they repair things. The writing sits downstream of an actual practice, and you cannot reverse the arrow. You cannot decide to have a content strategy and then go looking for something to know.
Which is why the audit usually ends somewhere uncomfortable. The problem is rarely the blog. The problem is that the company has not decided what it is for, and the blog has been quietly covering for that decision at a rate of two posts a week for four years.
You cannot decide to have a content strategy and then go looking for something to know.
I have kept this blog since 2017 and I have missed plenty of weeks. Nobody has ever written in to complain about the gaps. Truffles and Barnaby have never once asked about my cadence. What they notice is whether I turn up with something worth their attention, and on that narrow question they are excellent editors.