A 90-Day Content Velocity Plan for 20 Sites

This 90-day plan provides an analytical, step-by-step framework to scale content production across 20 sites while preserving quality, governance, and measurable SEO outcomes.

Key Takeaways

• Plan structure: Translate high-level publishing goals into tiered cadences, clear SOPs, and measurable KPIs to create predictable content velocity.
• Quality controls: Use multi-layer QA (automated + editorial + SEO) with tiered sign-offs to prevent quality erosion while scaling.
• Operational backbone: Maintain a single tracking sheet with automated data pulls and publish webhooks to enable timely decisions and performance attribution.
• Capacity modeling: Convert article volumes into role-based hours and FTE estimates to decide between in-house hiring and external sourcing.
• Iterative learning: Run controlled experiments, measure outcomes, and refine briefs and SOPs each sprint to improve ROI over time.

Plan overview and measurable objectives

The plan frames content velocity as an operational system rather than a vague target: it defines weekly cadences, queue depth, quality checkpoints, responsibilities, and the KPI set that validates success. By translating strategic objectives into measurable tasks, the team can track progress, identify bottlenecks, and allocate resources with precision.

An effective measurement strategy separates output metrics (posts published, word count, time to publish) from outcome metrics (impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, engagement, conversions). For short windows such as 30–90 days, early signals—impressions, CTR, and time-on-page—provide actionable feedback for optimization even if full organic gains unfold over several months. Integrating Google Search Console and Google Analytics is essential for automated tracking; the Google Search Central and Google Analytics documentation should guide setup.

Site tiering: prioritize effort and budget

Tiering creates a rational allocation of editorial attention and spend. The team should score each site using consistent, quantifiable metrics: historical organic traffic, topical relevance, content gaps, monetization efficiency (revenue per visitor or conversion rate), backlink profile, and technical health (crawlability, Core Web Vitals).

Suggested scoring rubric (example):

• Traffic score: recent 90-day organic sessions normalized across the portfolio.

• Monetization score: revenue per thousand visitors (RPM) or conversion rate.

• Growth potential: share of keywords ranking pages 5–30 that could move into the top 3 with optimization.

• Technical score: crawl errors, mobile friendliness, and Core Web Vitals health.

Sites with the highest composite scores become Tier 1 – Flagship. The plan recommends a conservative split for 20 sites: 3 Tier 1, 7 Tier 2, 10 Tier 3, but the distribution must be defensible via the scorecard.

Posting cadence: how often each tier publishes

Cadence selection should reflect resource reality and an evidence-based view of diminishing returns. Higher volume carries higher marginal editorial cost and more complex QA. Two models—aggressive and sustainable—offer contrasts in staffing and risk.

Model: Aggressive velocity

This model suits organizations with established SEO wins and the budget to staff rapidly. It accelerates topical coverage and long-tail keyword capture but increases the likelihood of quality drift if governance is weak.

• Tier 1: 3 posts/week per site.

• Tier 2: 2 posts/week per site.

• Tier 3: 1 post/week per site.

The example aggregate of ~429 posts over 90 days requires a detailed resourcing plan and automation to avoid operational overload.

Model: Sustainable velocity

This model balances quality and throughput, suitable for teams with limited hiring bandwidth or sites that value reputation preservation over raw volume.

• Tier 1: 2 posts/week per site.

• Tier 2: 1 post/week per site.

• Tier 3: 1 post every two weeks per site.

Approximately 229 posts over 90 days allows more robust QA, revision cycles, and topical research per article. The team can treat this as a baseline and increase volume for high-performing topics.

Queueing: the production pipeline and lead time

Queue design is a primary determinant of operational predictability. Stages should be explicit and measurable: ideation → research/brief → draft → editing → SEO QA → images/formatting → publish → post-publish checks. Every item in the queue should have a timestamped SLA for moving between stages.

Lead times should be tailored by tier and complexity. Example lead time policy:

• Tier 1: 10–14 days to account for deeper research, SME review, and richer assets.

• Tier 2: 7–10 days, balancing depth and throughput.

• Tier 3: 3–7 days for lighter briefs and faster publishing.

The team should maintain a buffer of 2–3 weeks of ready-to-publish content per tier. Buffering reduces the risk that editorial or technical delays break the cadence.

Detailed production stages and what to include at each step

Each stage benefits from a short SOP and a checklist to ensure consistency and measurable quality. Below are expanded requirements and practical examples for each stage.

Ideation

• Inputs: keyword research, customer support queries, transactional data, and competitor content gaps.

• Documentation: record the primary keyword, search intent (informational, commercial investigation, transactional), target user persona, and why the piece matters to the site.

• Prioritization: assign an expected impact score using reach (search volume), difficulty, and monetary value.

Research and brief

• Components: target word count, H1/H2 outline, primary and secondary keywords, at least three competitor URLs, required data sources, internal links to include, and target CTAs.

• Time-box: briefs should be created in 25–60 minutes for mid-tier topics; complex investigative pieces may require several hours of scoping.

Drafting

• Writer expectations: follow the brief closely, mark unverifiable claims, and include source references inline or as a bibliography section.

• AI usage: if AI assists drafting, require an explicit flag in the document and a short note on prompt engineering and sources used; the human author is responsible for accuracy.

Editing

• Editorial checklist: clarity, tone alignment, accuracy, brand voice, structural flow, and readability (Flesch score or similar where relevant).

• Plagiarism & grammar: run Copyscape and Grammarly or equivalent tools; flag content for rewrite if overlap exceeds policy thresholds.

SEO QA

• On-page checks: meta title and description optimization, canonical tags, H1/H2 consistency, schema implementation for reviews/SERP features, image alt text, and internal linking to priority pages.

• Topical completeness: compare the draft to SurferSEO or Clearscope recommendations to ensure minimum topical coverage; use these as guidance rather than strict rules.

Final formatting and publish

• Assets: check image optimization (WebP where appropriate), compressed file sizes, captions, and accessibility attributes. Use a CDN for media delivery when possible.

• Scheduling: schedule publication in WordPress using historical traffic windows; for new sites or topics, prefer steady publishing days to help crawl predictability.

Post-publish checks

• Indexing: verify indexing via Google Search Console and request indexing where necessary.

• Initial measurement: tag the article in the tracking sheet with baseline impressions, clicks, and tests to run (headline A/B, internal link boost).

Multi-layer QA: protect quality while scaling

A tiered QA approach balances throughput and risk: automation filters obvious failures while human reviewers catch nuance. The plan recommends at least three tiers of checks: automated, editorial, and SEO.

Automation examples include plagiarism scans, broken link checks, image size audits, basic accessibility validations, and schema validation. For automation, tools like Screaming Frog and CI-style checks integrated into the publishing pipeline reduce manual effort.

For high-value Tier 1 content, add optional SME review and legal clearance where claims could create liability, and require sign-off from a senior editor before publish.

Tracking sheet: the single source of truth

The tracking sheet should be treated as operational infrastructure. It must be writable, auditable, and partially automated so that stakeholders can trust its data. Use Google Sheets for flexibility or Airtable for richer data types and integrations.

Automation should include:

• Search Console impressions and clicks pulled weekly via the Search Console API.

• Publish events pushed from WordPress via webhooks to update actual publish dates and URLs.

• Performance annotations for experiments (headline A/B, internal linking lifts) stored alongside the content row.

Delegation: roles, responsibilities, and SOPs

Clear role definitions and SLAs are essential to avoid bottlenecks and decision paralysis. The operational matrix should specify who can approve what, escalation thresholds, and the SLA targets by tier.

Example SLAs by tier:

• Tier 1: draft return within 72 hours, editor review within 48 hours, SEO QA within 24 hours.

• Tier 2: draft return within 5 days, editor review within 48 hours, SEO QA within 48 hours.

• Tier 3: draft return within 7 days, combined editor/publisher action within 48–72 hours.

Governance must prevent role conflict. The SEO analyst should provide optimization guidance but not act as sole quality sign-off to avoid releasing content biased toward short-term ranking tricks that harm user experience.

Tools and integrations to support the plan

Tool choice should prioritize reliable integrations with WordPress and the tracking sheet. Key categories and examples include:

• Project management: Trello, Asana, Airtable for visual pipelines and automated status updates.

• Keyword & competitive research: Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz to prioritize topics and monitor competitor moves.

• On-page guidance: SurferSEO, Clearscope for topic modeling.

• Grammar & plagiarism: Grammarly, Copyscape.

• Publishing: WordPress plus editorial plugins such as Edit Flow or PublishPress and SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math.

• Automation: Zapier, Make (Integromat), or native API integrations to reduce manual handoffs.

Where possible, automate publish events to push into the tracking sheet and trigger post-publish monitoring jobs (indexing checks, schema validation, initial performance pull).

Capacity planning and workload estimates

Accurate capacity planning prevents chronic backlog or uncontrolled quality lapses. The team should model workloads by combining article volumes with stage-level time estimates, then translate hours into FTE equivalents.

Example time budget for a mid-tier article (average complexity):

• Brief creation: 30–45 minutes

• Drafting: 90–180 minutes

• Editing: 45–90 minutes

• SEO QA & formatting: 30–60 minutes

• Publishing & checks: 15–30 minutes

If the average article requires ~4 hours of human work and the plan calls for 300 articles in 90 days (~100 articles/month), the human effort equals 400 hours/month. Dividing by a standard 160 working hours per full-time editor yields ~2.5 FTEs across writing and editing roles—adjusted for overhead, leave, and management time.

For budgeting, the plan should compare costs of in-house FTEs vs. freelance rates vs. agency retainers, factoring in ramp time and quality variance. Outsourcing drafting accelerates throughput but increases editing and QA costs if quality is inconsistent.

Editorial policies, compliance, and risk management

Scaling content production increases exposure to legal and reputational risks. Policies should be explicit and embedded into the SOPs and publishing checklist.

• Plagiarism policy: zero tolerance and automated checks before publishing.

• Fact-checking: all factual claims must have an inline source or footnote; data points originating from internal analytics should be flagged and dated.

• Expert review: for medical, financial, or legal topics, require SME sign-off or avoid prescriptive advice; see general editorial policies outlined by major publishers such as the New York Times editorial policy for model governance practices.

• Affiliate and ad disclosures: make disclosures prominent per FTC guidelines and platform policies.

• Cross-site linking: ensure links are relevant and disclose network relationships where necessary; follow Google webmaster guidelines to avoid manipulative linking patterns.

Measurement and review cadence

Regular, structured reviews turn data into decisions. The plan recommends a multi-horizon review cadence:

• Weekly: publish count, queue health, SLA adherence, site-technical alerts (crawl errors, indexing issues).

• Bi-weekly: early content performance (7–14 day metrics), headline tests, and internal-link experiments.

• Monthly: cross-site traffic trends, ranking movements, and conversion performance for monetized pages.

• Quarterly: full ROI review of the 90-day program—compare planned vs. actual outputs, engagement trends, revenue per site, and re-tiering decisions.

Key analysis questions for each review include: Did newly published content reach expected search visibility? Which topics outperformed and why? Were there consistent editorial quality issues? The data should drive tactical changes to briefs, QA, and staffing.

Sample 90-day calendar and sprint priorities

Viewing the 90 days as three 30-day sprints reduces cognitive load and clarifies priorities.

• Month 1 – Stabilize and queue: finalize site tiering, hire or contract to fill obvious gaps, build a 2–3 week publish-ready buffer for Tier 1 and Tier 2, and pilot automation for publish-event updates.

• Month 2 – Ramp and optimize: escalate publishing to target cadence, run controlled SEO experiments (headline variants, internal link patterns), and stress-test QA under load.

• Month 3 – Measure and refine: analyze 30/60 day performance, reassign resources to highest ROI sites, refine briefs and templates based on early results, and document learnings for the next cycle.

Content lifecycle management: refresh, retire, or consolidate

Publishing is not a one-way activity; content ages and requires lifecycle decisions. The team should track content decay and create a refresh cadence to preserve ranking and relevance.

Recommended lifecycle actions:

• Refresh content every 6–12 months if it still ranks and drives traffic—update facts, add new sections, and re-optimize keywords.

• Consolidate similar low-performing posts into a stronger, canonical resource to prevent cannibalization and thin content issues.

• Retire obsolete content (broken products, outdated regulatory guidance) after archiving and redirecting to relevant pages.

Automate alerts for pages with declining traffic or drops in impressions so the analyst can triage refresh opportunities.

Backlink and promotion strategy aligned to cadence

Organic ranking gains are accelerated when content receives relevant promotion. The plan recommends pairing higher-value Tier 1 content with a modest promotional budget to attract initial links and shares.

Promotion tactics:

• Outreach: targeted outreach to niche bloggers and journalists for anchor link opportunities on Tier 1 pieces.

• Internal promotion: schedule social posts, newsletters, and cross-site internal links during the first two weeks of publication.

• Repurposing: turn flagship posts into short video clips, infographics, or podcasts to broaden distribution and attract links.

Scaling AI responsibly in writing workflows

AI can speed drafting and ideation, but it introduces risks if used without guardrails. The team should adopt an AI usage policy that clarifies acceptable use, verification responsibilities, and transparency requirements.

AI governance components:

• Attribution: record when AI contributed and the prompts used for traceability.

• Verification: require human verification of facts and primary sources, especially for high-risk content areas.

• Quality gate: treat AI drafts as first drafts that must pass editorial and SEO QA before publishing.

• Ethical checks: screen for hallucinations and biased language; use tools to flag problematic claims.

Organizations should consider vendor policies and regulatory guidance; for example, general AI usage guidance is available from major platform providers such as OpenAI, and the team should monitor evolving best practices.

Training, onboarding, and knowledge retention

A scaling program must invest in onboarding and knowledge capture to maintain consistency. Short practical training modules reduce iteration waste and speed ramp time for new writers or freelancers.

Recommended onboarding sequence:

• Week 0: brand voice, editorial policies, and SOP walkthrough.

• Week 1: a paid test brief with feedback cycle; require at least one revision before granting unrestricted assignments.

• Ongoing: monthly training sessions on SEO updates, SERP features, and internal learnings from experiments.

Maintain a central knowledge base with templates, exemplar articles, and a change log for SOP updates to avoid repeating mistakes.

Common failure modes and remediation playbook

When scaling rapidly, the same predictable failure modes recur. The plan recommends a short remediation playbook linked in the tracking sheet.

• If quality drift appears: pause Tier 3 publishing, run a spot audit of 10% of recent articles, and require re-training for the affected writers.

• If indexing fails: run immediate technical audits (robots.txt, canonical tags, sitemap), and request reindexing via Search Console.

• If impressions are low after 30 days: run a SERP features analysis to see if the content matches intent, adjust H1 and meta descriptions, and re-promote where appropriate.

Experiment design: how to run reliable content tests

Experiments should be controlled, measurable, and small enough to be reversible. Each experiment needs a hypothesis, metric(s), sample size, and a run-time window.

Example experiment template:

• Hypothesis: Changing meta title structure to include the year will increase CTR by X%.

• Metric: CTR and impressions from Search Console.

• Sample: 40 similar pages split into control and treatment groups across two sites to minimize domain-specific bias.

• Run-time: 30–60 days to gather sufficient impressions for statistical significance.

ROI measurement: cost per published page and payback horizon

Evaluating the program requires estimating the cost-per-article and the expected payback period. The analysis should include direct content costs (writing, editing, imagery), tooling, and overhead (management, QA time).

Example cost model:

• Average writer cost: $100–$300 per article (varies by market).

• Editor cost: $20–$60 per article.

• Tooling & overhead: amortized $10–$50 per article depending on scale.

Divide total cost per article by the expected monthly revenue per organic visitor and the traffic estimate to calculate a payback window. For example, if an article costs $200 and is expected to earn $20/month in incremental revenue after ranking, the payback is ~10 months. The team should prefer experiments with shorter predicted payback windows while allowing strategic pieces longer horizons.

Practical tips and optimizations

Operational refinements compound over time and increase efficiency without adding staff. The plan recommends:

• Templates: standardized briefs, SEO checklists, and editorial guidelines to reduce briefing time and variance.

• Batching: create opportunities to batch similar tasks, such as image sourcing or fact-checking, to lower time-per-article.

• Repurposing: extract short posts from long-form pieces for Tier 3, or turn posts into newsletters and social posts to extend reach.

• AI-assisted workflows: use AI for summarization, meta description drafts, or outline generation, but keep human review mandatory.

• Internal linking plan: map pillar pages and cluster content to direct internal links from Tier 2 and Tier 3 content to Tier 1 pillars, prioritizing user relevance and SEO benefit.

Example tracking sheet automation ideas

Automation examples accelerate decision loops and reduce manual workload. Practical automations include:

• Publish webhook: WordPress triggers an update to the tracking sheet and the performance dashboard when a post goes live.

• Search Console sync: weekly import of impressions, clicks, and CTR for newly published pages.

• Alerting: automated emails or Slack messages for critical failures (indexing errors, pages with zero impressions after 14 days).

Delegation decision matrix: in-house vs. freelance vs. agency

The team should choose a hybrid model for most portfolios. Strategy, editing, publishing, and governance typically remain in-house, while drafting and visual production can be outsourced to scale quickly. A short onboarding test project for each new freelancer or agency reduces the risk of quality surprises.

Frequently encountered pitfalls and how to avoid them

Anticipating common pitfalls allows the team to put pre-mortems in place:

• Quality erosion: prevent with spot audits, training refreshers, and temporary cadence reduction if issues are widespread.

• Data lag: mitigate through API integrations and near-real-time dashboards.

• Operational silos: prevent by insisting on a single tracking sheet and cross-site standups to share learnings and avoid duplicated effort.

• Over-indexing on volume: ensure leadership evaluates outcome metrics and ROI, not just publish totals.

• Compliance lapses: enforce content flags for regulated topics and elevate to SME review automatically.

How to test and iterate the plan

Iteration requires small, measurable tests. The team should treat the first 90 days as a learning cycle and plan for continuous improvement based on data. Each test should be recorded with a decision rule: keep the change if it improves the primary metric by a predetermined threshold, otherwise revert and document reasoning.

Final implementation checklist

A condensed checklist ensures nothing critical is missed before launch:

• Tier sites by data-driven scorecard.

• Select cadence model (aggressive vs. sustainable) aligned with capacity.

• Build a queue with at least two weeks of publish-ready content for each critical tier.

• Create SOPs for all production stages and embed compliance checks.

• Define SLAs and roles; align them across all 20 sites.

• Automate tracking for publish events and initial performance pulls.

• Schedule reviews at weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly intervals.

• Run onboarding and test projects for all external contributors.

Which part of operationalizing this plan seems most urgent—capacity, quality, measurement, or delegation—will guide the first triage decisions and resource allocation. A focused approach on that single constraint allows faster, observable progress.

Execution consistency is the multiplier: a reliable queue, rigorous QA, and a tracking sheet that acts as the team’s factual backbone will convert publishing velocity into durable organic growth.