You’ve been publishing consistently. The “mandatory” weekly blog post is going out, topics ticked off, the calendar filled. But your website traffic hasn’t grown the way you expected?
The frustrating part is that the advice was to publish more, and so you did. The problem is that Google now assesses your entire site for topical expertise, not just individual pages. If a significant portion of your content sits outside what your business actually knows, it drags down the authority of everything else you’ve published.
Content Overview
Why Publishing More Stopped Working
For a long time, the content playbook was to publish regularly, target your keywords and you’d inevitably get traffic. For a while, it worked, Google rewarded sites that published consistently, even if the content wasn’t particularly deep.
Google’s systems now evaluate content at a site-wide level, looking at whether your site demonstrates genuine expertise in a coherent area. A business that publishes specifically and consistently within its real domain of knowledge tends to be assessed as more authoritative than one that publishes broadly across loosely connected topics, even if another site has more posts.
Search Engine Land reported on HubSpot losing millions of monthly organic visitors, attributing it partly to a content library that had expanded well beyond their core areas of expertise. This might seem like a luxury big business problem, but the topical authority dynamic is well-documented and plays out at every scale. A smaller site has less room to absorb the drag of off-topic content before it starts affecting overall search performance.
How Google Evaluates Your Whole Site
Google’s helpful content guidance is refreshingly clear about this. The system doesn’t just assess individual pages, it evaluates the overall content quality of a site. Having a high volume of content that doesn’t genuinely serve people or demonstrate real expertise can pull down how the whole site is assessed, even when that content sits alongside material that’s genuinely good.
The question Google is trying to answer is whether your site has demonstrated depth and credibility on a given topic, not just whether a page is optimised for the keywords. A business that publishes consistently and specifically within a well-defined area builds that credibility over time. A business that publishes across 20 loosely related topics makes it harder for Google’s systems to establish what the site is actually authoritative about.
Content volume has a ceiling, it’s about the coherence between what your business actually does and what your content covers.
Google has also been clear that the helpful content evaluation isn’t a penalty that lifts when you delete a few underperforming posts. It’s an ongoing assessment that responds to the overall quality and relevance of your content library. A genuine audit matters more than a quick cleanup.
What Off-Topic Content Looks Like for Most SMEs
Off-topic content rarely feels off-topic when it’s written. It tends to be adjacent, close enough to your business that it made sense at the time but really you’re just trying to hit an arbitrary amount of blogs or content. Something like a plumbing business with blog posts about renovation trends that have nothing to do with pipes, but because a kitchen or bathroom was involved you wrote it and hit the internal linking to service pages.
The trickier version is content that’s topically correct but shallow, posts that cover a relevant subject but don’t demonstrate any firsthand knowledge, specific experience, or genuine depth. This tends to happen when content production is outsourced without sufficient input from the people who actually do the work. The post talks about the right subject but reads like it could have been written by anyone who spent an hour researching it. That’s increasingly the kind of content Google’s systems filter out of competitive results.
The AI Content Acceleration Problem
AI writing tools have made this worse for a lot of businesses, and faster. But AI tools produce content by synthesising what already exists. The output is often broad, structurally sound, and completely generic. It doesn’t demonstrate firsthand expertise because it doesn’t have any, don’t get caught up in how much or how fast you can make, be careful to congratulate yourself on speed where there is no quality.
When you publish AI-drafted content at volume on topics your team hasn’t genuinely worked through, you’re building a content library that looks active but doesn’t signal expertise to Google, and that’s the content getting filtered out of competitive results. AI as a drafting tool within genuine expertise works. AI as a substitute for expertise doesn’t. Google has gotten better at distinguishing the two, and your SEO strategy needs to account for that.
If you’re spending money on content production and your traffic has been flat or declining, the content quality question is worth answering before you spend more.
How to Audit What You’ve Published
Open Google Search Console and look at the Performance report, specifically what your site is actually ranking for, not what you intended to rank for. If a meaningful portion of your impressions are coming from topics that have nothing to do with your core business, that’s worth paying attention to.
The next step is to export your full list of published posts and run them through a simple set of questions. Does this content reflect our genuine expertise? Would a customer reading this trust us more because of it? Does it connect to what we actually sell or offer? Is it still accurate and relevant? Posts that fail most of those questions are candidates for removal, consolidation, or significant updating.
Quantity isn’t the goal of this exercise. You’re looking at the proportion of your content that’s genuinely serving your site’s authority in the areas that matter. A site with 30 focused, genuinely useful posts on a specific topic will regularly outperform a site with 200 posts spread across loosely related subjects.
For posts that are clearly off-topic and low-quality, the standard approach is to either no-index them which removes them from Google’s index without deleting the URL, or redirect them to a relevant page. Both approaches tell Google to stop including that content in its assessment of your site. Deleting outright is also fine for content with no inbound links, but handle carefully if those URLs have links pointing to them from other sites.
If you’re not sure where to start, the SEO strategy conversation usually begins here, understanding what your current content is actually doing before adding more of it.
Fewer Posts, Better Results
Slowing down and publishing less runs against the instincts of any gung-ho entrepreneur. But if the content you’re producing doesn’t demonstrate genuine expertise, publishing more of it will continue to dilute your authority rather than build it.
Define your core content pillars clearly, make sure that you and your SEO team know the topics your business has real, demonstrable expertise in and concentrate your production within those pillars. If you’re a law firm for instance, that means publishing exclusively on the areas of law you actually practise, not general legal lifestyle content.
Within those pillars, depth consistently outperforms breadth. A single post that answers a question properly, draws on specific experience, and gives the reader something genuinely useful will outperform several shorter posts on adjacent topics.
Improving existing content is often more efficient than creating new posts. Before adding to your content library, look at whether existing posts on your core topics could be meaningfully updated, current information added, specific examples included, structure improved. Updating what you have tells Google you’re maintaining quality, not just adding volume. It also tends to produce faster ranking improvements than waiting for new content to build authority from scratch.
What Your Content Strategy Should Actually Look Like
So how much do I write? As much as possible. If it’s good.
It’s irrelevant what you’d like to rank for, ask honestly what you’re an expert in. What can you speak to with depth, credibility, and real experience. That’s the foundation of a content strategy that compounds over time rather than gradually diluting your authority.
This is also where the relationship between SEO and content production matters most. Content produced to fill a calendar or hit a volume target tends to drift from topical relevance over time. Content built around specific search intent, within defined expertise pillars, stays coherent and builds authority cumulatively.
We run content audits as part of our SEO engagements, and the findings often surprise people not because the content is obviously bad, but because of how much of it falls outside the areas where the business actually needs to rank.
Get in touch and we can look at your Search Console data and content library together and give you a clear picture of what to address first.
Rob Sharif
Technical SEO Lead
