The challenge
Quillon had published to a calendar for four years — roughly two articles a week, four hundred pages in total. Organic traffic was respectable and organic pipeline was negligible. Several clusters had five or six thin pages competing for the same query, none authoritative enough to rank, and the content team's performance was measured on publication volume, which guaranteed the pattern continued.
What we did
Mapped every page to a query and an outcome
Each of the four hundred pages was scored on the query it targeted, its ranking, its traffic and whether it had ever appeared in a closed-won path. Roughly two thirds had never ranked in the top fifty for anything and had never touched a deal. Seeing that as one table ended the debate about whether to consolidate.
Consolidated clusters into single authoritative pages
Where five thin posts addressed one question, we merged the genuinely useful material into one substantial page and redirected the rest to it. Consolidation concentrates the ranking signals that were previously split, and it is the fastest organic gain available to a site with a long publishing history.
Rebuilt commissioning around questions, not a calendar
New pieces are now commissioned against a specific query with an estimated value, rather than against a slot in a schedule. Output fell by roughly two thirds. The team was rebased onto rankings and pipeline rather than publication count, which was the change that made the rest stick.
Connected content to pipeline properly
Their analytics could not tell which pages appeared in deals that closed. Once first-touch content was recorded against opportunities, the commissioning decisions became arguable with evidence rather than opinion.
The result
Organic pipeline rose 212% while the library shrank 64%. Top-three rankings rose 186%, almost entirely on consolidated pages that inherited the signals of the thin ones redirected into them. Content payback compressed from around nine months to two, because the programme stopped funding pages that were never going to rank. Publishing volume is now roughly a third of what it was and nobody has asked to raise it.
“We had spent four years measuring the content team on how much they published, and then wondering why none of it ranked. Deleting two hundred and fifty pages was the most uncomfortable thing we have done and the most obviously correct in hindsight.”