A quarterly content plan: building one that survives the quarter

Content plans usually die at the end of the first month. Rarely because anyone slacked; more often because the plan described a desirable publishing rate rather than an achievable one. What follows is how to build a plan that reaches the end of a quarter, and what has to be in it so people can work from it without asking you questions.

Why a quarter is the right horizon

An annual plan is stale by March: the product range changes, someone leaves, the results page reshuffles. A monthly plan hides the compounding effect, which in search is the whole point. A piece starts earning traffic eight to twelve weeks after publication, so on a monthly horizon you are always looking at the results of old work while deciding blind about new work.

A quarter fits both constraints. Long enough for the first pieces to show something by the end of it, short enough that the plan does not need rewriting halfway through.

What has to exist before the plan

A plan distributes decisions that have already been made across a calendar. With the decisions still open, the calendar becomes a wish list.

• Keyword clusters with volume. Without them topics come out of someone's head, and half will become pages nobody searches for. The process is in our piece on keyword clustering.
• A page type per cluster, read from the current results.
• Current positions, if the site already ranks.
• A clear idea of who will physically write, and how many hours a week they have.

The last one gets skipped most often, and it is what decides whether the rest is realistic.

How much you can actually ship

Count from the person, not from the ambition. One writer spending half their working time on copy ships two or three solid articles a month including edits and sign-off. That is a reasonable number: nine pieces a quarter, each against its own cluster, visibly changes a site's structure.

The recurring mistake is putting twelve articles a month in the plan because a competitor publishes twelve. That competitor probably has three writers and an editor. Planning against someone else's capacity ends with four pieces shipped by March instead of thirty-six, all four written in a hurry.

A sensible check: take the time the last piece took from brief to publication and multiply by the number planned. If the result exceeds the hours available, cut the plan, and cut it before the quarter starts.

Ordering the queue

Order matters more than composition. Three criteria, by weight:

1. Proximity to money. A cluster bringing people ready to buy goes ahead of a cluster bringing readers, even when the second has three times the volume.
2. Current position. A page sitting at 11 to 20 needs revision rather than a new article, and revision is cheaper. Those clusters go first because they pay back fastest.
3. Volume. All else equal, more searches is better, but this criterion comes last.

One category sits outside this: pieces that serve sales rather than search. Comparisons, answers to objections, descriptions of how the work is done. They rarely have high volume and they often close deals. Reserve a fixed share of the plan for them, or they lose on volume every time and never get written.

What belongs in one plan row

A row saying "article about clustering, March" is not a brief. A working row has seven fields:

• The cluster's head query and its volume.
• The page type, read from the results.
• Target URL: a new address, or an existing one if this is a revision.
• Length, calculated from the average of the current top ten rather than from a general recommendation.
• Subtopics, meaning the rest of the cluster's queries grouped by meaning.
• Two or three internal links: what points here, and what this points at.
• Writer and publication week.

Seven fields per row looks excessive until work starts. After that it turns out the writer asks about every one of them anyway, at the moment you are away from your desk.

Where plans break

Four scenarios, each with its own remedy.

Sign-off. The text is ready and sits with the client for a week. Fix it with a buffer: set the publication date a week after the ready date and treat that week as part of the process.

Images. The text is ready, the illustrations are not, publication stalls. Fix it by putting illustrations in the plan row as their own task rather than assuming them.

The expert. A piece needs a comment from someone who has no time. Fix it by planning those two weeks early and putting them at the front of the queue.

Urgent work. A landing page appears out of nowhere and the quarterly plan stops. Fix it with slack: plan eighty per cent of the available time, because the other twenty will go to urgent work regardless.

Measuring the quarter

At the end of the quarter there are three questions to answer, and none of them is how many articles shipped.

First: how many pieces made it into the index. A page still missing six weeks after publication is a technical question rather than a content one, and it gets closed separately. Our technical audit checklist covers it.

Second: how many pieces earned at least one impression on their target cluster. Impressions arrive before clicks, and over a quarter they are a more honest indicator than traffic.

Third: which pieces reached the top twenty, and what they have in common. That is the only question whose answer changes the next plan.

What does the work, and what it costs

The plan lives in a spreadsheet and no tool changes that. Paid subscriptions matter at the input, so topics come from data, and at the output, so the result can be measured.

Prices from the gbseo.ru catalogue as of 19 September 2026; "retail" is the vendor's own price for the same subscription. The full set is 4 999₽ a month against 36 700₽ at retail. The calculator on the homepage prices any subset.

The rhythm, week by week

1. Week 0. Build the clusters, order the queue, fill all seven fields for the first eight rows. The rest can stay as headings.
2. Weeks 1 to 11. Write to schedule. Every fortnight, fill in the fields for the next few rows so the queue is always ready a month ahead.
3. Week 6. Mid-quarter check: what shipped, what is stuck, which pages are already indexed.
4. Week 12. Answer the three questions above and build the next plan from them.

That week-six check is the most useful point in the cycle. It catches a slipping plan while there is still time to catch up.

It is also worth recording how many hours each piece actually took. A quarter of those records is enough to plan the next one from your own numbers rather than a general estimate. That is the only reliable way to stop planning twelve articles a month. The argument about whether a plan is realistic ends with a table showing the last nine pieces took twice as long as anyone expected.

FAQ

How many articles a quarter counts as normal?

For one writer at half time, six to nine finished pieces. Anything above that needs a second person or a drop in quality, and the second option usually gets discovered after the fact.

What if there are more topics than time?

Cut by the queue criteria and keep what you cut on the list rather than throwing it away. A quarter later some of it rises, because positions or the product range have changed.

Should revising old pieces be planned?

Yes, and it is usually the best-paying part of the plan. A page at 11 to 20 with revised headings and added subtopics climbs faster than a new page travels from zero.

What if there is no result after a quarter?

Check indexation first, impressions second, and question the topics only after that. Three quarters of "the content did not work" turns out to be pages that were never indexed.

Does each search engine need its own plan?

No. Topics are shared; the differences sit in site structure and regional settings. What differs is covered in our piece on Yandex and Google.