Case: a 3-tier content depth model fixed thin pages without writing 10k articles

Case: a 3-tier content depth model fixed thin pages without writing 10k articles

10,000 pages, all thin, no budget to expand each. Instead, tiered by demand:

— Step 1 (analyst): bucketed pages by impressions. Gate: Tier 1 = top 10% by impressions, Tier 3 = bottom 50%.
— Step 2 (content): Tier 1 (1,000 pages) got hand-expanded to 600+ words. Tier 2 got an enriched data template at ~250 words. Tier 3 (5,000 pages) got consolidated 10-to-1 into category roundups.
— Step 3 (dev): 301'd the 5,000 Tier-3 URLs into 500 roundup pages.
— Step 4 (QA): confirmed no surviving page under 200 words.

Outcome: page count 10k to 5.5k. Sitewide clicks +28% in 11 weeks. Effort concentrated on the 1,000 pages that drove 80% of demand.

Guardrail: spend writing budget by demand, not evenly.

Ship gate: don't publish until all boxes are checked.