It's that time of year again. The CMO wants your content strategy for the year, and what they usually mean is a calendar that lines up with conferences, ad spend, product releases, and the seasonal events that map to your product.

I call this a "Big Rocks" calendar. These are the assets you need for the CES show in January, or the big industry conference in the fall. You might need website content and collateral for a product release in April, then again in October. You might run your own research in January so you have reports to publish and promote in February and March. A social media calendar feeds off all of it.

But for people publishing blogs throughout the year, that's the wrong tool.

Some call the alternative an editorial calendar — though that gets confused with the Big Rocks calendar I just described. Others call it a content calendar, meaning production workflows and publish dates. Sticking to exact dates gets tricky when you have a dozen internal reviewers and several external audiences to satisfy.

Call it what you want. This planning calendar is directional, and it should be the cornerstone of your blog publishing plan. Use it to signal the topics your team will tackle this year, or at least in the foreseeable future.

Think of it as a compass. Not a tablet written in stone.

If you're coordinating that across teams, the governance side lives in enterprise content planning. This is the practitioner's version: how to pick the topics.

Operate Like a Newsroom

The reason I stress that the calendar is directional and not static is that the most effective marketing today is inbound. Your audience finds your content on their own, consumes it, and decides they want your product. That only works if the content is current and relevant.

So you have to think like a newsroom.

Here's an example. For years, the path to being found was simple: rank on page one and earn the click. Then buyers started putting their questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, and getting a synthesized answer without visiting anyone's site.

The brands that adapted fastest didn't throw out their plans. They looked at the questions their buyers were now asking answer engines, saw where they were missing from those answers, and moved their editorial calendars to fill the gaps.

That's the argument against static content calendars. They can't keep pace with a market that changes how it searches.

A responsive blog adapts to what the market is talking about and fills the gaps as they appear.

Setting Your Content Goals

To pull the calendar together, start with your marketing goals. Are you trying to increase visibility? Build brand awareness? Establish thought leadership? Educate prospects and bring them into the funnel? Your content has to reflect the larger marketing strategy.

  • If you want more visibility in search and AI answers, expand the number of topics you go after
  • If you want brand awareness or thought leadership, look for topics that are more tangential to your brand
  • If you want to educate prospects, come up with ideas that signal intent to buy

So what is a content topic? It's the subject of a discourse, or a section of one. That can be as narrow or as broad as you want.

"AI" is a content topic. So is "AI tools," and so is "AI content tools."

From a strategy point of view, always plan for more than one post on a topic. One story is fine. A collection is better.

Which brings us to topic clusters.

Topic Clusters

If you sell shoes and you only have one pair, are you really a shoe store? Search engines look at content the same way. If there's only one article on a topic, the algorithm decides you probably aren't an authority on it.

So if you want to be visible, in search results and in the answers AI engines generate, you build topic clusters. If you've been publishing for a while, you already have dozens buried in your existing content. You can build on them by:

  • Optimizing what you have
  • Expanding them, by finding subtopics you missed that you can now rank for
  • Deciding to create net-new content instead of expanding the old

Pillar Page

Pillar page is another term that gets thrown around. The pillar page is the one you consider authoritative on your site. It's usually a blog post, especially if the intent is top-of-funnel and educational. But if the intent sits closer to a buying decision, your pillar might be a solutions page.

As you publish new posts, link to the pillar whenever you can, and link back from it.

Pro Tip: Match the anchor text to the topic. Don't use ambiguous words like "read more."

Follow the Data

So where do you start? Follow the data.

But not the data most planners reach for first.

The old rule was low difficulty and decent volume. That still tells you something. But volume measures demand for a keyword, not your odds of being the answer. And when a growing share of searches end in an AI-generated summary, your odds are what matter.

So I look at three things instead, in this order.

Start with what you already own. Where do you have real coverage: several posts on a topic, linked to each other, already earning traffic? That's existing authority, and it's cheaper to extend than to build from nothing. Siteimprove.ai's Topic Research shows the related topics and variants that define a subject, and which of them a page already covers. That tells you where a cluster is thin.

Next, find the pages sitting on page two. Your search performance data shows pages that get impressions but few clicks, or that rank just off page one for terms you should own. Those are your fastest wins, because the foundation already exists.

Then look at the answers. Put the questions your buyers actually ask to the answer engines they actually use. Where doesn't your brand show up at all? Where are you mentioned, but someone else gets the citation?

Those are two different kinds of AEO content gaps, and each calls for a different fix. Track them the way you'd track rankings, with answer engine optimization metrics like mention rate and citation rate, so you know whether the plan is working.

A big site can map to thousands of topic and page combinations. You don't put all of those on the calendar. Your manager will think you're nuts.

So narrow it down. What you want is the overlap: topics where you already have some authority, pages within reach, and questions where you're missing from the answer. A handful of topics will usually hit at least two of the three.

I repeat that process until I have a collection of topics that becomes the foundation of the planner.

For each one, the next question is whether a strong new subhead and some added copy can get me there, or whether I need net-new. Comparing the page against what already ranks usually settles it. Siteimprove.ai's Competitive Heatmap, for example, shows which important terms a page is missing compared with the top-ranking competitors.

Say I'm planning for a payroll software company. "Contractor payments" comes out of that process on all three counts. We have a few posts on it already. One of them, on paying international contractors, sits on page two. And when I ask answer engines how to classify contractors, they cite a competitor's guide, not ours.

The team comes back with a cluster of three:

  • How to Pay International Contractors (a refresh of the page-two post)
  • Contractor vs. Employee: How to Classify Workers Correctly
  • Contractor Payment Compliance by Country (a little further down the funnel)

The refresh goes first, because it's closest to winning. The two net-new pieces slot across the rest of the quarter. Soon I'll have a cluster of three on a winnable, important topic.

Depending on the size of your team, repeat the search to fill out the rest of the plan.

Communicating Your Plan

The easiest way to track topics and the content you want to make is some kind of planner. A project management tool like Asana or Wrike works. So does a Google Sheet. Siteimprove.ai's Content Blueprint AI can also turn an analysis into a plan of pages to create and refresh, organized by cluster and persona.

Like I said, looking out more than a quarter is dicey, because so much changes.

But if a single quarter isn't an option for you, slot your staple topics across the year and plan to fill them in as you get closer.

And don't underestimate the power of refreshing old posts. Those page-two pages are refreshes, not new projects, and they're usually the quickest return in the whole plan.

The calendar isn't the plan. The willingness to throw it out when the market moves is.