With a topic list from the previous part, the next question is order. The common mistake here is writing whatever comes to mind. Finish ten that way and you find three that overlap and four that connect to nothing.
Fixing the ratio in advance removes that waste: three broad, seven narrow.
Broad and narrow do different jobs
A broad article explains a whole subject in one go. It is long, hard to write and slow to rank. What it gives you is a centre for the narrow pieces to gather around, and it gets stronger with age.
A narrow article answers a single question. It is short, quick to write, and faces less competition, so it tends to surface in search relatively early. On its own, though, it never explains your business.
You mix the two because of timing. Narrow pieces show results early enough to keep you going; broad pieces pay off later. Write only narrow ones and the site stays a pile of fragments. Write only broad ones and months pass with no signal at all, which is where most people quit.
Respect the size of the competition
The shorter a query, the more people search it and the harder the field. Aiming there first as a founder mostly spends time.
Specific questions have fewer searchers, but those searchers are in the middle of the problem right now. Early enquiries almost always come from this end.
Sequence — start narrow
The order that works: write two or three narrow pieces first. You learn the rhythm of writing and get a feel for where readers drop off. Then write one broad piece and pull those narrow articles into it with links. After that, keep stacking narrow pieces and add another broad one each time three or four related topics have accumulated.
The reason not to start with the broad piece is simple: there is nothing to link to yet. Build an empty centre first and you will come back later to rewrite all of it.
Keep all ten on one screen
Put the list in a table and the overlaps become visible. Title, query, intent and status (unwritten, draft, published) per row is enough. If two rows answer effectively the same question, merge them — two similar articles split each other’s ranking.
Choosing topics was covered in part one, and the wider search picture lives in the SEO archive. If you would rather check that the site is ready to carry these ten — speed, indexing, structure — see our optimization program.
Next part
Now that the plan exists, the question is how to write one of them. The next part covers the skeleton of a readable article — it has only four parts.