Plan the content around what people need.

A content strategy tied to intent starts from what searchers are trying to do and decides which page should serve each need. It follows from the keyword and intent work described in understanding the market, and from the structure described in shaping the site.

Google's SEO Starter Guide says that creating content people find compelling and useful will likely influence a site's presence in search results more than any other suggestion in the guide. Its attributes of such content include text that is easy to read and well organised, content that is unique, content that is up to date, and content that is helpful, reliable and people-first.

The helpful content guidance supplies questions to test a plan against. Is there an existing or intended audience that would find the content useful if they came directly to the site? Will someone leave feeling they have learned enough to achieve their goal? It also lists warning signs of content made for search engines first: producing lots of content on many topics hoping some will perform, writing about something only because it is trending, and writing to a word count because of a belief that Google has a preferred one. Google states that it does not.

In practice, a plan tied to intent names the audience, the need and the page type for each topic, and gives a reason why this site should be the one to answer it. Where the reason is weak, the topic is a candidate for the "leave alone" end of the opportunity picture, not the calendar.

Most established sites need as much pruning and combining as writing. Each existing page falls into one of four decisions: create something new, merge overlapping pages, update a page that has aged, or remove one that no longer earns its place.

Google's SEO Starter Guide gives direct support for several of these. On updating, it says to check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it is no longer relevant. On merging, it explains that when several pages carry the same information, a redirect from the non-preferred URLs to the one that best represents the information is the first option, with rel="canonical" where redirecting is not possible. Google's page on specifying a canonical ranks redirects and rel="canonical" annotations as strong signals and sitemap inclusion as a weak one.

On removal, Google's guide to maintaining a site's SEO says that a permanently moved page should get a 301 redirect, and that a page which has been removed should return a true 404 and not a soft 404.

The helpful content guidance also names two things not to do. It warns against changing the date on pages to make them look fresh when the content has not substantially changed. It also warns against adding a lot of new content, or removing a lot of old content, mainly because you believe it will make the site seem fresh. It says plainly that this will not help. So the decision on each page should rest on whether the page is useful, accurate and distinct, and not on a target for volume or recency.

Whenever pages are merged or removed, the redirect plan matters as much as the content. The foundations guide covers the dependencies and risks.

Editorial standards are the written rules every page is held to: how claims are sourced, who writes and reviews, how errors are corrected, how often pages are revisited, and what tools may be used. They matter more as the number of contributors grows.

Google's helpful content guidance gives a useful checklist. Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, with clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, and background about the author or the publishing site? Is it written or reviewed by someone who demonstrably knows the topic? Does it contain easily verified factual errors, or spelling and stylistic issues? Does it look sloppy or hastily produced?

The same page describes E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google says trust is the most important of these, and that E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor. It adds that its systems give even more weight to content aligned with strong E-E-A-T on topics that could significantly affect health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society.

Standards should also say how automation is used. Google's guidance on generative AI content says generative AI can be useful when researching a topic and for adding structure to original content, but that using it to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate the spam policy on scaled content abuse. The spam policies define that abuse as generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating rankings and not helping users, however the content is created.

A standard that people can apply consistently is what turns these questions into practice.