The situation
I inherited almost nothing. One person doing SEO, one writer, and an Excel sheet that someone had generously described as a content tracker. That was the entire vertical. Sportskeeda was already a significant platform at this point, one of India's biggest sports media properties, but this particular vertical had not been invested in.
The work
The first thing I built was a process for finding and qualifying stories. Before we could publish at any scale, we needed a repeatable way to identify what was worth covering and how to cover it quickly enough to matter. That became the foundation everything else sat on.
On the SEO side, the focus split into two areas. First, getting content onto Google Discover, which required a specific approach to headlines, story framing, and freshness signals. Second, building authority on competitive athlete and team name queries so we could appear consistently in Google News and at the top of search. Both required systems, not just good writing.
I scaled the team and created repeatable editorial workflows with clear output targets and quality standards. The goal was to make good content the default output of the operation, not the exception.
The results
Grew from average tens of views to a consistently high-performing vertical under direct KPI ownership.
What I took from it
Content at scale is an operations problem first. The writing matters, but the system around the writing determines whether the output is consistent.