My emphasis added... - I was thinking to write about the entities that received the most traffic over the past year.
- does it makes sense to create a post that targets these popular entities?
I'm not getting the point of doing this. As I read what you're describing, these entities on your site have received traffic via organic search. Wouldn't a blog article
targeting just these terms, if it ranked, in effect be cannabilizing your own traffic?
Also, what's the point of discussing
traffic on your blog at all? Seems to me that the proper kind of site to dispense such information would be something like Google Trends, or one of the sites that provides keyword popularity information. They're taking a slightly different point of view, though, talking about how much something is searched... not about rankings on one site.
That said, the question about whether to talk about your most popular entity/ product/ topic, etc, for the year is an interesting one, and I can see some justification in doing it if the entities are unique enough to you that you're not simply providing a checklist for someone else to do it.
I can imagine a fashion site, a book review site (thinking NYT here), an auto manufacturer, a clothing designer, etc, might want to talk about their best selling products... but probably not optimized in such a way that they would be ranking for the entity name itself. It seems you'd actually be targeting something like
"best selling",
"our most popular",
"most read" together with entities/ articles, etc.
This kind of publicity always runs the risk of alerting competitors. So does selling on Amazon. But I don't know how else you can advertise your specialty, assuming that it is a specialty and that you're good enough at it to be proud of it.
I can't think of an exact informational site equivalent... but in SEO, eg, there are many sites right now talking, say, about similar optimization factors that are going to be important next year... and there's enough variety, even with inevitable overlaps, to go around. But it's not pure entity keyword search rankings these SEO sites are depending on.
In terms of whether you're overthinking this, you may not be thinking about the right formulation of your question. If your entitites are simply commodities that anybody could duplicate, and where awareness might raise the competition on AdWords, and you can't offer any unique value, then you might be in kind of a precarious situation anyway. IMO, you should be considering how you can make this kind of article a useful marketing feature for your site... or how your site can develop enough identity so this might be possible.
I have worked in niches where there are a dozen imitators the next week copying everything the client does, so I understand that this isn't always easy.
