Key Takeaways:
- How often you should post per month is a challenging metric for many brands.
- Deciding how often to post a blog for SEO purposes comes down to knowing your industry, your team, and your audience.
- Ideally, your blog frequency should focus on consistency and quality over quantity.
- While two to three times per week is a good starting point, everyone’s ideal posts-per-week is different.
So, you’ve decided to add a blog to your site. You’ve done the keyword research and created the topics, paired with a freelancer or had someone on the team hit their keyboard running to get a few optimized pages out into the world – and that’s great! Blogging is a superb way to keep the organic traffic you crave flowing into your website. Pat yourself on the back.
There’s one hitch, though – how often should you be posting? What’s the ideal ‘sweet spot’ for post frequency to help your blog actually meet the goals you created it for in the first place? How should you plan your editorial calendar? Once a month? Twice? What about twice a week? Once a day? More?
(Okay, probably not more.)
As with many subjects of SEO debate, the answer is more complicated than a simple this-or-that sum. Here, we’ll help you find the best blog posting frequency for SERP success based on your business needs and resources.
Is there an ‘ideal’ blog posts-per-month frequency?
You’re likely told that posting very often on your social media accounts is the best way to get those posts seen, especially on platforms like Twitter that have touchy algorithms. Blogging, however, is quite different.
When it comes to how many blog posts you should write per month as part of a content marketing strategy, there is definitely an ‘ideal’ that will serve your brand and industry the best. However, your ideal blog post frequency might not be someone else’s. There is no magic number or rubric that Google or any other search engine wants in terms of posts per week, day, or month. If there were, this would be a shorter blog post.
At a rudimentary level, your blog schedule should be “as much as possible,” – but what’s possible depends heavily on what type of content you’re writing and who is writing it.
The truth is, blogging for SEO and content strategy should not be about quantity, but rather a ratio of quality content posted consistently.
Know your blog’s purpose
While a personal blog might detail what you did with your cousin last week or your thoughts on jazz, blogging for SEO has a particular set of goals that are met when your reader is engaged. In order to engage a reader, a blog post should solve a problem, answer a question, or convey information in some way as part of your content strategy. From there, a visitor might be inclined to read other posts, visit other pages on the site, and (ideally), connect with your products or services and drive conversion rate.
Regardless of your industry, your blog’s purpose is organic traffic and brand awareness. To do that, you need high-quality content. High-quality content should be industry-relevant, informative, and original.
Know your industry and audience
Here’s where your industry and audience come in. If your website is focused on something extremely broad, you’ll have a lot of potential questions to answer and information to provide. On the other hand, if you have a very tight, specific niche, posting too often can quickly lead to keyword cannibalization or, worse, a Google penalty. Diversifying your content without straying off-topic is key.
When publishing content, think about the questions your audience is asking. What blog content can you create that will suit your ideal audience, driving them to your site?
Remember that you’ll also want to have a balance of topical and evergreen content, and that while the latest news does make for a great post in the moment, it’ll become dated eventually. When those posts hit their expiration date, never underestimate what you can do to reuse and recycle content.
Who is writing your blog?
Take a look at your team. Who is in charge of content? Do you work at a larger organization with a dozen content marketers dedicated solely to launching your new blog project? Or, are you working with a smaller group, or a group that has crossover with other duties within the business?
What about your budget? Do you have enough budget to pay a freelancer, external contractor, or agency to create fresh content for you regularly? The content creation process takes time and effort – external teams or freelancers will need fair compensation for it.
If you have a large, in-house team, don’t be afraid to be more ambitious with your blog posting schedule. For example, suppose there are multiple writers and creatives who can brainstorm topics, arrange a calendar, write, edit, and optimize high-quality, diverse content, promote those posts via social media, and keep doing this indefinitely. In that case, you might be able to post two to three times per week, if not more, depending on your industry’s niche.
Smaller teams might need more time or resources to post valuable content more frequently. A daily post might begin to reduce, or even eat into ROI if you spend more hours creating the content than you’re earning from the traffic it’s driving.
That’s not to say you should skip out on the blog; if you’re very creative and your industry allows for ample opportunity to keep the content coming, posting a piece of content once a week is a respectable post schedule, as is once or twice a month.
Determining your blogging frequency
So, how do you find your ideal blogging frequency? Ask yourself a few questions:
- Based on your niche, how much content can you, and your content team, reliably produce without stepping on your own toes, writing something that has nothing to do with your brand, or running out of relevant content ideas?
- Can you manage two to three blog posts a week while maintaining a supply of diverse content, or should you stick to once a week, or even once or twice a month? Or, is there a rich enough vein to allow you to post on a daily basis?
So, how often should you blog for SEO?
So, how often should you blog for SERP success? If you’re dedicated to producing diverse, high-quality content, how often you post depends on your brand, niche, and team. A good benchmark to start with is once a week. If this feels like too little, try two to three times. If once a week is pushing it, move it to twice a month.
Remember that it’s all about consistency and quality over quantity. Once you pick a schedule, stick to it. Be sure to plan well enough in advance to guarantee that you have a stream of helpful, industry-focused content to drive and engage your ideal target audience.
Need a hand with your brand’s blog?
Content strategy consists of many moving parts. You need to balance content quality, blog post frequency, search engine rankings and keyword research, a publishing schedule or content calendar, and much more to write killer content and publish it at your ideal frequency. If this feels like a big ask, you should trust a skilled marketing agency with your content instead.
We don’t just write content at Redefine Marketing Group – we love content. We know that every business and industry is different, with its own content marketing goals and blog post ideas that they’re ready to get out into the world. We’ll work with you to find your ideal posting schedule, bringing quality posts to your site that will help drive organic increases in traffic and brand awareness.
Contact us to learn more about what we can do to help you meet your content marketing goals!
