How Often Should You Blog for SEO?

Every month, bloggers on WordPress.com generate about 70 million new posts. That’s roughly 2.3 million posts per day. And that’s only on the WordPress.com platform. If you consider the millions of blogs across the internet, there are tens of millions of new posts each and every day. That’s a lot of content to compete with and leads to the question, how often should blog if you want to get your site ranked in Google? Let’s take a look at what you should consider.

The Life of a Blog Post

The lifespan of a blog post can vary from a few days to several years. Some posts will be relevant for much longer than others. If you’re writing posts about current events in a market that is in a constant state of flux, your blog posts likely won’t be useful for much longer than that topic is relevant. If your posts are about evergreen topics, on the other hand, something you write today could be just as relevant 5 or 10 years from now. This lifespan plays a part in how often you should publish a blog post. Those fast-paced markets that are constantly changing will need more frequent posts if you want to get your pages ranked to drive traffic.

Consistency vs Frequency

The consistency of your posting schedule is just as important, if not more so than the frequency of your posts. This is true from both Google’s perspective and your readers’. If you post on a consistent schedule, your readers will quickly learn what that schedule is and come to expect new content based on that. Writing one new post every Friday, week in and week out can be more effective than writing one here and two there, on different days every week. If you post consistently, Google will also “learn” your posting schedule and over time it will start to crawl your website to find new posts based on that schedule. If you post haphazardly, Google will index your site the same way. And if your blog post isn’t indexed in Google, it’s not going to rank in the results.

How Blogging Impacts Your SEO

Google’s ranking algorithm considers dozens of factors when determining what pages to rank in the search results. A large number of those factors boil down to one thing though – user experience. Its business is based on being the search engine of choice for as many users as possible. To do that, it needs to provide searchers with high-quality results. That quality includes several factors:

• The content
• User experience of the target site
• Speed

When someone clicks on a search result, Google knows if they immediately click back to Google and try a different site. If that happens too often, the first site will drop in the rankings. Having high-quality, up-to-date posts on your blog provides your visitors with a good experience. That can help your site rank better in Google as a result. The key is to focus on the visitor, not Google. There are some technical factors to blog posts that have a bearing on SEO, one of those is the posting date. Google considers the date a post was added to your blog in the ranking algorithm. That doesn’t mean an older post can’t still rank but if there’s a post on another site that’s equally valuable but newer, it could outrank yours. A good way to combat this problem is to update older blog posts regularly. Add new data, expand on the topic, or update the information with new changes. This can keep your content fresh and help it outrank your competition.

Exactly How Often Should You Blog for SEO?

With that background on how blog posts can affect your SEO, let’s go back to the question at hand – how often should I blog? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. A large part of it comes down to the market you’re in and how hungry your audience is for information. For example, the Huffington Post blog posts 1600 to 2000 articles a day. Its readers are anxious for news and that kind of posting frequency makes sense. A company selling a software application in the B2B market, where the sales cycle could take several weeks, wouldn’t get any benefit from that kind of schedule. One post a week might be plenty to keep their audience engaged. You need to consider what kind of resources are available to you as well. Huffington Post has hundreds of writers contributing to their site every day. You might be the only blogger in your business. While there’s no simple answer to this question, posting on your blog once a week is a good target to aim for. That creates a regular stream of new content for your visitors to read as well as for Google to add to its index. At the end of the day, more content means more opportunity. You’ll have more pages than can get ranked in Google, more pages that can generate leads and customers for your business, and more information to help your audience make decisions about buying from you.

Test, Tweak, and Test Some More

The only way you’ll know for sure what’s working and what isn’t is to track the visitors coming to your website. A tool like Google Analytics lets you see what pages are working well, where visitors are leaving your site, and what strategies have the best ROI. Test different strategies to see how they work. Try posting more often for a few weeks and see what happens. Take what you learn from your tracking system, tweak your strategy, and test those changes. If a change works well, you’ve improved your results. If it doesn’t work so well, you can always switch back to a more successful option. But if you’re not tracking your results, you’ll never know if you’re getting as much from your blog as you could be.

Where to Turn for Help With Your SEO

Knowing the answer to the question “How often should you blog?” is one thing but putting that knowledge into practice can be challenging. And Google is constantly tweaking its ranking algorithm so keeping up with the latest SEO changes can be a full-time job. If you’d rather focus on what your business does best and leave the SEO work to experts, Website Design Kingston can help. Our SEO services can help you get more traffic from Google using the latest techniques that are working today. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you get more traffic to your website and turn those visitors into new customers.