The short answer:

Most small businesses can get away with publishing blog content 2-3 times per month, or scaling up to one post weekly. This will boost their organic search efforts and give them social media content without overwhelming them.

Keep reading for the long answer

One of the most common questions that clients ask is how often they need to publish blog content. Oftentimes, this question is used to mentally evaluate what kind of budget or time commitment they will need to get their desired results. Like all things related to SEO, there is no magic number for the exact amount of posts you need to rank first in Google. Plenty of blogs publish content daily or weekly and don’t get the results they want. 

Let’s look at what the experts have to say in regard to blog post frequency to determine how often you should publish blog content.

How Often Should You Publish for Good SEO? 

The main reason why blog owners try to publish a certain number of times per week is to boost their search rankings. They want to keep an active blog and increase their daily traffic and keyword quality. However, the frequency with which you publish blog content does not have any impact on your search results. 

Chris Lee at RankXL explains that while publishing less often doesn’t hurt your SEO, it can limit your growth. He uses his own website as an example: if he publishes content once per month, he isn’t slowing his growth, but his site will take longer to grow than another one that publishes twice per week. Twelve posts versus 104 posts over the course of the year is a significant difference and the latter blog will have had more opportunities to drive traffic and rank well. 

It is more important that you post high-quality content on your site that keeps people checking on your blog instead of sticking to an arbitrary posting amount in hopes of winning over Google’s favor.

It is Better to Publish and Promote Than to Overpublish

You do not need to post every day and you do not need to keep up with some mythical amount of posts to grow your business. Instead, look at how you plan to promote your blog content and determine when people will be interested in your content. 

Dries Cronje wrote a fantastic piece for Smartblogger on why posting every day is a terrible idea. His premise is simple: your audiences don’t care what you have to say every day. You are not the Huffington Post or the New York Times. There are very few things that you have to talk about that will attract customers daily. 

If you publish content five times per week, then you need to command the attention of your social media following each one of those times to visit those pages. 

You have to highlight the content in an email blast and hope your audience clicks on multiple links. 

Your marketing efforts will become solely focused on driving traffic to your blog instead of promoting your actual products or services. 

Instead, consider the benefits of posting weekly. You can feature the blog in a weekly email, schedule a few social media posts around one piece, and then use your free time to highlight the amazing work you do. You will get more traffic to one high-quality piece instead of spreading it across five average posts.  

Post at a Frequency Where You Won’t Burn Out

Blog burnout is a very real issue that content marketers face. They set high expectations for posting every week (or even multiple times per week) and then quickly feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they need to create. At any given point in the week, they are writing, editing, publishing, or brainstorming ideas for various posts. It becomes incredibly easy to fall behind or skip your blog content entirely.

It is better to start out at a slower pace, posting only a few times per month, than to have to pull back or pause your blog content because you have run out of energy, ideas, or time to get work done.

Don’t Stop Publishing During Your Busy Season

Your frequency also depends on the ebbs and flows of your workload. We’ve all had weeks where we don’t have the time or energy to complete everything on our to-do lists. More often than not, it’s the blog content that gets cut. A company will go a week or two without posting, which will then turn into a month or two without posting. 

In fact, it’s not uncommon for companies to experience a roller coaster publishing schedule where they only publish one article per month, then go dark for three months, and then suddenly publishes four posts within a few weeks. This will negatively impact any following that you have.    

There are a few ways you can prevent this content roller coaster from tearing through your blog: 

• Make sure you can handle your blog workload. Either hire someone to manage your blog or carve out a specific amount of time to work on content.
• Schedule content ahead of busy times. If you know that a certain month or quarter is busier than the rest of the year, schedule content a few months out so the blog functions on autopilot. 
• Pull back on your publishing schedule without completely shutting down. It is better to reduce your posts from twice weekly to weekly publishing than to completely give up on posting for a month or two.   

Even if you don’t have a busy season, a vacation or internal deadline can completely derail your editorial calendar. Try to anticipate and plan for this ahead of time when possible.

Start Small and Scale Your Publishing Efforts

If you recently launched a website with a blog, or have just started your content marketing initiatives, start with a publishing schedule that you know you can handle. Test out your content creation efforts for the first three months and get into a habit of writing, editing, and publishing. 

If you can’t make it through the first 10 blog posts without delaying a publish date or scrambling to get something live, then you need to adjust your frequency. 

Once you get into a groove and feel like you can publish more often, start to scale your efforts. Add a few more posts each month or increase the length of your blog content. Test to see how your improved content boosts your traffic and organic rankings.  

One more thing: if you decide to work with an outside contractor to help you publish blog content, remember that managing them takes time, too. Set aside a set number of hours per week to review their work, provide feedback, and talk about strategy moving forward. This is especially important if this contractor is working with your brand for the first time. You may know certain industry terms and best practices, but they might not. However, once this person knows what is expected of them, they will be able to create better content at a faster pace. 

Publish at a Rate That Works of You

Some brands need to publish weekly (or multiple times per week) in order to stay competitive. These are typically either larger companies with a big social media following or brands that have constant news and updates they need to send out. However, if you are just posting evergreen content (blog content that isn’t tied to a particular timeline), then you likely don’t need to keep up with the rates that “SEO gurus” expect. 

Start small and scale up – or down – depending on what you can handle. You will reap more benefits from publishing high-quality content consistently than by haphazardly posting whenever you have free time.

Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay