Blogging is an essential part of running a successful digital marketing strategy for your business. So like any good entrepreneur, you added a blog page to your site, opened the word processor, brainstormed a few good ideas, and overcame writer’s blog to get a post or three for your visitors to read — and hopefully convert into customers. But a blog isn’t a one-and-done kind of thing. It requires a steady supply of fresh content to keep it going. But how often should you update your company blog? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day? More? That’s what we’re here to find out.

 

The Data

Here are the facts. In 2019, HubSpot found that marketers who prioritize marketing efforts are 13x more likely to see a return on their investment. So no matter what, let’s get this straight from the beginning: something is almost always going to be better than nothing. But like any marketing campaign, you need a goal to guide and refine your efforts.

If your main goal is to raise traffic and attract more clicks to your website, then it’s best to post more often to your blog than not — four to five times per week is a fair ballpark figure. Blog posts that are best at raising traffic are going to be educational in nature. For example, industry how-tos, campaign round-ups, and listicles.

If your main goal is to build your brand, you don’t need to post as often — once or twice a week should do the trick. This is when you need to provide useful information to your audience, such as branded infographics and statistics that are relevant to your industry. You can also do posts that celebrate members of your team, event recaps, or posts about the core values behind your company.

 

How Publishing More Posts Helps Your SEO

According to John Mueller at Google, publishing frequency is not a ranking factor in their algorithm. So why the heck are you even here? Because although Google doesn’t particularly care exactly how often you post, your readers do. And when people care about your content, Google pays attention.

It’s simple. When you post more often, your content is likely to reach more people, increasing your chances of a click. Posting more often also makes your brand show up more often to your audience. This repetition keeps your brand fresh in your audience’s minds, also increasing your chances of a click. More clicks means more traffic to your site, and more traffic means higher rankings. More content also means that there are more keywords associated with your site, which means you’re more likely to show up when a person Googles something related to your industry.

 

Is There Such Thing as Publishing Too Often?

Clearly, publishing as often as possible is the best way to increase traffic and improve your SEO. After all, according to Neil Patel, the wildly successful Huffington Post got its start by publishing one blog post every 58 seconds in 2013. That’s about 1,600 to 2,000 articles per day. So if you want to be as successful as Huffington Post, you’ll have to be able to compete on that level.

Or do you?

Increased frequency of posting doesn’t actually guarantee success. In fact, it can actually start to hurt you. After all, when you focus on quantity alone, quality always suffers. And you’re a business owner, not a blogger — when you’re focused on pumping out tons of content 24/7, it distracts you the more important things that you need to be doing. And finally, saturating your audience with content risks burning them out, which can turn your mailing list into a ghost town.

If you need more content, but don’t have the resources to provide it, subscribing to a free blog writing service can be heaven-sent. These services aren’t enough to be a standalone content strategy, but they can take some of the load off your shoulders.

 

At the End of the Day, Do What’s Right for You

Striving to be consistent is almost always more important than focusing on a certain frequency of posting. Choose a schedule that works for you and stick to it. Here are some helpful tips for determining what posting schedule will be best for helping you achieve your goals:

• What are your goals? Are you working for more traffic, or is this a branding campaign?
• How much blog content do you already have? If you already have an established bank of content, you can get away with posting less often than if you have a barren blog archive. In fact, the beginning of a blog is when you should be posting the most often, as this gives your practice and helps you find your unique voice.
• Where does most of your traffic come from? If you get most of your clicks from social media, that’s probably where you should be focusing most of your attention. If most of your clicks come from search engines, then you should probably focus more on blogging.
• How much content do your readers want? Your audience’s needs and preferences should be taken into account when determining a good posting schedule. After all, you create your product to fit a certain target market, so why should your content be any different? 
• How much content can you handle producing? Your health (or the health of the employee assigned to write content for you) is important. Don’t run yourself ragged. When you’re burned out, your creativity suffers and you won’t be able to create engaging content. Subscribing to a blog writing service can be helpful here.

 

At the end of the day, there’s no one “perfect” publishing frequency for a business blog. When considering how often you should update your company blog, consider the above questions and try different approaches until you find what works best for you.