Considering getting started with brand blogging? You should know that how often you post on your blog will make a huge difference, especially if your goal is to rank on search engines such as Google and generate organic leads.
The general consensus among experts is that publishing blog posts two to four times a week yields optimal results for content marketing, driving both traffic and conversions. However your ideal posting frequency depends on several factors. What are those factors? Let's see!
In this post, we’ll cover:
- How to determine your ideal posting frequency through 6 key factors
- How to optimize your posts to maximize the impact of each new piece you publish
How to Determine Your Ideal Posting Frequency: 5 Key Factors
Frequent blogging is a highly effective way to improve your website's SEO positioning, as it leads to an increase in organic traffic. The primary advantage of organic traffic is that it tends to snowball: the more page views your website gets, the more it gets shared online, boosting its ranking in search engines and, in turn, attracting even more page views.
Search engines such as Google consider every indexable page on your website, which means that having sufficient relevant blog content can increase your visibility in related searches you might not have been specifically targeting. If your objective is to improve SEO KPIs increasing organic traffic is crucial.
In this section, we’ll cover 5 key factors you should have in mind when determining your ideal publishing frequency. Namely:
- Your positioning goals
- Your team size and resources
- Your sector
- Your ability to balance quality and quantity
- Your ability to stay consistent
Let’s take a closer look.
First Things First: Blogging Goals and Brand Positioning
To start blogging, the first step you should take is to establish some strategic goals.
If your objective is, for example, to report the latest news in the sector, a higher weekly publication frequency will be key to demonstrating to users and search engines that you are up to date and continuously offer unique and fresh content.
But, if your content strategy is centered around creating evergreen, in-depth guides, focusing on quality over frequency may be ideal to keep increasing your reach without saturating your readers.
Does Your Company Size Matter When It Comes to Blogging?
Your team’s size can significantly impact your blog post publishing frequency. Here's how:
- Resources - Smaller startups may have fewer resources, including team members and budget, to dedicate to content creation. This can make it challenging to maintain a high publishing frequency without sacrificing content quality.
- Target audience - The size of your target audience can also influence your publishing frequency. If you're targeting a niche market, you may not need to publish as frequently as a company with a broader audience.
- Industry - The industry you're operating in can also affect your publishing frequency. If your industry is fast-paced and constantly evolving, you may need to publish more often to stay relevant.
However, recent research has shown that companies of all sizes can benefit from increasing their publishing frequency.
Here’s a quick look at the data:
- Companies with 10 or fewer employees actually that publish around 11 blogs per month get more organic traffic than those with a lower publishing frequency.
- Companies that publish more than 11 blog posts per month experience nearly triple the amount of traffic as those publishing only one post per month, and double the amount of those publishing between two and five posts per month.
- Both companies with 11 to 25 employees and those with over 200 employees saw optimal results with 11 blog posts per month.
- By increasing their publishing frequency to more than 11 posts per month, these brands were able to boost their traffic by 3.5 times compared to those who published just one post per month.
- Similarly, companies with 26 to 200 employees saw a significant increase in traffic when they published more than 11 blog posts per month, enjoying approximately twice the traffic compared to those who only published one post.
Blogging for B2B vs. Blogging for B2C Companies
B2B and B2C companies have to think about publishing frequently differently. And that’s exactly what we’ll explore in this section. But before diving into it, it's essential to understand the fundamental distinctions between B2B and B2C content marketing.
Target audience
B2B brands typically target a narrower, more specialized audience compared to B2C companies. This means that B2B content needs to be more focused on providing in-depth, hyper-specialized information about specific business challenges. Meanwhile, while it’s still important for B2C content to be focused on user challenges, it’s especially prioritary for it to be accessible, easily digestible and actionable.
Sales cycle
B2B sales cycles are typically longer and more complex than B2C, requiring multiple touchpoints and interactions with prospective clients. As a result, B2B content often serves as a means of nurturing leads and building trust over time.
Decision-making process
B2B purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders with different priorities and concerns. Therefore, B2B content should:
- Address various pain points and provide comprehensive solutions
- Empower internal advocates
Given these key differences, B2B brands must approach content publishing frequency with a unique perspective.
Quality over quantity
Due to the specialized nature of B2B audiences, it's crucial to prioritize producing high-quality, informative content that addresses specific industry challenges and pain points. This often means that B2B brands may publish less frequently than B2C companies, focusing on creating in-depth, valuable content rather than trying to maintain a high posting volume.
Long-form content
B2B audiences often seek more detailed, long-form content, such as whitepapers, case studies, and guides. Creating this type of content requires more time and resources, which can impact publishing frequency. B2B brands should strike a balance between producing long-form content and shorter, more frequent posts to keep their audience engaged.
Lead nurturing
With longer sales cycles, B2B brands need to use their content to nurture leads throughout the decision-making process . B2B brands should consider their publishing frequency in the context of their overall lead nurturing strategy, ensuring they have a consistent stream of content to support prospects at each stage of the conversion funnel.
If you’re in B2B, the conversion around publishing frequency should be guided by a question: How often can we post, with the resources we’ve got, while remaining strategically relevant?
Quality Wins Against Quantity
Don’t rush to upload content frequently. Increases in publishing volume should never cause your content quality to drop. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a blog with an infinity of entries that nobody visits, because they provide no real value.
Always remember that there’s high competition. If you do not meet the expectations of your habitual readers, they won’t hesitate to replace you. Meanwhile, new readers won’t be captivated by what you have to offer.
When creating content for your audience, it’s important to consider their needs and preferences. If the most valuable members of your audience have a lot of questions about a particular subject, focus on providing information and resources to address those questions.
It’s also important to keep visibility of your conversion funnel and understand what your audience needs to know before making a purchasing decision. Providing real value and incentivizing informed conversions should always be a top priority, rather than simply posting for the sake of having new content.
Consistency Will Be Your New Best Friend
It's well-known that it can be hard to publish considerable volumes of content, consistently. But posting too little can also have a negative impact on your blog. If you post too infrequently, it’ll take a while for you to see results. And, especially if you don’t have resources to spare, this may demotivate you and prevent you from further investing in content.
So, it's important to be realistic about what you can handle. If you can’t publish dozens of pieces a month, it’ll probably take you longer to see results. But that doesn’t mean that blogging won’t be worth it for you. You just need to align your resources and your expectations.
How Can You Optimize Your SEO Posts for Better Impact?
We’ve already covered some key factors that will help you determine your ideal publishing frequency. But, if you publish poorly optimized content, frequently will be irrelevant, you just won’t see results. So, in this section, we’ll dive into how to maximize the impact of each new piece you publish.
Most of the hard optimization work is already done when you align your posts with search intent and take a data-driven approach to the content itself. But it's always worth doing a few optimizations to give your post the best chance of ranking high on Google and attracting qualified leads.
Don’t forget to:
- Use an evergreen (timeless) URL
- Create an attractive meta description with a clear CTA
- Minimize “filler content” and add as much value as you can throughout the post
- Optimize images
- Address frequently asked questions
- Add a table of contents for maximum scannability
- Include “linkable snippets”
- Add schema markup
- Link to internal and external resources
- Repurpose and distribute your content
At this point, we find it fitting to answer two very common content optimization questions:
- How long should a post be for SEO?
- How many words per page are good for SEO?
Although the difference is subtle, these questions are different enough to be approach separately.
How Long Should a Post Be for SEO?
For SEO, Google favors lengthier articles, with an average preference for those in the 1,500-2,500 words range. There are two reasons why longer articles usually perform better:
- The longer the article, the greater the likelihood that relevant keywords will appear organically, allowing a single piece of content to rank for a wide variety of keywords.
- Google's goal (at least on paper) is to provide users with the most valuable resources as quickly as possible. A long article will probably be better equipped to provide rich and satisfying answers to users’ questions.
How Many Words Per Page Are Good for SEO?
It’s recommended to have an average of 600-700 words per page. Google considers pages with less than 300 words as "thin" content and are unlikely to rank highly in search results.
Let’s Publish Good Content, Often
So now you understand that the answer to the crucial question of how often to blog is quite simple: it depends! Publishing a higher volume of content can potentially drive more traffic to your website. However, you shouldn't post content just for the sake of it. Always align your content goals with the resources you have available for content creation.
When it comes to SEO blogging, consistency is key. Regular and consistent posting can help increase website traffic and generate more leads, but that doesn't mean quantity should always trump quality. Keep in mind that all content must be relevant to the user and properly optimized to improve your Google search rankings.
Ultimately, the best publishing frequency is the one that fits your needs. Just remember that once you establish it, you should consistently maintain it. This consistency will help you achieve the results you're aiming for!
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