How often should I blog for SEO?

One of the most common questions we’re asked is: How often should I blog? The answer surprises them. (We’re not going to waste your time; the answer is 1-2 pieces a week is the minimum, but you’ll need more to really achieve your ranking potential.)

We’ve scoured the search engines (page 1, obviously), worked with other SEO colleagues, and used our experience to create this guide. We hope you’ll read it, learn from it, and start writing…

Is this blog about blogging for you?

In this article, we’re going to discuss how often you should blog to improve your search engine ranking. This is only going to be relevant to you if you’re using your blog to boost search engine performance.

If you are an organisation, business, or brand that’s happy with your search engine position, then you can do something else, right?

Not so fast. A regularly updated blog does more than improve your ranking, which you can read about in our guide on the 3 Vs of content marketing. Your blog can provide a valuable and effective marketing channel to connect you with customers (and it’s much cheaper than PPC!).

How often to blog: What the experts say

Before we get into the detail, here are some recommendations from a non-representative sample of SEO experts:

• Expert Neil Patel recommends you read his blog. (Standard practice for SEO guys.) In the end, he recommends about 2 posts per week without a break.
• Marketing Insider Group goes with the 2 posts per week recommendation.
• Content Hacker says 2-4 blog posts per week.
• Rock Content (good name, but effectively a content mill) recommend 2-4 posts per week, and they have the snippet text, so they must be right.

We could go on here, but the consensus is that in 2023, you should post 2 posts per week as a minimum.

But that’s just what the experts say…

OK. So, how often should I blog for SEO?

Obviously, the answer is at least 2 posts every week. But that’s a fairly basic answer, and (of course) the answer is more complicated than that.

There are several things you should consider before deciding on your blogging frequency:

• How competitive are your keywords? The more competitive your keywords, the more comprehensive your content should be, and the more frequently you should post.
• Do you have a content strategy? Simply publishing piece after piece of generic content won’t help you to rank. Instead, you need to develop a comprehensive and targeted SEO content strategy.
• Can you create blog posts with value? A 500-word post will have little SEO impact. Instead, aim for longer pieces, ideally 2,000 words or more.
• How much content do you have to publish? If you’re a confident writer (or have the budget to back it up), you can bulk publish, which will accelerate your SEO efforts. We work with several clients, developing at-scale blog solutions.
• Do you have access to high-quality writers? Publishing poor-quality content could damage your business, brand, and ranking. It’s better to publish fewer high-quality, optimised blogs than lots of junk content.

In the end, your blog frequency depends on your aspirations for your blog, your capacity to create content, your capability, and budget.

So, (for the third time) how often should I blog for SEO?

We don’t know who you are or what your business does, so we can’t work with you to provide a clear and accurate answer. Instead, here are some recommendations on blog frequency of businesses in different sectors to give you a flavour:

Here are some bullet points about how often you should blog:

Average business

• You should post at least two posts per week
• You should post 100% original content (ditch the AI for now)
• Aim for 2,000 words per-blog post

SaaS start-up in a competitive niche

• 4 – 5 blog posts per week
• Comprehensive content strategy
• At least 2,000 words (but up to 5,000 words for highly competitive keywords)
• Everything must be written by natural language experts

Local business

• 2 posts per week
• Highly targeted keyword selection
• Aim for 1,000 words plus
• Post frequency is important, so don’t worry if the word count is lower

Established international business

• Content must be accurate, in-depth, and demonstrate authority over your subject matter
• Blogs must add value and provide insight to readers
• Publish 1 or more blogs per week
• Focus on brand building

Fast-growth retail brand

• 10 or more blogs per week
• Shorter blogs (1,000 words +) with highly targeted keywords
• Brand building and backlink creation

These are some rough guidelines. As an example, for an aggressive AI start-up aiming to establish itself in a highly competitive niche area, we created 50 pieces of content to support its launch. The cadence after was 10 posts per week, with the aim of creating at least 300 pieces of original, human-generated content.

How successful has this been? Stay tuned for an in-depth case study in the next few months (when we’ve recovered from writing so much!).

Your SEO blog content questions answered

Hopefully, by now, you’ll have a good understanding of the appropriate blog frequency you should be aiming for. It’s not an exact science, and you’ll want to review progress and adjust as you understand the impact it’s having on your analytics.

Here, 42group’s content experts have answered them. Need something else? Message us, and we’ll answer your questions.

What makes a great SEO blog?

We’re going to approach this from an SEO perspective, so our recommendations here are about how to optimise content. In some cases, this may make your blog less easy to read than a simple story narrative or a

• Keep the introduction simple, clear, and use your keywords (can you guess what ours are?)
• Focus on adding value and answering readers’ questions (whatever they are)
• Set up questions and answer them (like this SEO content FAQs)
• Include links to internal pages and external sources
• Ensure all content is 100% original (and not created using AI)
• Vary the type of bog. Create guides, case studies, FAQs, in-depth examinations, and shorter brand-building pieces.

This is a super-simple and incredibly brief run down of how to create a blog post. It’s something we’re going to approach in forensic detail in a 5,000-word super guide (all free, of course). When it’s published, we’ll post the link here, so if you’re reading this now, it’s still being written!

If you want to read some of the reasons why you’re not smashing search, learn some of the reasons why your SEO content isn’t ranking.

What’s the ideal length for a blog?

The days of a 500 word blog doing anything for your SEO are done. Today, you’ll find most SEO experts recommend every post must be over 1,000 words. To stand a good chance of ranking, you should aim for posts of 2,000 words.

If you’re aiming to compete for high-value keywords, you’ll need to create highly detailed guides of up to 5,000 words. Yes, that’s right, 5,000 words.

Don’t just sit there and start writing, you’ll want every blog to have a strategic purpose, a range of targeted keywords (with various permutations) and a logical structure.

Should I create one long post or several short blogs?

As we’ve outlined above, it’s better to create longer posts with value for readers. Ideally, you should be able to create two pieces of long-form content every week.

We don’t know how the Google algorithm works, and while some SEO pros recommend publishing smaller pieces of content more frequently, others say it’s better to focus on delivering longer content.

Which side of the fence are we on? In our experience, we’ve found that longer content pieces perform better than shorter ones, and we’d create one long post instead of several short ones.

Does it matter if I miss posting a blog for a week?

We simply don’t know how the Google algorithm works. While posting frequency sends a strong signal, there will probably be little impact on your SEO efforts if you don’t post for a few weeks.

But consistency matters, so always aim to have a series of blogs in the background. We’re working on a post about how to create an editorial calendar, but until then, we’ll impart some of our advice…

We operate on a monthly commission cycle and schedule all our blogs in advance. Whenever you’re reading this, the blog was posted to the site a few weeks ago.

Is blogging once a month enough?

No. While you might safely miss a blog every few weeks, cadence is important. Blogging once a month doesn’t send out a strong enough signal to Google that you’re investing in content.

Aim to publish 1-2 blogs per week.

How long will it take for me to see SEO results from my blog?

Successful SEO is more than having a regularly updated blog. When deciding on your search engine rank position, Google will assess a massive range of factors, including your website performance, speed, backlinks and (yes) content – including your blog.

While we’re passionate advocates for investing in content (we’d be homeless if you didn’t), if your website is slow, you have no link-building strategy, no social media presence, or strategy for turning this around even the best blog won’t help your site rank.

Chat with your technical SEO agency and get them to chip in with some answers. In our experience, it can take 6 months to 1 year for your SEO content marketing strategy to move the dial in search engines, although many businesses can see results quicker if you follow our guidelines (or work with us!).

How many blog posts should I have before going live?

Planning a new site? Congratulations! Building the site, optimising it, and producing all copy takes enough time, but do you need to think about blogs so early? The answer is yes.

We’re going to assume that you’re launching a new site, not relaunching an older one. You’ll need to have some blogs ready at launch, covering your core service areas. Ranking a new site can take time, so you’ll want to support it with a regular posting of 1-2 blogs per week.

Should I use AI to write blogs for me?

We know (perhaps more than anyone else) how hard it can be to generate up to 100 high-quality blog posts every year. Given all the positive information about AI, it can be tempting to use ChatGPT or Bard to generate ideas for your blog, but it’s a mistake.

We’ve written before about the perils of using AI to generate content, and we’re still convinced it’s a bad idea. Even if you’re asking AI to generate content ideas, you’re going to get highly derivative content that’s not adding value to your audience. And does the internet really need more content that achieves nothing? (Err, no).

How do I know if my blog is working?

Most businesses and brands invest in digital content marketing because they want to see a boost in their search engine ranking. Every content marketer knows clients will be feverishly checking Google to see what’s moving. However, this may not provide the full story of SEO impact.

You should always have a solid Google Analytics set up, and use the information provided here to help see how users are navigating your site. In our industry (digital marketing, content marketing, and copywriting), it’s less about achieving high numbers of clicks and more about engaging an audience of motivated buyers. Analytics can show us the customer journey, identifying content that’s capturing clicks and creating leads.

We don’t do this alone but work with a technical digital marketing partner that provides this for us.