How often should I blog for SEO?

There’s a lot of information out there about blogging. A lot of the data contradicts something else you might have read before, so it’s hard to know what to do. I understand. Today, we’re talking about one of the most essential, fundamental blogging questions, “How often do I need to blog for SEO? 

If you want to be found at the top of Google and get free organic traffic, you need to blog. Blogging is the best way to increase your website's ranking opportunities. The more high-quality blog posts you have on your website, the better. Now, the important note here is the blog has to be on the same URL as your website for you to get the benefit from blogging. If your blog is on a subdomain or another website, it won't help your website's SEO. Having a blog with lots of great information that's helpful to your customer and optimized for SEO is a great way to drive traffic to your website and can help sell more products, book more services, generate more leads, etc., for you.

Blogging Basics: What’s Your End Goal? 

The answer to the question of how often you need to blog depends upon your blogging goals. Are you blogging for fun or to turn your blog into a cash-making machine? If you want your blog to help grow your business, you need to take it seriously and treat it like a marketing channel. You'll have better results with your blog when you do it regularly. 

Blogging For Fun

If you want to blog for fun and you’re not looking for ways to monetize the blog, then you can write when you want. It doesn’t matter how often you blog if you’re not looking to build a significant following or earn money from your blog. If it’s for fun, then focus on that and write about what you want when you want. Enjoy yourself, and don't stress out. 

Blogging as a Business

If you want to monetize your blog today or in the future, having a consistent blogging schedule is essential. If you're going to grow your blog into a revenue-generation channel, you need to be very strategic from the beginning. You’ll need to work to build your audience and to do that; you need to write about topics people care about on a regular basis. You need to post at least one new blog post each week. I teach my students to choose four content topic areas they'll cover on their blog. Write one post for each of those content topic areas each week for best results. Learn more about how blogging works for business here. 

Blogging Best Practices 

If your blog's goal is to make money, there are a few things you should be doing regularly. 

Write one new post each week 

You need to post consistently, and it’s better to post once a week than write 3-5 posts, add them all to your blog at once, and then not post again for weeks or a month. Consistency is the key. Now, we have seen that blogs with daily posts drive more leads than those with weekly but adding posts to your blog on a daily basis is HARD to manage over time. If you want to succeed with blogging, start with weekly and work your way up from there if you see the need or have the desire to write more often. 

I want to caution you here, though – if you’re going to try to post two or three times a week, I want you to write those posts ahead of time and only publish one per week until you know that you can keep up with the consistency of two to three posts per week for a minimum of a quarter. Posting once per week consistently is MUCH better than posting a bunch of times in a row and then not posting for a long period. 

If you’re serious about blogging, make sure you’re following blogging best practices. We’ve covered most of these in prior posts. You can learn how many photos you should include in your blog here. This post covers how many words your blog should be, and here, you’ll learn how to write a great blog post. Also, make sure you're doing SEO on every blog post that you write so you can get traffic to it from Google.

Now that you know how often to post to your blog, you may be trying to figure out what to write. Grab a copy of our Blogging Idea Guide, and you’ll have over 100 blog post ideas that can help get you started. If you’re going to blog once a week, that’s almost two years’ worth of ideas for you. And finally, here's a great post on how to plan content for your blog. Grab the Blogging Idea guide and then follow the content planning process, and you'll be on your way.