Blogging: once the province of teenagers with too much time on their hands (hello, LiveJournal) is now the backbone of corporate and business marketing and communication.
Blogging, or adding authoritative and trustworthy content to your website is a time-honoured and proven strategy for increasing your Search Engine Optimisation. Blogs that target keywords can help increase your ranking and drive traffic to your site, theoretically increasing conversions and revenue.
With all that in mind, how often should you blog for SEO purposes?
The advantages of determining your appropriate posting frequency are considerable.
Why Blog for SEO?
Blog entries, first and foremost, help you rank for natural keywords. For your website to receive organic traffic, you need these.
A blog that is regularly updated also raises brand recognition. Your target audience becomes more aware of your web presence, your products, and your services as you post more about your sector.
Your company can gain the community's trust by blogging. Regularly updating and posting pertinent articles about your sector can help you establish credibility with your audience. In contrast to a rival that rarely refreshes their content or publishes blogs, they are more likely to convert on your website.
How often should you blog FOR SEO?
You need to establish a blog post frequency first and foremost. How often can you afford to blog, in terms of time and resources? An ad hoc approach of “when I’m not busy” will lead to exactly zero blogs being written.
A blog post frequency lets you set a baseline for yourself or your content writing staff for more pragmatic reasons. Without a schedule in mind, you can neglect other tasks in favour of creating blog entries all the time. This also applies to teams that are close to one another, such as social media and design, who would significantly benefit from a set frequency so they could order their tasks.
You have an upper and lower limit for blog post frequency, allowing you to concentrate more time and resources on other areas of your company.
Newer websites or start-ups should blog at least once or twice a week to play “catch-up” with their competitors. For established businesses, blogging bi-weekly or monthly may be key. The important factor is to keep adding to your pool of content, as the SEO benefits will emerge over time.
Even a solo writer like me can’t compete with enterprise level communications firms or dedicated blogs that churn out content several times a day – so you have to keep your expectations reasonable and sustainable. Burning yourself out writing blogs all day as an accountant will likely upset your clients due to a lack of attention!
When too many blogs steal your keywords: keyword cannibalisation
With many things in marketing and communication, too much of a good thing can often lead to diminishing returns. Having too many blogs – especially blog posts of equal quality and authority – on the same topic or search term can lead to keyword cannibalisation.
Keyword cannibalisation means that a site has too many pages that are competing against one another, potentially driving away traffic from more important pages, especially ones that are geared towards conversion (e.g., a sales page.)
You should be targeting key phrases and keywords related to your business – just don’t choose the same ones too often!
You can compliment evergreen topics or blogs with new information and timely resources. Just remember to keep on top of new developments to share on your website – because old and outdated information can work against you the staler it gets.
Skyscrapers – the long read blog
Blogs don’t have to be any particular length – though more words are better to convey as much information as possible – but experimenting with the “Skyscraper” or “Hero” blogs once a month can lead to greater SEO dividends than peppering your site with smaller blogs more often.
One client of mine uses this strategy, producing timely and keyword rich skyscrapers of over 1,500 words every month. It not only increases traffic for their chosen keywords, but it also garners considerable media attention and the all-important backlinks from other authoritative sources.
This of course takes time, research, and editing to make it all flow and read well.
The final word on blogging for SEO
The trick is to examine other blogs in your field and assess how frequently they post in relation to their organic keyword distribution. For a hint as to how many posts per month are optimal for your site, search for a strong organic keyword profile that has the largest percentage of industry-relevant page one keywords.
That way, you’ll see significant upticks in your Search Engine Page Results over time!
Want to supercharge your blogging output? Get a professional award-winning copywriter to create a blog post frequency that helps your website stand out with superior SEO.