As a baseline, publishing 1-4 blog posts a month should be enough to get consistent traffic to your website. However, this number varies greatly depending on your capacity and resources, the quality and rankability of the content you are putting out, and whether you are utilizing other content mediums.
Capacity and Resources
First, your capacity and resources have arguably the largest impact on the amount of blog content you are able to publish. Some competitors may have a whole team of writers, while you only have the budget for one internal writer. It’s important to keep this in mind when you are comparing your blog content to your competitors.
It’s also important to make the most of your resources, and this doesn’t always mean creating more content. For example, say you are the marketing manager of a new brand, and you have 5 hours per month you can dedicate to content management and a $1,000 content creation budget. While it may be tempting to find a cheap writer, let’s say at $50 a blog, and push out 20 pieces of content per month, the time it would take to coordinate with writers, publish the blogs, and QA the content would eat up exponentially more than 5 hours of content management per month.
Additionally, when you pay less for writers you are usually compromising on the quality of the writing. This can greatly increase the time it takes to QA and edit the content. If you are getting 20 blogs per month, and it is taking 1-2 hours of QA per blog piece, you are likely looking at around 20-40 hours of content editing time alone.
A better alternative would be to work with a more expensive, but higher quality writer and publish around 2-4 pieces of content per month. This would ensure you are not draining hours into content editing, content management, and publishing.
Quality and Rankability
The quality and rankability of the content you are publishing are other factors that influence the amount of content you should be creating per month.
Oftentimes, we work with clients that publish a lot of blog content that is brand and product-oriented. While there is nothing wrong with this type of content, usually it is not the type of content that brings in a lot of organic traffic. It is important to have a mix of content so you are also targeting relevant keywords with high search volume.
For example, take this blog post published on ugg.com:
While this blog does an excellent job of showcasing UGG’s latest collection, the blog is not optimized for organic search. According to Ahrefs, the blog only brings in 2 organic visitors per month and ranks for 3 keywords. When your blog content is too closely tied to your brand, oftentimes it will not target high search volume, non-branded keywords. To rectify this, UGG could supplement this blog by also publishing a more SEO-friendly piece, such as “6 Ways To Style Slippers in Autumn”.
If you are publishing both brand-related and SEO-targeted content, we recommend utilizing a 50/50 split.
Another factor to consider is the quality of your content. Google’s algorithm favors content that provides benefits to users and is both useful and authoritative. If you are publishing a lot of content, but it is keyword stuffed or generally uninformative, most likely these blogs will not perform well. It is better to publish less content that is of higher quality and allows your brand to be an expert voice on the topic.
Utilization of Other Content Mediums
While blog content can be effective in terms of garnering traffic, it is often resource and money-intensive. For that reason, we recommend utilizing other content mediums that require less time and money in addition to blog content. A few examples of lower-cost, high-ROI content types include FAQs, category pages, comparison pages, location pages, and calculator pages. For more information, check out our:
If you are publishing these other content types, you will see increases in traffic while being able to decrease the amount of blogs you are publishing.
