How often should you blog for business? Well, if you attended Attention 2017 and saw my talk, you would have heard me answering this question during the Q&A section in which I said you should aim for around twice a week. But that answer has been bugging me. The real answer to this question requires a much more intense analysis of a business’s unique situation.
For example, if your website is a travel blog which relies entirely on content to drive traffic, you’ll want to blog several times a day. However, if you own an eCommerce site selling electrical items, blogging will be much lower down on your list of priorities compared to ensuring your site has a high conversion rate, schema markup and useful product descriptions. So, if you want to decide how often you should be blogging, here are a few things you should take into consideration.
Consideration #1 - your industry
Each industry has a different approach to blogging; so, one of the first places you should check when deciding how often to blog is your competitor’s websites. I’m not saying you should do exactly as they do, but this will give you an idea of your industry standard. You can also gain valuable insight on what to blog about and by checking their social profiles you’ll see which topics created more of a buzz.
As I said though, don’t feel that you should just copy your competitors blogging frequency. If they aren’t blogging at all, this could represent a real opportunity for you to become a thought leader in your industry just by firing out one blog per month! If they are all blogging every single day, you’ll want to try and establish what their blogging purpose is (which we’ll come onto later).
Consideration #2 - your audience
The next thing you want to consider is how your audience react to blogs. Are they the type of people who spend hours and hours on the computer, consuming as much content as they can? If so, you will want to maximise your blog content in order to try and capture their attention. Or are they the kind of people who use the internet only when they need to? In which case, you can blog less frequently, concentrating more on a high relevancy within your blogging strategy.
You should also think about whether your audience really WANT to read lots of blogs from your business. If you are an MOT garage, your website probably doesn’t need to be blogging much as your audience will only visit your site as and when they need to make that essential MOT booking. However, if you are a car manufacturer, you might want to blog much more to capture the car enthusiast audience. That being said, the MOT garage can still benefit from the brand awareness associated with blogging for the car enthusiast audience, so as you can see, it’s hard to really set a precise rule on blogging!
What is it you actually want to achieve from your blogging? Are you just doing it because Mystic Meg told you to? Or have you got a real purpose? Hopefully it’s the latter, and that purpose can help you decide on how often you should be blogging. Many businesses will be looking to improve their keyword rankings and blogging is a great way to do this, but it’s not the only route to page one of the search engine results pages, so don’t spend all of you time blogging when you could be fixing crawl errors, proactively sourcing backlinks or investing time in your website’s user experience. If keyword rankings are your goal, then once to twice a week will suffice, with each blog targeting one set of keywords around a single subject.
You might find though that you have a different blogging purpose every month. If you’re having a sale, running an event or launching a new product, your blog frequency will change depending on that activity. Or, you might find that blogging is a highly successful strategy in producing sales/conversions, in which case you’ll want to start churning out more content. What’s really important is to plan your blogging by building out a content calendar. This allows you to sit back and evaluate your blogging strategy and decide whether it is matching your purpose.
What does blogging achieve for your business or website? You might consider it a huge priority because of the return on investment, in which case you should blog frequently. You should also take into consideration how well the rest of your business is performing. Are there other areas, such as your internal communications, purchase funnel etc. which it would be more beneficial for you to invest your time in?
If you are blogging mainly as an SEO effort, it might be wise to spend less of your marketing time blogging and more time doing technical SEO, or optimizing meta data etc. however, this doesn’t mean blogging should be forgotten completely, as it has many SEO benefits for your website.
How blogging helps SEO
Blogging is a big part of SEO for good reason. Google looks at many different factors when deciding where to rank your website, including the relevancy and frequency of fresh content, the keywords used on specific pages, a helpful link architecture, the number and quality of backlinks to a page and the overall level of user engagement. A strong blogging strategy covers all of these bases, as you are producing fresh, new content, optimising for keywords, adding more pages and therefore more internal links and potentially gaining backlinks to your blogs and increasing user engagement.
So, clearly there isn’t a one size fits all answer to the question ‘how often should you blog for business?’, but one thing is for certain, you should be producing some sort of fresh content and publishing it on your website at regular intervals! If you want to talk to us about your blogging strategy, feel free to get in touch with us at any time.
