How often should you post on your blog? Content volume is a key driver of content cost, so getting this right can make a significant difference to your success with content.
We produce best-in-class SEO Content, so we’re interested in the answer to this question solely from an SEO performance point of view.
We want to know: how much content should you publish each month, to get maximum SEO performance?
We produce blog content for SMBs, and we’re focused on SEO performance. We do the content production on retainer and in the last 18 months have produced 729 blog posts.
During this time, we offered 2, 3, or 4x posts per month (we no longer offer 2x posts/month, and why will make sense later).
What is the data-driven answer?
You need a minimum of 3 posts per month but will get best results with 4x posts per month.
SEO performance increases 30% when you go from 2x posts / month, to 3x posts / month. SEO performance then increases 55% when you go from 3x posts / month, to 4x posts / month.
This makes 4x posts / month both the best value and the most performant:
This data looks at expected clicks and actual clicks, for the different content volumes.
Obviously, if you do more content you expect more clicks. We’ve accounted for this by showing you the expected clicks. Expected clicks is the # of clicks you’d expect if we just increase the quantity of posts proportionally from the 2x posts / month baseline.
The data shows us that doing more content delivers more clicks to each piece of content. You don’t just get more clicks as a result of doing more content: doing more content makes ALL of your content more successful.
4x posts / month is our recommendation as this is creating best value. You’ll note, however, that there is a huge jump between 2x posts / month and 3x posts / month. The 3x is performing 30% better. This is why 3x is a good minimum, and you shouldn’t go lower: the drop off in performance is too significant.
Here’s the full breakdown in performance between 3x posts / month and 4x posts / month:
Other factors in SEO Content success
There are, of course, many factors in SEO Content success: you need to identify the right target keyword, the right title, answer the searcher question, choose the right headings and topics, the right length of content, images, and so on.
You need to take care of all of these. Interestingly, we don’t see time of day or day of the week as a statistically significant factor in content success, but we do see all the other factors.
Most SEO Content never gets any clicks. Churning out your 4x posts / month but getting no clicks to them is not going to be a good time.
Over the 729 posts we’ve produced in the last 18 months, we’ve built a fine-tuned content machine that produces content that consistently gets results.
Most content agencies will never show you the average number of clicks their clients are getting, because they won’t be tracking it, they won’t be trying to improve it, and most likely the numbers are going to be embarrassing. We’re happy to share because our content work, works.
Growing with content
This data answers the “how often should you blog” for SMBs and bootstrapped companies. 4x posts / month is best value, and 3x posts / month is a good minimum.
Enterprise businesses are often focused on maximising gains, and can justify a significantly higher volume of content each month. 15-30 posts/month can often make sense.
We are anecdotally seeing clients on 5x or 6x posts / month outperform those on 4x posts / month, but we need more data to confirm this.
If you need help with SEO Content, our Content Growth plans are perfect for you. Get in touch if you’d like to chat.
