Reaching the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) isn’t just about the right keywords and intent anymore. In the era of AI Overviews, it also means solidifying yourself as a trustworthy source and leader in your space, which can include creating high-quality blog content.
These blog posts should be original pieces with unique insights or data that show your expertise in a specific field and your brand’s authority in the space. This is even true for ecommerce brands that need high-quality content to differentiate and outrank their competitors.
But how often should you publish blog posts?
Five Blog Cadence Factors
To answer that question, we need to explore the factors that inform a content strategy that accommodates your bandwidth, budget constraints, and overall goals.
1. Brand Goals
Ask yourself how your measurements of success feed into the broader company goals for the month, quarter, or year. What do you intend to accomplish with a regular blog schedule? Is it impressions, clicks, conversions, or another metric?
What’s just as important as the goals themselves are the tools you use to measure performance. Carefully consider your sources of truth when gauging metrics. In most cases, platforms such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and linked ecommerce platform metrics provide valuable and actionable first-party data.
2. Staff Availability
It’s a numbers game. The amount of content a small marketing team can produce can be easily eclipsed by that of larger teams with more resources. However, teams of all sizes need to spend valuable time on an SEO strategy for blogging. Make a plan to create the right blog posts on the ideal topics that target the right keywords for long-term success.
Finding the right keywords that best match audience intent is sometimes easier said than done. You have to look past the keyword with the highest search volume and find the terms that your audiences use to represent the right intent. Use this as a launchpad to find similar terms that you can work into a blog topic keyword map, which will serve as the basis for your blog strategy.
With smaller teams, it can be tempting to write a prompt and have the AI tool of your choice generate the blog post for you. However, these pieces can be filled with fluffy words that lack meaning, misleading facts, minimal context, and a voice that is far from your brand identity.
The internet is overrun with low-quality AI-generated content that will have a short shelf life in the SERPs. Don’t fall into this trap.
If your staff isn’t large enough to meet your content goals or isn’t skilled at creating high-quality, helpful content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) for SEO purposes, consider augmenting your staff with SEO agency support.
3. Promotional Needs
Integrating with the publishing calendars for your promotional channels, like social media, email marketing, PR, and even PPC, should be an important feeder into your blog cadence.
For example, if there’s a weekly newsletter with an existing editorial calendar of themes, you’ll want to integrate with that to generate content that supports those themes. The same goes for topical integration with social media pushes. The closer your blog topics are aligned with other marketing efforts, the more cohesive and successful the content marketing strategy is likely to be, and the more likely your blog posts are to be featured in their promotional marketing efforts.
Subscribers and followers are already invested in your brand and products, and offering them new insights in the form of blog posts bolsters their confidence in your brand. These followers will hopefully also link to and share your content organically, potentially increasing its exposure to new customers and driving link authority back to your site.
4. Performance Analysis
Monitoring the performance of your content on a monthly basis can also help determine the cadence with which you produce new blog content. When you’re just starting out with creating new blog content, you’re likely to want to publish more frequently to produce a satisfying corpus of content. As you analyze the performance of those posts, you’ll notice trends in the data that can help dial in the frequency with which you post new content.
For example, when you post more frequently, do you have the promotional support to get the content in front of more readers? If not, your metrics will not be as strong, and you may need to slow down. Or if your metrics are strong and engagement is high, you might want to produce additional content to capitalize on that trendline.
5. Your Brand Recognition and the Competition’s
Another factor in your blog cadence is your brand’s prominence. Well-known brands attract readers more easily, regardless of how often content is posted. For new or niche entities, this is harder to achieve, but you can still get valuable exposure and traffic with a frequent cadence. Share enough content on the right sites or platforms, and people begin to take notice. Again, use that monthly performance data as the foundation for any adjustments made to your cadence.
Another way to gauge your potential post frequency is your competition. Visit their blog page and see how often they publish or update content. Take note of the quality of content produced under that cadence. Is there room for you to improve upon what they’ve written? Are they providing valuable insights or merely writing content as a way to continue promoting their products? Find ways to write content that surpasses competitors in terms of quality. Accomplishing this feat in a similar cadence is a great start, but don’t be afraid to change tactics if you don’t have the available resources or if the data suggests a better course of action.
The Ideal Blog Cadence
With all the factors laid out, the answer to the ideal blog cadence is: It depends. If you have a smaller team and resources are tight, you may only be able to post on a bi-weekly or even monthly cadence. If that’s the case, really make those one or two posts a month stellar, full of high-quality, helpful content that demonstrates E-E-A-T.
If you have more resources or budget and have a team of dedicated writers, then publishing two to three times a week is an excellent target. At the enterprise level, multiple posts may go out each day.
In other words, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, note your opportunities and challenges, start with a plan that fits within those parameters, and make adjustments based on performance.
Conclusion
Whether you’re publishing blog content weekly, monthly, or anywhere in between, high-quality content is king. People are more likely to read your content and trust the brand if there are valuable takeaways and insights. Your content should focus on adding new context to the conversation. Simply throwing your opinion without solutions or new perspectives adds unnecessary noise that doesn’t translate to conversions. Take time to consider unique positions and how your brand can provide solutions better than the competition, and people will listen, regardless of how often you publish content.
