How Many New Blog Posts Should My Blog Have Every Month?
As the owner of a marketing company that offers guest blog posting services, that’s a question that clients and prospects ask me all the time. There is no exact answer or number that Google wants to see from you, the same rules apply to mostly everything in SEO. There are rarely any superlatives when it comes to things like keyword density, word count etc… The factors that Google takes into consideration are way above that type of rudimentary measuring. If you want to succeed, you need to focus on a lot more than just how many blogs or how many words are in your blog.
Think like a Search Engine….
When you think like a search engine you put the world wide web users FIRST. Meaning, you cater to their needs before anything else and prioritize user experience above all else. If you produce good content that your readers like, they’ll keep reading it and probably even share your posts on social media. If you produce lousy content, the readers might hit the unsubscribe button to your social media profiles where you promote the blog posts (or your newsletter if you use email marketing as a way to promote your blog). The fact that your blog has pretty pictures or keywords in it won’t mean a thing if its not well optimized for the user’s experience. Some of the key ingredients needed for a successful blog campaign are going to be outlined in this blog post but there are MANY other things that you can do to get the most out of your blog campaign.
Now, back to the original question — How many blogs should you be publishing on your blog each month!? The simple answer would probably be, as many as you can produce as long as they’re not redundant or spammy. Your blog posts are supposed to be enjoyed by your audience and hopefully help grow your audience not diminish it. Hopefully you enjoy this post and after you’re done reading it you’ll want to read more posts. You might even be tempted to follow us on Facebook where we let our audience know when a new post goes live 😉 Now, let’s get into the important factors that I consider to be important when it comes to writing a blog post.
What Are The Most Important SEO Factors For a Blog Post?
As a general disclaimer, what I’m about to say is not the guaranteed right answer that Google’s search team C-level execs will endorse however, I’ve been running SEO campaigns for the last 12 years and I’ve learned a lot. What I believe to be the 3 most important factors may not be what other SEO professionals consider to be the most important factors and that’s fine. From my experience if you follow these guidelines and optimize these factors, you’ll gain SEO value from the blog posts your create in the future (or existing blog posts that you re-optimize).
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Pristine On-Page Basics – Starting from the top, literally, make sure your title tag is relevant and keyword rich if you want to rank it for some specific keywords. Then move your way down the HTML code and optimize the meta description (yes it matters still). Next ensure that your images have alt tags and that you have a URL that is relevant to the post (using the title is sometimes the easiest way). Using header tags that help the reader understand the sections of your blog and using keywords in the headers when its relevant to do so will also help your page rank for long tail keyword variants.
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Engaging Content That Readers Actually Appreciate or Enjoy – A blog that has a high bounce rate is never a good thing, to take it a step further Google isn’t going to reward a blog post by pushing it up higher on the SERP rankings if there aren’t any indications that people actually like the blog post content. Google is a pretty sophisticated machine that uses an algorithm to fetch results in a VERY intelligent way. Google’s algorithm has proprietary technology that can track your blog post and actually see if people are reading the entire post or not, whether they’re sharing it on social media or not, whether they’re leaving the blog post after a few seconds of clicking on it and much much more…. Taking the time to have a professional write your content is crucial to the success of your blog posts. There are a lot of things that you can do to ensure that your readers are going to enjoy your blog posts. Depending on the audience that you’re trying to attract your content might be very technical or less technical, serious or funny etc… This blog post is not intended to explain how to write perfect blog content but if you’d like to learn how, check out this blog post.
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Reference Links Strategically Placed Throughout Your Content – Having reference links to other pages on your site or even off of your site when deemed appropriate is important for SEO and user experience. For example, if a link is used from this page to the “how to write a blog post” page on a 3rd party blog which was written a long time ago, it would be a relevant post using a keyword as the clickable text. Reference links are often used to refer users to another page on the world wide web that would better explain something or as a resource link giving credit to an original source of information.
There are many things that you need to do to get the most out of your blogs after they’re published such as leveraging social media platforms like Twitter to get more engagements for your blog. You should also be re-visiting blog posts that were written in the past to incorporate new reference links as your new posts start to add up and provide more reference link opportunities for old blogs. SEO is not something that you will ever completely be on top of, there are so many things that you can do that it would probably take a full time team of 8 people or more to really do it all and even then it might not be possible.
The Take-Away From This Post
In short, you shouldn’t spend too much time trying to figure out how many blogs are appropriate to publish each week or month. Instead, you should focus on the quality of your blogs and the SEO factors that matter. When it comes to SEO in general you should always strive to do as much as you can to improve user experience with anything that you do to your website or web assets associated with SEO for your website. Its 2017 and its time to take it back to the SEO basics, start writing content that search engines will appreciate. Getting more links with massive amounts of low quality content is an out-dated technique that could result in a penalty from Google’s smart algorithm. Don’t take short cuts, do things right the first time and always double check your work before publishing a blog. Like always, thanks for reading and I hope to hear your feedback.
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
