Content marketing is an interesting beast. We cannot undermine the importance of good, quality content on your website. It’s an absolute necessity. Good content marketing can be hard to pull off at times as well. You have to know how to write the with keywords, make it conversational, and make it relevant. It takes time to learn these skills.
A question I get all the time in the SEO world is how often you need to post new content on your website. It’s a great question. It’s something my team and I have experimented with a lot on our own website here at Boostability. And the answer is a big fat IT DEPENDS! And I know you’re now saying, Kristine, that’s not helpful. But I’ll get into more details in this blog so you can determine for yourself what is the right amount of content for your website.
There’s a couple different kinds of content here that I want to define before we get into more of the technical side of things.
Blog Content versus On Site Content
Both of these kinds of content have their perks. Your on site content describes your business, your products and services, and give details about your website. This is where you put your most important keywords. This kind of content includes pictures, videos, and descriptions. This content is often short, focused, and detail optimized. This is your website bread and butter and the focus of most on-site optimizations done during an SEO campaign. This often falls under the specialty of content marketers as well as copywriters who know how to optimize content for users and search engines.
Blog content is the ongoing efforts to build up more keywords and also establish you as an expert in your field. Blog content shows why you’re the best at what you do and lets you demonstrate that. It shows those who check out your website that you know what you’re talking about and helps to build up your credibility.
Both of these fall into content marketing. And both play an important role on your website and in the role of SEO.
So What Content Do I Update?
The on site content you don’t update very frequently. Because you’ve optimized them with keywords and branding, you want to give the search engine spiders the chance to crawl and rank your site. You’ve chosen these blocks of text, images, meta tags, and keywords so that you can get your site ranking and then hook those who visit your site for a conversion. Your website should ultimately be a brand showcase, an advertisement for your business. These content blocks can take time to get ranking. You need to keep them consistent in order to keep the rankings you’ve earned and continue growing for additional keywords.
That’s not to say you can’t optimize these on site text blocks. But they don’t need to regularly be updated or added to.
Blogs on the other hand, are a continual effort to help your site rank, grow, and establish credibility. These are crucial to the SEO process. And a well-written and keyword focused blog will not only get its own organic traffic, but it continually helps your site grow and bring in more visitors. These blog topics need to focus around your industry expertise. You need to offer helpful hints and suggestions that your readers can follow. And you need to comment on news for your area of expertise and show how you’re on top of the latest trends.
It’s important to build up a strong foundation of blog posts. Once Google sees that you’re publishing on a regular basis, with solid and relevant content, it will start to crawl your site more often. More crawls equals more keywords, higher rankings, and ultimately more traffic.
How Often Do I Need to Post Blog Updates?
Ok, now that we’ve gone through all this, I’ll actually go into the “it depends” comment I made earlier. With Blog updates it truly is a quality over quantity-type post. And it depends on your business. Small businesses with only one person working on marketing might only need to post three or four times in a month. Larger companies can crank out several posts a week or even in a day!
To know how often you want to post, you first want to figure out what your goals are. Are you trying to increase traffic numbers? Do you want to sell your products? Do you want to grow your brand? Or do you want to establish yourself as an industry leader? It’s ok to have multiple goals here. But figuring out what you ultimately want to do with your content marketing will help you decide how often to post and what to post about.
Once you know your goal, you can set a blog schedule. If the goal is to increase clicks and traffic to your site, you need to post more frequently. If you want to build your brand, it’s less-frequent posts with more in depth and diversified topics.
The industry standard is to post at least twice a week. These posts don’t have to be extremely long. They can be 800 words, but we don’t recommend less. Long-form content gives search engines and readers more meat and information to crawl through. More in-depth, thought leadership posts aren’t as common, but plan on those a couple times per month to establish your expertise and authority. These kinds of posts are often 1200 words or more.
Updating Old Content
There’s also something to be said for updating old content. New content is good, but if you’re ranking for an older blog, you should just update the information to make it relevant. Point out that it’s been updated recently in the blog. This keeps your content fresh and relevant. And as people continue to visit the site, they know you care enough to make the content pertinent to the topic at hand. Newer articles are more likely to get the click than older articles.
Final Thoughts
There’s no exact science to blogging and content marketing. Consistency and quality is the key here. Don’t just start and get burned out within a couple weeks. The important part is just to get started and keep going with high quality content. Take the time to outline several posts to know a content direction and work towards that goal.
