One of the most common questions for beginners is: “How many articles should I be publishing on my blog every month? What’s the optimal number of blog posts for SEO?”
The short answer is: Publishing frequency doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you publish 20 articles in one day and none for the next month. It doesn’t matter if you publish one article per week for the next year.
How often you publish doesn’t really make a difference.
However, HOW MUCH (quantity) you publish does make a big difference, especially if your blog is brand new.
Frequency doesn’t matter
By frequency, I’m talking about how often you publish – the time intervals between each blog post published.
This does not matter for SEO. For established blogs, it does help to create some consistency and trains your audience to expect new content at a certain time each week.
It also helps get your site crawled more often, and your new content can get indexed faster.
But other than that, frequency is unimportant. Doesn’t really affect your SEO.
Publishing less often doesn’t hurt your traffic. It just slows down your growth because you’re not putting out that much content.
For example, ever since I started RankXL, I’ve only been posting about once per month. This hasn’t negatively affected my growth, except for the fact that it grew slower than it could’ve if I gave it more time and attention.
Think about it… Posting just once per month is 12 articles in a year. Compare that to something like posting twice per week, which is 104 articles in a year.
After a year or two, which blog do you think will have more traffic, considering content quality for both sites were equal?
Obviously, in a vacuum, the correct answer is the blog that posted twice per week considering quality levels are consistent for both frequencies.
The only way you can really succeed with posting just once per month is if each time you publish it’s absolutely amazing content that people go crazy over.
But as you can imagine, that’s extremely difficult to do and you need to get a lot of things right, not just the content quality.
Volume matters
If you’re starting with a brand new blog, place more importance on publishing volume over publishing frequency.
It doesn’t matter HOW OFTEN you publish. What matters is building up your content on your site.
For the first 200 pages, it’s not a matter of how you divide up the frequency.
It’s… how fast can you publish 200 articles on your site?
The only challenge is doing so while creating quality content.
It’s all about how fast you can get 200 articles published on your blog while still maintaining quality.
Of course, you’re going to have to divide that up with a frequency that makes sense to you.
For example, if you have to write them all yourself, writing once per week may be all that you can do while still maintaining quality.
If you’re open to hiring writers and have a large budget, writing once per day is the better option.
How much you publish does affect traffic
I know that a lot of people like to argue that publishing less is better than publishing more. The craze these days is all about quality over quantity.
And I do agree with that, but only under specific conditions.
That rule only applies if you’re already at a higher publishing volume than you can handle. Meaning… you’re publishing too much and it’s affecting your ability to maintain quality.
It’s for blogs that publish thin articles once (or multiple times) per day. In that case, they would really benefit from publishing less, and spending more time on each article instead.
For sites like RankXL, where I’m only posting once per month, ramping up is the better choice.
This has proved to be true for every single blog that I’ve worked on, especially ones that have built up decently strong domain authorities.
And bigger blogs than mine have also landed on the same conclusions.
When Neil Patel experimented with publishing 2 posts per week instead of 1 post per week, he saw his traffic grow from 46,134 visitors per month to 59,787 visitors per month.
He’s taken that even further and at one point was publishing every single day.
HubSpot analyzed their 13,500 customers and found that companies who posted 16+ blog posts per month got 3.5 times more traffic than those that only posted 0 to 4 blog posts per month.
Not only that, but their research showed that the total number of posts published made a huge difference, since a lot of traffic came from older posts.
They found that B2C companies that published 401+ total posts generated 4.5X as many leads as B2C companies that published 0 – 100 total posts.
The race to 200 blog posts
I’ve experimented a ton with the blogs I work on, and talked to a bunch of successful bloggers on what they think about this as well.
My conclusion is that frequency doesn’t matter – volume does.
Your goal should be to get 200 blog posts published as fast as you can while maintaining quality.
After 200, you can reassess your strategy, go back and see what articles are doing well, what can be improved, which ones can be merged together, etc.
I know a lot of people will say: “But I have only 30 articles on my site and I’m successful!”
And good on you for that. A lot of blogs have few articles but drive a lot of traffic.
However, that’s not a consistent, repeatable model across different industries. If you built 10 blogs and wanted all 10 to be successful, the better strategy isn’t to create a content plan for 30 pages.
The better, more reliable strategy is to create a content plan for 200, and target a much wider range of keywords/topics.
99% of sites that have under 30 articles but are driving a bunch of traffic got there because one page took off for them. That’s one page that got to page 1 for a big keyword. That’s one page driving all their traffic.
Now scale up that content by 10x, and see what happens.
So what’s the optimal number to shoot for, realistically?
It really depends on your personal situation, how much time/money you have to spend on it, and how seriously you’re taking your blog.
My answer for this “optimal number” has changed a lot over the years.
For me, I’ve found that the best number if publishing 3x per week. That’s 156 articles per year.
For starting out with a new blog, that’s a good frequency to start with. It allows you publish a lot of content, target a wide range of keywords, and build up your blog quickly while still being able to maintain quality.
It also allows you to build a backlog of content and give you time to focus on other growth strategies like building high quality backlinks.
Anything over 3x per week is difficult to manage and maintain. It requires a larger team with more writers and editorial managers.
If you have the budget for it, then go for it. But I’ve found 3x per week to be the magic number.
Good article Chris. 200 articles is a lot. How long should they be? I read an article recently that said around 4,000 words. I think you and Neil Patel used to say 2,000 words.
Thanks Jeff – there’s no right answer for this. In general, longer content tends to perform better. 2000 words is good.
But when you’re hitting a wide range of keywords and topics within your niche, you’ll find 2000 words is not always necessary. Depends on the scope of the topic.
Hey Chris,
You’ve given me something to think about. I always thought the consistency was better so that Google keeps coming back to your site regularly and crawling your pages and new links. That seems counterintutive if you just upload 20 articles in one shot. The spider comes once and then leaves. But I guess if you’re getting links and new comments, that would cause google to come back as well.
I only post once a week for each of my blogs because it’s manageable in terms of my apparently flawed
“consistency” mentality. But now you have me thinking I should just go balls deep and try to bang out more content as my writers can handle and publish them right away instead of spacing them out week by week.
Damn you for making me rethink my blogging practices. It’s been working but it seems like it could work better doing what you’re saying.
Haha, always good to experiment with new strategies 🙂
Thanks for sharing this article Chris!
I come from the paid traffic world and I’m interested in learning SEO. I have been following you for a while and decided to create my blog sharing my own internet marketing journey. After reading this article, I think I need to push more contents in my blog! Also, just checked your another article about the backlinking. I need to build backlinks too. Thanks for writing many informative posts man! 🙂
Thanks for reading man! Good luck with your blog.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your article, it’s awesome!
I would like to ask you a question. I want to know your opinion about syndicating other website’s content on our website. Is there any negative effect on the SEO given that it creates duplicate content?
I found that there are good websites such as “The Conversation” that allow other people to syndicate their content. I want to use some of their articles, but I would like to know first whether or not it will have a negative effect on my site.
Thanks,
Sasha
Thanks for this, it relieves some stress, I feel when I am not consistent with the frequency of publishing articles
Good to hear!
Chris, you’ve got me realising that frequency doesn’t matter.
However, your term ‘volume’ brings up a question for me.
Is it number of posts on the site (which you seem to be suggesting with your 200 article recommendation) or total amount of content on site? Silly example: 200 posts of 500 words or 1 post of 100,000 words?
I’m thinking you would say something like, ‘get to 200 posts as quick as you can…and regarding length of post, make each post whatever it needs to be’.
So in practice…200 posts is the goal; some might be epic posts and some might be brief, because that’s all that particular topic needed.
Have I got that right?
I should clarify that 200 is not a hard set number.
But yes, it would be 200 posts, not total word count – word count would depend on scope of topic you’re writing about and what sites ranking already have.
I love reading your content because it always gives me something to think and then make it happen. I really enjoyed reading your free email sequence for SEO.
I have done with my keyword bucket and planning to start writing content from tomorrow. This article has come at the right time for me since it give me idea of getting my 200 blog post done as soon as possible while maintaining the quality.
Thanks again.
That’s awesome 🙂 Thanks Sandeep.
Hey Chris,
Thanks for this post!
If you were posting 3x/per week, would you be outsourcing some of that to a writer? And if I wanted to outsource, how would you advise going about that? What’s a good budget for this? Thanks so much for the input.
Hey Chris, thanks for sharing content with us ))) . I am Eugen and newbie in this area .. I have some thought in my mind to create a website like fixya.com to help people to find answers how to fix their home appliance , cause i am appliance tech and know how to fix it. Whould it be good idea to combine blogging with some appliance repair articles and forum ,where every one can ask their questions and get answers? Cheers
“It doesn’t matter HOW OFTEN you publish. What matters is building up your content on your site.”
Man you are the ONLY person to ever say this and it makes so much sense. Being a new blogger (I am building my blog as we speak), how often to blog and whatnot is a common search term in my google bar and almost everyone says this:
“Post once a week, or once a month because you can offer better content”
Okay, fine. But like you say: growth is SO SLOW that way. I am going to try twice a week, and see if that makes a difference compared to previous blogging attempts. Thanks!