man typign while thinking how many blogs is a good amount for my website

How Many Blogs Is A Good Amount For My Website: The Guide

Content is indeed important online, but have you asked yourself, “How many blogs is a good amount for my site?” Well, if you have, you’re not alone. Being a small business owner brings many responsibilities, including balancing to-do lists. Some search and SEO experts say that you need to post a blog every day, while others say that longer and less frequent blogs are the best strategy. So what’s the right way to blog?​

In short, there is no rule for every website. Just like marketing, there is no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all strategy. Be that as it may, some SEO experts claim that two to four relevant blog posts per month is what most websites should aim for. Other experts claim that a major milestone that helps your website gain momentum is 25 total blog posts, while 50 blog posts is when traffic starts to come in.

However, just like most things in life and business, it’s all about striking a balance between frequency, quality, and what your business can actually produce in terms of blogs. In our guide, we’ll help walk you through the steps of what to consider for your goals, bandwidth, and industry type. Additionally, we’ll include tips on how to optimize your blog posts.

quality over quantity scale with burning ox marketing logo

Before you start writing content because a great idea came to you or because some expert on a podcast claims their method generated a substantial number of views with one simple trick, you need to have a plan. As a reminder, there is an adage that content is king online, which is true. However, simply dumping content for the sake of content wastes your time and the time of bots that crawl the web to index your blogs.

One negative effect of dumping content online is that it can hurt the overall search engine optimization of your website. Critics of this strategy often argue that Google now ranks pages and posts individually rather than assigning an overall grade to an entire website. While that is true, one factor they often forget is Google’s crawl budget. With over a billion websites online, search engines simply don’t have time to review every single URL in existence.

So, if your website only gets, hypothetically, ½ a second a month for Google to review, rate, and index your content, it won’t get to all of your blogs if you’re just posting quantity. If you do end up writing relevant blog posts with tons of research, chances are search engines won’t see it because they ran out of time looking at the infinite quantity of blogs.

Other than time, search engines notice how visitors to your website react to the content you produce. If they see that each blog post engages the visitor to stay on the website, visit other pages, and return, they know your content could be valuable. Transversely, if everyone jumps off your blog after two seconds, then your content won’t be ranked as high.

A good way to know if the content should be published in the first place is to use Google’s E.E.A.T. scale. The acronym stands for:

  • Experience
  • Expertise
  • Authoritativeness
  • Trustworthiness

So, if you or your business has experience in your industry, are experts in your niche, are the authority on a topic, and people can trust what you say, use that as the first thing to measure if you should write a blog about a specific topic before thinking of how many blogs to post.

After considering the quality of the content you can produce, the next step is answering the question: how many blogs is a good amount for your particular website, which depends on its age and authority.

For new websites, consider investing more initial resources to ensure you produce high-quality, relevant content more frequently. A new website needs to build credibility by producing content, and ensure there is enough content for users and indexing sites to reasonably understand the business. In other words, the site needs to prove that it is active and valuable.

However, once you’ve had a website for many years that is considered authoritative in a specific vertical or niche, then the standard for the content produced is predictably going to be higher. Instead of the website trying to get attention all the time, the content needs to make a greater impact. So, the frequency of new posts goes down, but the existing content needs to be refreshed and updated periodically to avoid falling into oblivion and being seen as archaic and out of date.

checklist with industry niche and location on a clipboard next to laptop

This may seem obvious, but when business owners and people in charge of website content strategy overanalyze, thinking just about how many blogs is a good amount can overlook how many blogs should be posted for your type of business. Just like every business has a different demand for labor, skills, and materials, the same is true for the blogs your website needs.

Let’s use a stark contrast example to help clarify the content needs of different websites. First, think of leading news websites. If news websites don’t post constantly about news or other relevant happenings in the world, they will be seen as not current and as a less reliable source for knowing what’s going on. Now think of a funeral home. The processes and services offered don’t change much due to laws and regional preferences, so their blog frequency would be comparatively low.

To help you stay ahead of the competition, we analyzed industry websites for small businesses in the United States and found the following on the average number of blogs posted per month:

  • HVAC – no consistent blogging
  • Dentists – one blog every two months
  • Law Firms – one blog every four months
  • Electricians – one blog every four months
  • Insurance – one blog a month
  • Financial Services – two blogs a month

Now, these are just a small sample of each of these industries. The takeaway from seeing the numbers above is that the average of this sample doesn’t blog. Keep in mind that half of businesses fail within their first five years, and the sample above included businesses of various ages. So, it would be unfair for a law firm to think their best practice would be to only have three blogs a year. Instead, think about what to do to be well above average to stand out.

Another factor with your industry and niche is your location. If you are the only electrician in a town with a population of 1,000, there’s a chance that updating your blog post won’t make much of a difference in your market. However, if you’re a plumber in the DFW metro, you have a lot of competition and need to be able to stand out.

The best way to determine how many blogs is a good amount for your business is to have a professional marketing agency evaluate what makes the most sense for your industry, niche, and location.

One large question to answer when considering how many blogs is a good amount for your website is why you want to post blogs in the first place. If your goal is to blog for the sake of blogging or you were told that blogging is important, that is good to get the ball rolling, but only for so long. It’s easy to burn out thinking of new ideas just to check something off a to-do list. Just like most things in life worth doing, there has to be a solid purpose.

If the goal of your business is to bring breaking news, then the smart choice would be to have an editor-in-chief who chooses what content meets the standard for publication. After all, news can encompass anything. So, rather than being the source of all news, perhaps your organization can set the goal of being the source of the most important news. Over time, with deep analysis, you could discover that the average newsworthy event occurs once a week, so your goal could be posting once a week.

If your business wants to inform the target market and have that information appear at the top of search engines through SEO rankings or within AI tools, covering topics in clusters is a better approach. Think back to the E.E.A.T. statement from earlier. One way to be seen as an expert is to understand not only the main topic but also the many subtopics surrounding it. AI tools can analyze this structure, extract answers to longer inquiries, and recognize that your site has the depth of content needed to be cited more frequently. For businesses like these, posting once a month won’t cut it.

If the company is looking to drive more traffic more quickly and maintain a long-term higher website traffic growth trajectory, then a goal of blogging quality content weekly would be a goal worth striving for. Keep in mind that blogs can pertain to company news, industry updates, and deep research topics.

frustrated writers next to financial projections on a whiteboard

It’s ok to have an aggressive goal to help fuel growth and become a leader in the industry or niche. However, if your creative team or content marketing services agency is going full throttle to create highly researched and engaging content daily, there may come a point when creativity or budget becomes exhausted.

Unless you have an unlimited supply of content writers or an endless budget to pay a third-party to create content for you, then there needs to be an honest discussion of how to best allocate the business’s resources. To prevent any long-term budget or burnout issues, we have some suggestions:

  1. Each blog post needs to have a minimum of 1,000 words.
  2. Have an open line of communication with your creative team to know their limits.
  3. Review the traffic from the content being produced every couple of months.
  4. Write about topics relevant to your customers.
  5. Have a strong SEO focus to get the content in front of the right people.
  6. Post consistently.

Like it or not, the things worth achieving in life tend to follow the same pattern of drive, focus, evaluation, adaptability, and consistency. Just like you can’t go on a diet and live at the gym for two days and expect to drop 100 pounds healthily, your company cannot write 100 blogs, post them all at once, and expect the website to bring in traffic forever. Inconsistency is one of the biggest hindrances to the benefits of blogging. In fact, consistency is more important than a large upload of many large blogs.

Predictable and consistent blog publishing also helps search engines crawl your site more frequently, which can help your content’s rankings over time. Additionally, regular posting builds trust in your audience. Readers will know when to expect your next installment, will make plans as to when to return to your website, and will increase your list of subscribers. These positive signals are what Google looks for and how they can boost your SEO rankings.

It’s better to commit to one quality blog post a month than to post a few amazing blogs in one month, then go on a posting drought for six months. The tortoise beats the hare no matter how many times that story is told.

So, how many blogs is a good amount for your website? Only you can answer that for your businesses. To come to that number, remember the importance of quality over quantity, the website’s age and authority, the industry and niche, your goals, your resources, and being consistent. Most businesses can achieve some form of success in posting at least two quality blogs a month, but your ideal might be different.

If you need help figuring out how to create blogs that are high in quality, consistent in scheduling, appropriate for your industry, meet your goals, that don’t break your budget, and fit within the age and authority of your website, contact the content experts at Burning Ox Marketing. We’ll help you create the framework for a successful SEO-focused blogging campaign and answer the question, ‘How many blogs is a good amount,’ for your needs.