Blogging for SEO: Strong Evidence Suggests Daily Posts
No one ever said it was easy to blog every day. But as we know, nothing good in life comes easy. And so everyday, we at Bruce Clay, Inc. strive to say something meaningful on the blog. The benefits of blogging for your brand and for SEO have been extolled before. But less examined are the risks of not blogging. What are you missing out on by not blogging regularly? It’s not a test we’re likely to undertake here, so luckily, social media blogger Justin Kownacki did the deed for us. But look out. The results aren’t pretty.
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For the last three months, Justin has blogged weekly instead of daily. His goal was to improve the quality of the blog by devoting more time to each high impact post rather than spreading his efforts across multiple posts. It’s a theory I’ve been tempted with before. But now the evidence is clear. Nobody wins — not the author, not the brand, and least of all your SEO efforts — when you cut back on the blogging.
Justin’s experiment showed that decreasing post frequency resulted in fewer visitors and a lower Alexa ranking. At the same time, the quality of posts didn’t increase as he had hoped. And when it comes to SEO today, I think fewer posts put you at a disadvantage in an index that values freshness.
Trends of Visitors and Traffic
The most significant effect of fewer posts was a downward spiral of visitors. Justin went from 7,500 page views in April to almost half, at 3,583 page views in June. A blog is a major SEO tool because it can introduce visitors to a site from search, and from there, it can funnel that user deeper into the site, engaging them with relevant content and sparking a relationship with the brand and community. Decreasing blog post frequency diminishes ranking opportunities, lessens the potential for relevant content, and loses out on chances to introduce readers to the brand.
Benefits of Fresh Content
If you aren’t adding to your blog on a frequent and regular basis, you won’t reap the benefits of fresh content. People seek out fresh and new content everyday to fill their desire for entertainment and information. Google considers some queries to be relevant for recently published results, a concept it calls “query deserves freshness.” Real-time results and SERP filters for time also show that search engines are paying attention to content freshness. Don’t miss out on the SEO opportunity for ranking visibility with newly published content.
Brand Impact from Dropped Rankings
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Justin saw his Alexa ranking plummet in the three months since he stopped blogging daily. While the importance of Alexa rankings themselves is up for debate, there are notable industry ranking lists that factor Alexa into their formulas. For instance, AdAge’s Power 150 list of marketing blogs uses Alexa as part of its equation. The brand impact of placement on well regarded lists may diminish as your score drops. And list placement also represents an opportunity for a link from a relevant and reputable source. Numbers are just numbers, but recognition, visibility and credibility are important for your brand and for SEO.
Correlation Between Quality and Frequency
Contrary to the supposition he made at the beginning of his experiment, combining the time he would have used to write five posts to write one post didn’t result in a better post. That is, if you consider better to be equal traffic and social media circulation. The popularity of posts and the rate of social media sharing is an important factor for Internet marketing and SEO due to the links and visibility posts can generate. It basically comes down to a choice between regularly circulated and linked to posts or posts that no one reads because they’ve forgotten about your blog in the week since you last posted. Tough choice.
This is great insight on the importance of blogging daily and the positive impact it has on Search Engine Optimization. Thanks for the great article.
Tony V.
@ August 10th, 2010 at 19:00The old Quality vs Quantity debate! As a daily blogger myself i have to say i would often love the opportunity to step away from the plate for a few days, gather my thoughts, and return full of ideas and renewed optimism.
Unfortunately, the ‘drop-off’ in traffic make this an impossible feat. As you say Virginia, fresh content is key, so it’s back to the drawing board to stave off writers block!
@ August 11th, 2010 at 08:51I read Justin’s post the other day (yesterday? Monday? I don’t know anymore) and thought the results were pretty interesting. It’s a fine line as a blogger. Too few posts and you lose SEO benefit and community influence; too many posts and you want to physically hurt yourself and run out of things to say.
At Outspoken Media we typically post 4x M-F and then do a quick links post on Saturday. Since I’m responsible for most of the blogging over there, the day off midweek gives me more time to focus on client work/internal projects without negating the community influence we’re trying to build.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:11I have to say that for people with something besides blogging to do everyday (90% of us), writing 5+ times a week can lead you to want to kill yourself.
If your main outlet is blogging, then 5+ times a week now seems to be all but mandatory.
Im Lisa’s case, where she already has a big pile of work and a ravenous fan-base, cutting back to 4 days was probably pretty safe.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:19Good insight here. Blogging daily is only worthwhile if you are providing useful information (in fact, any blog entry is only worthwhile if the information is relevant).
I love the fact that blogging is good for SEO purposes, but I won’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Whether I write 2 entries a month or 15, I’m only going to blog if I can provide useful information to my readers.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:26You’re pretty much THE example of how to blog on the regular so I was hoping you’d pipe up on this one.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:33Yeah, Justin’s insight was priceless.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:34An oldie but an… importy! I totally agree, Craig. As much as it pains me, the continual battle with the block is worth it.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:37Yup. We can’t all be The Lisa… Believe me. I’ve tried.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:38I agree and disagree. I think there are different kinds of bloggers in this industry. There are the practitioners of SEO, PPC, CRO, etc., who blog when they discover or formulate an idea they think is worth sharing. When they say something, it’s infrequently but pretty high impact. The only problem is they don’t typically have a regular following. People aren’t checking they’re blog regularly because posts aren’t published regularly. That means when something’s posted, the author has to take great effort to get it in front of people. Then there are bloggers who force themselves to write every day. And while you may think that leads to a lot of rubbish, “write every day” is the primary advice I’ve heard from professional writers over and over again. You hone your craft. You stumble across things you may not have realized before. You end up with more gems than if you hadn’t tried in the first place. And sometimes the simple things you write just to get in a post that day end up really resonating with readers. Crystalizing a simple concept in a way that’s relatable can be just as important as sharing a “new idea”. Obviously not everyone has time to write daily and there are exceptions to both models, of course. I’m just speaking generally.
@ August 11th, 2010 at 10:50Great post, and encouragement to those of us who have been blogging daily. I admit I was somewhat discouraged last month when I posted the 700th post and received the comment from one blog subscriber that I was overwhelming her. Obviously not everyone will be interested in every post, and in our case, we probably should segment our audience and start several more blogs rather than trying to cover everything under one umbrella. But the thought of adding more daily blogs makes me shudder!
@ August 11th, 2010 at 12:54It’s one thing to measure pageviews and visits. What I’d really like to see is what the effect of blogging less had on his goal conversions. It might be that blogging everyday brings in a lot of low converting traffic – they just come to read the post and leave (which is completely normal).
But if the posts are more thought out, in depth, and share more valuable information (as I assume he could do given 5x more time to write each post) would those visitors be more inclined to convert (or even at least go from being a bounce to a multi-page visit)?
Also, I would love to see Justin’s traffic patterns for last year. He compared May to June, and saw that the numbers dropped in June. Although a lot of that drop off is undoubtedly from blogging less, I wonder how much is just seasonal. I know for us (and a many others) June is usually the start of the slower period of the year, with July and August tending to also be slow. That didn’t seem to be taken into account with his experiment.
All things considered, it’s still a fascinating look into the effects (and power) of blogging daily. If nothing else, it at least lights a fire under my ass to write more!
@ August 11th, 2010 at 13:35I totally agree. With blogging you have to be on it daily. I used to try and write 700 word articles daily to post to numerous article sites, but I found that I very quickly ran out of ideas and became burnt out. And, by posting the same article to numerous sites it actually drove my Alexa ranking down, with not much of a difference in traffic generation as compared to my new approach. Now I am writing smaller posts that are keyword rich (balanced) using a cool SEO tool that can be found on another blog of mine http://biz-zoom.com/ which I am rebuilding around the same approach. I also create back-links by posting to blogs like this one, and one great advantaage is that when you write a quick post you can copy and save it as a seed idea for another post(s) or article(s). The internet is keyword and back-link driven, and posts throughout it is what drives traffic to your site(s).
@ August 11th, 2010 at 18:06I am a strong non-believer in QDF bringing additional visitors, and I have tons of data that correlates.
However visitors
1. Can be trained to visit more frequently
2. Tend to read more than one post when they visit, so you had better have a few good posts for them to read each time they visit.
Also the value of links deteriorate over time – if you are not encouraging more links in some way, whether to new or old content, then overall rankings can deminish.
Note: QDF can have a negative ranking/traffic effect for existing content (I have data for that as well)
@ August 12th, 2010 at 05:52Andy… glad someone said it.
Virginia…
@ August 12th, 2010 at 06:11did you do any correlation between subject matter of posts vs. search trends/volume for those topics of the two time periods??
Two really important points that should be considered. My analysis just focused on SEO goals of traffic rather than the bigger picture of conversions. And seasonality of blog readership has a big impact and could have skewed the results. Thanks for expanding the conversation, Jim.
@ August 12th, 2010 at 08:53Very interesting… Your closing note makes perfect sense, though the point you make at the beginning seems counter intuitive. Not having data and just working on instinct, I would think that having fresh content that appears in results due to QDF gives a blog an opportunity to get content in front of new eyeballs. But I haven’t done any tests or collected any data – that’s just speculation. I’d be very interested to know more about what you’ve found, Andy. Thanks
@ August 12th, 2010 at 09:16That would be fascinating, Steve. Maybe I’ll leave a comment on Justin’s post.
@ August 12th, 2010 at 09:18Great insight on blog posting, Virginia. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges a blogger has to deal with, especially if they’re concerned with ranking – how to push out quality content on a regular basis. The analysis you did behind blog posting is awesome and definitely makes sense. I’m sure we can discover from our own personal online activity, we tend to gear towards sites that update on a daily basis. Good post! Thanks for sharing!
@ August 20th, 2010 at 10:50I’m a big believer that daily and relevant posts over an extended period of time are a great way to build blog traffic. I also teach my blog book tour students to schedule blog visits five days a week over a period of 2-3 weeks to increase the “noise” they make online about their new titles. Someone challenged me on this assertion recently, and I can’t find the articles that promoted this blog book tour approach. It seems intuitive to me, but can we prove book tour promotion 5-10 days consecutively actually generages more search engine attention? Is this an effective promotion strategy? I’d like to hear a professional opinion of an intense, albeit relatively short, blogging campaign. Thanks.
@ September 3rd, 2010 at 10:50