As many marketers begin their content marketing journey, they quickly wonder what level of commitment is required. How often should we blog? What level of downloadable content is necessary to support an effective contact marketing strategy? How often do we need to refresh content on our website to get Google’s attention?
Content marketing, in particular, blogging is one of the best ways to increase visitors to your website. HubSpot reports that companies with an active blog have 97% more inbound links than those companies that do not. Inbound links are essential to increasing web traffic because they directly tie to Google’s perception of the authoritative value of a website. This article will explore the optimal level of blogging frequency and the expectation associated with differing levels of blogging frequency.
One of the most important content marketing considerations is blogging frequency. How often you post to your blog can make a big impact. Marketing Vox notes that companies that boost blogging by more than 20 times per month have (on average) a 45% growth in traffic over those companies that only blog 11 to 20 times per month. Our own experiences and content marketing analytics have demonstrated a sharp jump in traffic from blogging 3 versus 4 times a week. That probably sounds like a lot of content generation. It is in fact a significant commitment to content marketing and in particular, blogging. Turns out content marketing is one of those efforts where frequency has a direct impact on results.
The following chart demonstrates the relationship between blogging frequency and site traffic. You can clearly see that a jump in generating traffic occurs when you start to reach 15 blog posts per month. HubSpot has studied the link between blogging frequency and site traffic across thousands of companies, so the data should be considered fairly stable.
“Impact of Monthly Blog Articles on Inbound Traffic” graph and associated information provided by HubSpot, Marketing Benchmarks from 7000+ Businesses.1
How web crawling works
To better understand the impact that blogging frequency has on your results, it is important to understand how web crawling works and what Google does to reward content marketing frequency.
While every search engine works a little bit differently, the basics are the same. According to Google, it uses a special type of web crawler software called “Googlebot.” This crawler skims web pages and then follows the links on the pages. The data about each of these pages is carried to Google’s servers where it is analyzed and a specific algorithm is used to determine how the information is organized and should be ranked. Search engines are able to view large amounts of search engine results and determine where that web page should be ranked. This is the foundation of search engine optimization (SEO). An effective optimization technique is to increase content marketing frequency, since adding new pages to a website is something that Google and other search engines reward.
Search engines reward frequent updates
Google and other search engines reward websites that are updated often. This is why blogging frequency is likely to directly tie to your content marketing results. How does this work? When you post a blog you are making an edit or change to your web page. This shows up in the search engine’s crawl as a change. When your page is changing frequently (as with a page with a high blogging frequency), the search engines are more likely to see your page as fresh. This freshness is perceived as “better” to Google, since it is theoretically more up to date than a stagnant page.
Leads matter
Blogging frequency is a very important way to boost website interest and traffic. It is essential to ensure every article and post provides value. Quantity should never be sacrificed over quality. According to HubSpot, 92% of website owners who blog more than once a day acquired at least one customer from blogging. A strong commitment to content marketing can result in not only more website visitors, but also leads. To learn more about how to tame the content marketing beast for your business, sign up for a J&C Content Marketing Action and Assessment Plan personalized session.
Source:
1. HubSpot
Topics: Inbound Marketing
