The short answer
Publish as often as you can keep up with good pieces, and keep it steady. A business that publishes one useful article a week for a year usually does better than one that publishes twenty in a month and then stops. The rhythm matters more than the number.
There is no magic frequency
Google does not reward a site for publishing on a schedule. It rewards pages that answer searches well. So the right frequency is the one that lets the business publish genuinely useful pieces without the quality slipping.
For one business that might be one article a month. For another with a broad range of services and an active market, it might be several a week. Both can work. What tends not to work is a pace the business cannot keep.
Why steady beats bursts
A steady rhythm helps in practical ways:
- each piece gets proper planning, writing and review, instead of being rushed to meet a sudden target
- new pages give Google regular reasons to recrawl the site
- the business builds a habit, so publishing does not depend on one person's enthusiasm
- results can be read over time, because the input is consistent
Bursts usually come from a campaign or a new supplier. Twenty articles go up in a month, nobody plans the next twenty, and the site goes quiet. The burst pieces are often thinner too, because volume was the goal.
How to choose a rhythm
Start from capacity, not ambition. Ask three questions:
- How many genuinely different questions do customers ask that the site does not yet answer?
- Who will write, and who will check each piece for accuracy?
- How much time does the business owner have to answer the writer's questions?
If the answers point to two pieces a month, start there. It is easier to increase a rhythm that works than to rescue one that has collapsed.
What counts as content
Publishing does not only mean new blog posts. Updating an old article that has gone stale, improving a service page with better answers or adding a case note all count. Often an update does more good than a new piece, because the page already has some history with Google.
A healthy content plan mixes new articles that answer new questions, improvements to existing pages, and the occasional larger guide.
Signs the rhythm is too fast
A publishing pace is too fast when the pieces start to look alike. Watch for articles that answer the same question with a different title, introductions that could belong to any business, and drafts that go live without anyone who knows the subject reading them. Another sign is a growing pile of published pieces with no links to the service pages they were meant to support. When any of these appear, slow down. Fewer pieces that each earn their place will do more for the business than a full calendar of near duplicates.
Keep a record
Whatever the rhythm, keep a simple record of what was planned, what was published and when it went live. Without it, nobody can tell whether the plan was followed or what it achieved. Our guide to how a publishing cadence stays organized shows the record we keep, and our answer on how long a blog post should be covers the question that usually follows.