How Often Should a Business Publish?

The industry answer is "as often as possible". It’s wrong, and it’s responsible for a lot of abandoned blogs.

The useful answer: as often as you can sustain without dropping quality, indefinitely. For most small and mid-sized businesses that’s two to four substantial pieces a month. Some do well on one.

Why frequency is the wrong first question

Publishing more only helps if each piece is worth publishing. Ten thin articles a month produce ten pages that rank for nothing, plus a site with a lot of weak content — which can drag down the pages that are good.

What actually correlates with results:

• Depth. Does the article answer the question better than what currently ranks?
• Relevance. Is it about something you sell to people who buy it?
• Consistency. Is the site alive, or did it stop in 2024?
• Connection. Does it link into a cluster and to a commercial page?

Frequency only affects the third of those.

The pattern that kills blogs

It’s always the same: an enthusiastic start at eight posts a month, a drop to four, then two, then a six-month gap, then a post apologising for the gap.

The site now looks abandoned, and the person responsible has learned that content doesn’t work.

Two articles a month, every month, for three years is 72 pieces of connected content and a site that visibly knows its subject. It also fits inside a real job.

Picking your cadence

Work backwards from capacity, honestly.

A genuinely useful 1,200-word article — researched, written by someone who knows the subject, edited, published with proper metadata and internal links — takes four to six hours. If you’re doing it yourself alongside running a business, that’s a real constraint.

Ask:

• Who writes it? Name a person.
• When, in their week? Name a slot.
• Who reviews it for accuracy?
• Who handles publishing and internal linking?

If any answer is "we’ll figure it out", start at one article a month. You can always increase.

When more actually helps

• Competitive markets where established sites publish constantly — though you’d beat them with depth on narrower queries rather than by matching volume.
• Large product catalogues where each product family justifies its own content.
• Genuine news in your industry, where being early has value.

Even then: sustainable beats fast.

Don’t forget updating

The highest-return content work in a mature blog is often not new articles. It’s:

• refreshing pieces that have slipped;
• merging two articles competing for the same query;
• adding sections answering follow-up questions;
• deleting content that isn’t earning its place.

Once you have 20 or more articles, budget a quarter of your capacity for maintenance. An updated article that already has some authority frequently outperforms a new one.

What to do when you fall behind

You will. Two rules:

Don’t apologise publicly. Nobody noticed. A "we’ve been quiet lately" post draws attention to the gap and adds nothing.

Don’t compensate with volume. Four rushed articles to catch up produces four weak pages. Restart at the cadence you can hold.

The measure that matters

Not posts per month. Ask instead:

• Is the total organic traffic to your article library rising quarter on quarter?
• Are articles sending people to your service pages?
• Have any enquiries mentioned something you wrote?

If those are moving, your cadence is fine. If they aren’t, publishing more of the same won’t fix it — the problem is topic selection or depth, and that’s a strategy question.

If the honest answer is that nobody in your business has time to do this properly, that’s what SEO content and blog management exists for — with the writing based on an interview with whoever in your business actually knows the subject.