Content cadence: How to find the perfect publishing schedule

We often get questions about how frequently you should publish new articles. The short answer is that the frequency depends on what's best for your company. This article will give a longer answer to how you should determine your publishing cadence.

First, it's important not to bite off more than you could chew, i.e. a critical deciding factor of your publishing frequency need to be how often you as a company can manage to post content that is relevant to your target audience. Quality (and relevance), length, and frequency are a trade-off. Generally, it's better to publish relevant and valuable content less often than irrelevant content frequently.

Nevertheless, optimising cadence for publishing articles is crucial in creating long-term success from your B2B content efforts. 

Deciding publishing cadence

How frequent you publish new content on your website is correlated with how many visitors you attract. Generally speaking, the more (relevant) content you post, the more opportunities you create to land on your particular page when someone does a Google search. 

However, search engines - like people - do not only look at the total amount of content on a site. Search engines also look at how old that content is and how frequently content is published on the site (among many other parameters ). 

For that reason, publishing 50 blog articles on the first of January and then posting nothing for the next 12 months will yield lesser results than publishing one of those 50 articles once a week for 12 months.   

You should publish as much optimised and relevant content as possible to maximise organic traffic. According to data from HubSpot, you should publish content multiple times per month at a minimum, and ideally, you should post new content almost daily. 

According to the same HubSpot data, the more frequently you publish, the more visitors you get, and conversely, less frequent publishing leads to fewer visitors. As shown in the graph below, among sites that publish many times per day, only about one third-get less than 15K visitors per month (remember that content quality and relevance are just as important as frequency). Meanwhile, 100 per cent of sites that only publish once a quarter or so get less than 15K visitors.

Sites that post new content daily are more likely to generate between 15,001 and 250,000 visitors per month and less likely to get between 1,001 and 15,000 visitors to their websites.

The volume of content you can produce is highly dependent on the audience you're trying to reach and the size and capacity of your team. The more resources you have at your disposal, the more content you can create. Moreover, the larger your audience, the more content you should produce.

However, although determining a publishing cadence is necessary, it is equally important to stick to it and remain consistent.

How much content do you create?

Everything else equal, the more relevant content you have on your site, the more opportunities you create for visitors to find it. How many new articles do you generate each week? One? Two? Three or more? The size of your content team will affect the amount of content you create. If you are incapable of producing new content each week, consider expanding the scope of your team to meet your needs.

How much should you publish?

At a minimum, you should aim to publish new content once a week - this signals to visitors and search engines that you consistently release new content. This also increases the likelihood of repeat visitors. When visitors learn that you publish something new each week, they are drawn to come back habitually to check for new content. When your visitors subscribe to your blog via email, this also serves as a weekly reminder about your brand and the great content you produce.

Additionally, search engines use the volume of content on a website as one of the primary authority signals to determine the legitimacy and quality of the website. Publishing regular blog articles are one of the best ways to increase the content on your site quickly.

Another benefit of a weekly cadence is sending the quality "fresh content" signal to search engines. A company that frequently updates its .com with relevant, high-quality content gets an advantage over competitors that publish content infrequently. This is due to being more likely to be up to date with the latest information on any particular subject they are an authority on.

However, once a week is the bare minimum - more is always better if you can keep up the quality and relevance norm. Ideally, it would be best if you aimed to publish 3-5 times per week to create as many opportunities as possible for potential customers to find you.

Want to know more? Take a look at our guide to content creation for more insight, and download the free presentation on the same topic below.