The most frequent comment I receive from fellow bloggers is “Ugh! My numbers are dropping again!” It’s great to see so many people begin to take steps to understand and track their analytics with Google’s free tools, but I find that similar to stock market numbers, paying too much attention to your analytics isn’t always helpful.

It also doesn’t help decrease frustration levels when the rules for social media, blogging, and SEO best practices frequently shift depending on who you listen to or where you find information.

Although I’m not going to suggest you ignore analytics altogether, I do think you will find that consistently posting excellent blog content to your website is one of the best things you can do to best maintain (or increase!) your website traffic and reduce your analytics frustrations. The great thing is that whether your goal is to increase website traffic to sell a product or to have more people reading your website content, consistent blogging will help.

Excellent Content
Before we go any further, let’s explore what excellent blog content includes. We’ve said it before, but it’s so important I’ll repeat myself here. If driving readers to your website is a priority for you, the days of typing out a few thoughts and posting them on a blog are gone.

Every Blog Post Needs to Include:

Content that is relevant to your website niche (this goes for either a business or author’s blog)
Keywords
Inbound and outbound links
An optimized image
A great title
Grammatically correct sentences that are also free of spelling errors
A minimum of 500 words
Meta description
Proper references to quotes and statistical data
Bonus: Relevant H2 and H3 headers and/or bulleted lists when possible
The ability to search for information before purchasing deeply influences today’s buyer. Even brick and mortar stores benefit from having an active website.

Here are a few stats to consider:

72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles. (WordStream, 2016) (Source)
47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Source)
96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders.
Consumers are looking to read more than one article on a subject before purchasing. B2B buyers value content from industry leaders. Excellent content is important to help you not only be found by search but to help you develop a reputation as a trustworthy source.

Why Blogging Helps Your Website Traffic
Every time you add a blog article to your website you increase the opportunities search engine bots have to connect your content with a search query. More than that, Google has made it clear that they prioritize new content. “When crawlers find a webpage, our systems render the content of the page, just as a browser does. We take note of key signals — from keywords to website freshness — and we keep track of it all in the Search index.”(source)

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While most of your website content will not change once you publish it, your blog content continues to add pages to your website with new information. Publishing fresh content on a regular basis tells Google your website is active and increases the number of pages for bots to scan.

Frequency Matters
While there is not an exact rule as to how often you publish new content, a Hubspot study found a direct correlation between publishing frequency and website traffic. “Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5x more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.”

Consider these Stats:

Companies with 1 – 10 employees that publish 11 or more blog posts per month drive much higher traffic than companies of the same size that publish fewer than 11 blog posts. (source)
Like the companies with 1 – 10 employees, companies with 11 – 25 employees saw the largest jump in traffic numbers when they published more than 11 blog posts per month.
Companies with 26 – 200 employees that published 11+ blog posts per month had a little less than 2X more traffic than those publishing 0 – 1 posts per month.
B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3X more traffic than those blogging 0 – 1 times per month.
B2C companies that blogged 11+ times per month got more than 4X as many leads than those that blog only 4-5 times per month.
As you can see, both company size and the type of company matter when determining the frequency of publication. While your goal may be to drive as much traffic as possible, it’s better to publish fewer excellent blog posts than to just put something out there to meet a number. Producing excellent content cannot be compromised.

Getting Started
Now that you know the details to include in every blog post, and you have an idea of how many posts to publish, it’s time to get writing. This process may feel overwhelming, but if you are starting from scratch, the good news is you can pretty much start anywhere and build from there.

Brainstorm a list of the most common questions you answer for your customers. Even if your competition has already published a blog article explaining the answers, your customers still haven’t heard the information in your voice.

Staying organized is going to be the key to success in this endeavor, but you cannot ignore the importance of creating a strategy. We’ve created helpful content to get you started. Our SEO Keyword Research Template will help you prioritize and focus your content ideas.

Remember, your goal is the have a steadier traffic flow to your website. So, while adding content is the first step, you will also need to promote the content across other communication channels such as your marketing emails and social media channels. Check out our Content Calendar Template for an organizational structure for planning out when posts will publish as well as when and how you can re-purpose blog posts for promotion.