TL;DR: There is no magic number of blog posts. The right total is the number of real questions your customers ask that connect to what you sell, and the right pace is one you can keep up without the quality dropping. Set time aside to update older posts as well as write new ones.
If you have been told to write 20 or 30 blogs, or to post twice a month, it is fair to ask where those numbers come from. They sound precise, but we have not seen good evidence that a set number of posts gets you rankings. The question that does have a useful answer is how many posts your business needs to cover what your customers are asking, and how often you can realistically publish them. If you are still deciding whether blogging is worth doing at all, start with our post on Do Blogs Increase SEO?
Is There A Right Number Of Blog Posts?
No. Google doesn’t give a number of posts to aim for. Its helpful content guidance treats publishing lots of content on many topics, in the hope that some of it performs, as a sign of writing for search engines first. The same goes for adding lots of new content just to make a site seem fresh.
What matters is coverage: whether you have a good, useful answer to the questions your customers ask before they buy. That is why the right number is different for every business. A business with several services and plenty of customer questions will need more posts than one with a single narrow service. A crowded market needs more than a quiet one, because you have to be better than what already ranks, not just present.
How To Work Out How Many Posts Your Business Needs
- List the questions. For each service you sell, write down what customers ask before they buy: how much it costs, how it compares with the alternatives, whether they need it at all. Your sales and customer service teams hear these every week. Our guide to topic clusters suggests writing down five to ten questions or subtopics under the main topic.
- Check what you already have. Mark each question as well answered, thin, out of date or missing.
- Rank the gaps. Put the questions that connect most directly to what you sell, and that you have a realistic chance of ranking for, at the top. A question you can never compete for can wait. A quick check is to search the question yourself. If the top results are detailed answers from much larger sites, that gap will take more work to win.
- Treat the gaps as your total. The number of posts you need is the number of worthwhile gaps, not a round number picked in advance. Some of those gaps will be closed by improving an existing post or service page rather than writing a new one.
- Review it twice a year. New gaps open up as your business, your competitors and the way people search change, so this is not a one-off exercise.
Our Top Tip: Before you write or commission a post, finish this sentence: “Someone searching this is trying to decide whether to …”. If you cannot complete it with something connected to what you sell, the post is filling space rather than filling a gap, and it can wait.
Wildcat Digital Example: When a housing provider specialising in affordable homeownership came to us, we didn’t start with a fixed number of blogs each month. We looked at their existing website content alongside keyword research, search performance and the questions potential homebuyers were asking.
That showed clear opportunities to better cover Shared Ownership, eligibility, affordability and the buying process, all genuine questions people had before enquiring about a property.
We prioritised improving the relevant existing pages first, then built supporting content around those questions, rather than publishing blogs to hit a monthly target.
The aim was a more useful journey for potential buyers, better visibility for relevant non-branded searches and content that supported the client’s business objectives rather than just generating traffic.
How Often Should You Publish?
Choose a pace you can keep up without the quality dropping. A steady rhythm you can hold for a year is worth more than a burst of posts followed by silence. One properly researched and checked post a month is better than four rushed ones, and if you have the time and the topics to do more, add more.
“When a client asks for a fixed number of blogs each month, I always look at what we’re actually trying to achieve before agreeing to a number. Publishing more content doesn’t automatically mean better SEO performance. The biggest mistake I’ve seen is businesses prioritising content volume over strategy. You end up with articles targeting the same keywords, covering topics that aren’t commercially relevant, or competing with pages that already exist on the website. Content should be driven by opportunities and evidence, not an arbitrary publishing schedule.”
— Paul Pennington, SEO Account DirectorAI tools make it tempting to publish far more, far faster. Using them to churn out many pages that add nothing for readers is a listed example of scaled content abuse. The tool is not the problem. Pages that exist to hit a number, rather than to help someone, are.
Should You Write New Posts Or Update Old Ones?
Both. Advice changes, links break, and competitors publish better answers, so older posts need looking after. We recommend reviewing older content at least every 6 to 12 months as a bare minimum, and blog posts often more regularly. Start with posts that already get some search impressions or link closely to a service, as they have the most to gain.
Jasmine Savery, our SEO Account Manager, covers a useful ratio in Is Blog Optimisation Worth It? She optimises one older post for every three new blogs she writes. Treat that ratio as a starting point and adjust it to how much your older content has slipped.
One caution: only change a post’s date when the content has substantially changed. Updating the date alone to make a page look fresh is another of the warning signs of search engine-first content.
How To Tell If Your Blog Is Working
Judge it by whether the posts bring in the right people, not by how many are live. Check in Search Console whether the questions you targeted are moving up, and in Google Analytics whether readers go on to your service pages and whether enquiries follow.
Give it time. Blogs typically start ranking in the top positions for competitive queries 6 to 9 months after publication, although there’s no strict timeline.
FAQs
As long as it takes to answer the question well. There’s no preferred word count, and longer pages tend to do well because they’re thorough, not because of their length.
If you want help with the writing itself, see how to optimise a blog for SEO.
Not on its own. Weekly only helps if you have a real question for every post and the time to do each one properly. Otherwise, monthly and done well is the better choice.
How Wildcat Handles This
Our SEO content process starts with keyword research, mapping and strategy, and a clear roadmap is created from that. We think the number of posts should come out of that work rather than being picked first.
On a new SEO account, one of the first things we do is a specialist SEO audit that gives us an overview of the health of your website, and our SEO copywriting page says a content audit should cover thin or missing content, page structure, keywords, duplicate content and blog content. We measure the success of our campaigns on the revenue they generate.
If you want an honest view of what your own site needs, you can book a free consultation with our team, or read more about our SEO copywriting services. If you prefer to write your own posts, we explain where an agency still helps in If I Write Blogs Myself Do I Need an SEO Agency?
Last Reviewed: 7 October 2026
Amy Varley
SEO Executive
