How often should businesses blog

If you are a small business owner and you’ve started dipping your toes into SEO and content creation then you’ve probably either started a blog or are wondering if you should start one.

But how often do you need to post?

This blog explores why you might need to blog, how often you should post content, and the mistakes to avoid. 

I will also look at how to properly leverage AI to help you speed up the writing process while avoiding penalties.

Why Should Businesses Blog at All?

Regular, strategic blogging helps you:

• Build trust and authority in your niche

• Drive organic traffic from search engines

• Answer common customer questions and objections

• Support your sales funnel (top/middle/bottom)

• Improve website freshness (a Google ranking factor)

It allows you to hit relevant topics in your niche in a way that doesn’t require major web development (in the form of new landing pages, etc).

A quick note about short tail and long tail keywords

In traditional SEO, we target short and long-tail keywords. Short tail keywords tend to be more in line with products and services, eg, Air Source Heat Pump. These are usually your "money pages". 

Long tail keywords tend to be related questions like, Are Air Source Heat Pumps Noisy.

Through a blog, you can answer the questions your customers have in more detail than you would on your “money pages”.

SEO in 2025 is less about targeting keywords, particularly long-tail, but you can still use the same principles of answering your customers questions to produce great blog articles. 

Should you be worried about AI Overviews?

With the rise of AI-generated overviews in search results (like Google’s Search Generative Experience), some business owners worry that users will stop clicking on blogs altogether.

From a purely SEO perspective, it certainly changes things.

While these AI summaries are reducing click-through rates for blog content, they still rely on high-quality, authoritative content to generate accurate answers. 

That means your blog posts are still vital, not just for attracting clicks, but for being referenced in these overviews. 

The key is to focus on helpful, original content that answers specific questions better than anyone else.

How Often Should You Blog?

General guideline: Once a week is a strong starting point and something most businesses should be able to manage.

Factors to consider:

• Your industry and competition

• Your business goals (lead gen, traffic, SEO)

• Your available resources (team size, budget, time)

I also like a strategic approach. For example, we publish digital marketing advice targeted at small business owners.

We know many small business owners want to grow, and online channels represent the best opportunity for them to achieve their goals.

We also want to create thought leadership for LinkedIn. Writing blogs helps us do that and get our content in front of more people.

By producing high quality articles that offer practical, actionable advice, we’re aiming to draw in the right audience and put our brand in front of them.

Each article is researched, written and then optimised for search (in that order).

Frequency can also vary depending on the industry:

Examples:

• A local trades business might only need 1–2 posts/month

• A fast-moving SaaS company may need 2–4 posts/week

One of the best ways to figure out how frequently you should post is to take a look at what your competitors are doing.

A lot of small businesses don’t blog anywhere near enough, but follow a few similar brands and try searching for relevant topics on Google.

Look at the blog articles that appear at the top of Google (not the ads), and you’ll be able to reverse-engineer their blog strategy.

Quality matters more than quantity, and consistency helps, not just with keeping things fresh but with getting into a groove of creating content regularly.

An example of a successful small business blog is N-Accounting. They understand that quality matters, always trying to create the best article for the topic. They only post around once a month, but every article is designed to be evergreen and answer specific questions on tax.

They have several articles that rank top 3 in the UK, drawing in quality traffic each month. 
 

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t do any of the following:

Posting too infrequently and expecting results

As already mentioned, frequency varies, but once you start, you should try and be consistent to build a readership and keep people coming back. Posting the odd blog without a plan will have little to no impact. 

Churning out low-quality, keyword-stuffed content

I’ve seen news articles copied and pasted, and I’ve seen old-school articles full of keywords written for algorithms. Keyword stuffing is where you try and “stuff” an article with your target keyword, eg. repeating it in every subheading and in the body text. Don’t do it!

Spamming AI blogs

If any agencies or marketing people are suggesting this as a viable strategy, then questions have to be asked. Google’s quality raters actively look for websites with AI-generated content. That doesn’t mean don’t use AI, it means don’t think you can suddenly automate the publication of 100 articles per week. Your website will be removed from Google (deindexed). We’ll explain how to use AI to help speed up blog writing a bit further down in this article.

Ignoring user intent (writing for algorithms, not people)

Write for humans, don’t write for search engines. It’s easy to get sucked into writing for SEO once you know a little bit about SEO. Don’t do this, it makes your articles hard to read and Google is much more interested in context. Be helpful to your target audience first, optimise later. 

Failing to promote the blog (e.g., no social/email follow-up)

Too many businesses forget about distribution. You’ve spent time crafting a brilliant article, but there is literally no point in it if you don’t drive traffic to that article too! We have a process that involves multiple social posts, creating a video and emailing out our blog articles to our mailing list. If you mention other businesses in your article, send it to them and ask them to share. Even better, get them to link back to your article from their website.

If you have interesting data or something newsworthy, use digital PR to boost your article's authority.  

Not updating old content to keep it fresh and relevant

Don’t just forget about old articles, even if they are doing well. Google wants helpful, relevant and timely content. If Google thinks your article is helpful, it will value it and it will rank well. Hooray! But forgetting about it and letting Google devalue your article over time, after all your hard work, that’s not so good. Keep your historic content up to date with timely, new additions. Monitor performance over time and keep an eye on those engagement metrics to make sure your content is still landing well with your audience.
 

How to Use AI to Help You Write Content (Without Hurting SEO)

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, well, it is to be honest. Thankfully, Chat GPT is very good at cutting corners.

Here are some tips on how to use AI, safely, when creating content.

How AI can help:

Generate ideas and outlines

With the right prompts, you can get Chat GPT to put together a blog outline. This very blog was outlined by Chat GPT. I had a title, and wrote an introduction to the article, then asked Chatgpt to provide me with an outline for a 1000-word article touching on x,y, and z topics. The blog was then completely rewritten and personalised in detail.

Speed up first drafts

An alternative is to get AI to write the article for you first. You then have a complete draft ready for you to personalise. This is the important part, you must put some effort into adding unique detail. Chat GPT, Gemini etc, they are “copying” from other blogs and websites. By adding your personal experience, photos, hot takes, maybe some unique statistics, you are improving the draft and making it your own, in half the time it would take to write it from scratch.

Help with grammar and readability

Using Chat GPT etc to check your grammar and readability, maybe even tone of voice, is extremely handy. Readability is important on the Internet. Complexity will quickly put audiences off. It isn’t always obvious how to check this but AI makes it easy. Simply copy and paste your article into Chat GPT and ask it to check grammar and readability! 

Avoid these AI risks:

• Relying solely on AI without human editing

• Copying AI-generated text without fact-checking

• Producing repetitive, unoriginal content that violates Google’s helpful content guidelines (EEAT)

Best practices:

• Treat AI as a writing assistant, not a replacement

• Blend your expertise with AI speed

• Use tools like ChatGPT, but always revise with your brand voice and audience in mind
   

Final Tips for a Sustainable Blogging Strategy

Plan content monthly or quarterly with a content calendar. I find it helpful to come up with lots of topics built around an overall strategy.

Repurpose blogs into emails, social posts, and videos. This helps you distribute your content further and come up with content across multiple channels.

Track performance (traffic, rankings, engagement) to improve future posts. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Don’t overcommit—start small, stay consistent and don’t be put off. Successful blogs can have a long lifespan, but it can take years for this to happen.

In conclusion

Blogging is a long-term strategy that pays off with consistency and high quality.

You don’t need to post daily, but you do need to post regularly

Use the tools and resources at your disposal, including AI, but keep it human

Start planning your next 3 blog topics today.