What Happens If You Stop Blogging?

We posted at our lab site, FreshPlans, every day for a couple of years. By doing so, we saw traffic increase by more than 3,000% in one year. Traffic continued to grow briskly from then on — till we stopped blogging regularly. Even though this website has thousands of indexed pages and continued to get nice amounts of traffic, the traffic fell gently yet steadily instead of climbing. After a year without regular fresh content, year-over-year traffic to the website had fallen by 56.86%

We’ve seen a couple of clients stop blogging this season. Traffic to one of the stopped blogs is down by 28% after 30 days. Another blog, which stopped posting two months ago, has seen a drop in website traffic of more than 40%.

When you consider that the average website has to work very hard to get a year-over-year traffic increase of 25%, drops like that are striking. The big message is this: it takes lots of time and work to increase your traffic significantly, and hardly any time to lose ground if you neglect your website.

But what if you start blogging again?

We started regular blogging at FreshPlans again two weeks ago, and we are down by 49.14% compared with last year — but up by 21.43% compared with the previous two weeks.

In other words, we’re seeing traffic increases already. We’re not sure how long it will take to regain the ground we lost over the year in which we stopped blogging regularly, but we’ll let you know.

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Rebecca Haden

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2 responses to “What Happens If You Stop Blogging?”

  1. Todd E Jones Avatar
    Todd E Jones

    There seems to be a debate about how much to actually blog, but one thing remains, consistency works. The SEO value of consistency is high. I read a post about a company who saw an increase in traffic when they posted 150 blog posts in 50 days and saw a dramatic increase in traffic and conversions.

    Reply
    1. Rebecca Haden Avatar
      Rebecca Haden

      We have access to lots of data, and we’ve seen that regularity is best. It’s hard to be authoritative about the perfect frequency, because there’s so much variation among sites, but the difference between occasional posting and regular posting is big enough to show regardless.

      We typically go with three times a week for clients and five times a week for our own site, but we have had clients who preferred a twice-a-week schedule and they still see good results. Less than once a week is the same as occasional posting.

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