Will Regularly Adding New Blog Posts Improve Ranking?

[Kingalan1]

We have added very little new website content in the last year. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. Would adding a brand-new blog post once a week help improve our ranking in Google? A few years ago adding new content would've had quickly had a positive effect. Is that still the case? Or should we focus content creation resources in other areas such as social media?

Thanks, Alan

[EGOL]

If you add new article content that is optimized for a specific keyword then that content will get out in the SERPs and compete for relevant traffic.  If your article content is successful at pulling in traffic, you can have house ads or links on that page to route that traffic to lead forms or sales pages that might produce conversions.

Would adding a brand-new blog post once a week.....

How much time do you have to spend on this?... if your blog post is going to be a page or prattle then you are wasting your time in my opinion.  But if your page is very informative and worthy of being linked to by news stories, real estate sites, city bloggers, business blogs, etc. then you have something that is worth doing. This isn't easy to do.  Only a person with knowledge can do it and even if you have the knowledge you must be willing to put work into it and write with enthusiasm.

If I owned your site my target would be once a month or at most twice a month and that article would be nothing less than absolutely kickass and my blog would be come the authority of NYC commercial real estate.  If you have the knowledge, the writing ability, the media skills and the time to do that they you might own the freeking city in a few years - but you will need to dedicate a lot of time to "making rain".

Will Regularly Adding New Blog Posts Improve Ranking?

This has nothing to do with freshness.  Some people are deluded that tossing up a page of prattle is going to produce kickass rankings and a boatload of traffic.  It doesn't work like that.  This has everything to do with making an absolutely awesome website and establishing yourself and your business and The Go-To Place for information, facts, data, gossip, news about NYC real estate.

You can pay for links, pay for ads, or earn your rankings by making an awesome website.

[MikeGracia]

Very good answer by EGOL. Quality over quantity any day. As for being awesome content, remember that it should be awesome content that answers the needs, questions etc of your target audience.

Also, remember that to be truly effective, your content should speak to your demographic at different stages in their buying cycle. From 'Discovery' pieces, through to comparison articles etc, always be mindful when writing an article who you're targeting the content to, what stage of the funnel they are likely to be, and how you can HELP them understand the issues and move on to the next stage. Sounds like a lot of work, but once you get into the workflow, it's worth it.

For content ideas, think of questions too - If you've been in an industry for a while, you may already know what common questions come up - use this! It's gold. Also, if you have any sales folks (or any customer-facing folks) ask THEM what questions they get asked by customers most often - keep a list, look for trends and there you have an ideas list for your articles. This is just one idea - there's loads of great advice out there on the web for this sort of thing. Check some Whiteboard Fridays on content topics too, there's some good ones from what I remember.

I'd then mix really stellar content with some outreach. Be careful with outreach though, be smart and always think of adding value. Can you partner with any businesses in the articles? Can you write any guides that mention other (non-competing) businesses and produce or co-authored piece that'll be shared to both your social audiences & email lists? If you do base an article on customer questions, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece (always ask!) as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more

If you do base an article on customer questions, - always as permission - but, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece ( "Joe Blogs from [town] raised a great question which lead to this article...] as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more customers, than your existing happy customers).

Anyway, just a few ideas.