We’re all in different boats, aren’t we? Some of you reading this may have just launched a content-based website or a blog with the intention of developing readership. Perhaps others that landed on this page have well-established eCommerce websites and are looking to gain a Search engine optimization-boost from blogging or content marketing. Others may be somewhere in the middle, wondering about how they can increase Traffic with content creation. 

Yet you’re all here for one reason: because you want to know the answer to the question, “how many blog posts does it take to get traffic?”

Unfortunately, there is no single answer. It depends on so many things, like the type of content and whether you’re really going at it full-time or not. But you can take a good guess if you know what you’re dealing with. 

Nonetheless, I’ll try to do my best to answer that question. 

Domain Authority Prerequisites 

One of the first things you can look at if you want to know how many blog posts you need to get traffic is domain authority. 

Without making me dive into the weeds, domain authority is an index that was developed by Moz which is used to determine (roughly) how likely a website is to rank organically for a given search term. 

Domain authority is yoked to all of the things Google uses as ranking factors, like age, high-quality content (and types of content), website speed, security, keyword density, site structure, and so on and so forth. 

There are tons of good domain authority checkers out there. Two of the better ones are from Moz and Ahrefs. I prefer Moz since they actually developed the index, but you can use any other one you want – the outputs are estimates anyway. 

Domain authority, also sometimes called DA by digital marketing gurus like Yours Truly, ranges from 1 to 100. The higher it is, the more likely the website is to rank for a given search term. 

So let’s say you’re on the end of the spectrum whereat you just launched a new website and a new domain. It has very few pages, no established content or published blogs, no age, and no credibility. Its domain authority is going to be 0 no matter what index you fully.

It’s going to take a long time – probably more than a year, for you to develop any appreciable traffic to that website, organically, through blogging alone. Probably more than a year, even if you post every day. Of course, this also depends on the competitiveness of the industry you target as well as the quality of your blogging. But in general, it will take a long time, assuming you don’t buoy it through email marketing or your social media channels.

If you have a well-established website, say an eCommerce website, with a domain authority of 30 or higher, then it realistically will likely only take you a few weeks to start getting traffic through blogging. Again, it depends on the industry and quality of content, but you can expect to start seeing traffic within half a year. Even one quality blog post on a solid blog topic can pull tens to hundreds, even thousands of views. 

If you have a well-established website, with a blog, and one that has been actively managed in the past, and you start blogging again, you could start to see traffic spikes within as little as a few weeks. 

How Long You’ve Been Doing This 

In addition to domain authority, you also need to consider how experienced you are with blogging and how long the website has been around. 

I know that this is a component of domain authority but leaving DA out of it, age of the website and your experience as a blogger are two of the most important things you can consider. 

For instance, even if you have a website with a fairly low DA (below 10) if it’s been around a while and has a bunch of pages, it’ll take you less time to start getting blog traffic, at least organically.

Again, there are a lot of moving pieces here, but I’ve seen clients with low DA websites start to get traffic to their blogs in under a year. It takes routine posting – several per month – but it usually works. 

If you publish several blog posts per week or even every day, provided it’s not fluff, you’ll get there faster. I estimate (though this is not a hard figure) that it takes anywhere from 12 to 30 high-quality blogs (keyword: high-quality) to start pulling organic traffic – although at the end of the day the number of blog posts it will take will still depend on other factors. 

One note: do not publish for the hell of it. I cannot suggest this strongly enough. If you have quality to post, put it out there, but if you’re just publishing fluff don’t even waste your time. Google will start assuming your website is a low-quality spam board and you’re probably going to get penalized. Even if you don’t, fixing the issue moving forward will require a heavier lift from you. 

How Relevant Your Posts Are to Readers, and to Each Other 

This is another huge thing to take into account when you’re trying to figure out how many blog posts it takes to get traffic. 

Let’s say you run a gardening business and you have a blog dedicated to helping your clients become more proficient in gaining that coveted green thumb. Maybe you even solicit guest posts from authorities in the industry. 

Suppose you post a bunch of guides on how to care for seedlings and condition soil. Once you get ranked for a bunch of those posts (which will take anywhere from a year to much longer) it will be easier for you to rank for similar posts. 

Once established, if you put up another relevant post (such as a guide on growing tomatoes) it will probably rank well within days and pull organic traffic within weeks, if not sooner. 

This is called topical authority. The higher your topical authority is for a subject (or a range of subjects) the more likely your posts will be to pull traffic, as long as they are relevant to that central topic.

Now let’s say you decide, for whatever reason, to publish a post on how to clean, wax, and detail a sedan. You can write the best damn guide to waxing and detailing a car on the internet, and there’s a chance it will rank well, but it’s also unlikely. 

Why? Because it’s totally irrelevant to your topical vertical. Google knows at this point you specialize in gardening know-how – so why would you be publishing about care car?

It makes no sense why someone that was an expert gardener would also secretly be into car detailing, so probably, that post won’t rank.

Maybe after a year or two, it will blow up, but in the short term, organically at least, that is very unlikely. 

Keyword Difficult and Search Volume Considerations 

Now we need to consider something else that’s also important to how many blog posts it takes to get traffic. 

But to do it, we need to play a little thought experiment. 

Let’s say you’re doing your keyword research and discover a series of keywords that have basically no difficulty – like below 10, and with very few overall results. 

Now let’s say you look at 10 of the most promising keyword variations. You write a whole load of guides and FAQs and blogs dedicated to the topic and publish everything you can consider as relevant to it. 

Give it a few weeks, then check the search results. Congrats – your blog is all over page one. Maybe you even have multiple organic listings 0n page one of the SERPs. 

There’s just a catch. You’re getting no traffic. How can that be possible when you’ve done the research and made the organic rankings happen?

Well, because there is more to getting traffic from a blog than there is to showing up in the SERPs. Remember, every time you type something into the search bar and hit “enter,” Google is going to give you something. 

That doesn’t mean it will be good, though. Now we need to look at the other piece of this puzzle: search volume. 

Suppose the aggregate search volume for all of those queries and keywords you targeted was around 200 per month. 

That means that if you are ranked organically for all of them and had a 100% CTR (basically impossible, by the way) you’d get, at best, 200 views per month. 

So that’s something else you need to consider. Even though it’s easy to rank for some keywords, that doesn’t make them worth it. 

You have to consider the balance between difficulty and search volume, as ranking alone does not guarantee traffic. You have to pick keywords that people are actually searching for, and then rank for those. 

Time: The Key Element 

Now we need to consider what is perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of all of this, and one that is, for better or worse, among the most important keys to how many blog posts it will take to get traffic: time. 

You can write better posts, you can do better keyword research, and you can pick low-hanging fruit among the garden of topics. But what you can’t do is make the seconds tick by faster. 

And that’s one of the only ways to let SEO do its thing. You need to let it all work out as the SERPs evolve, and that can take a long time.

One of the most inconvenient truths about SEO is that it really can take a while. Even really good blogs and eCommerce websites (usually) grow slowly. Explosive growth happens, but it is not the norm. It is an outlier in every sense of the word. Don’t gamble on that, anyway. Slow, steady growth is better (and more replicable) than explosive growth, anyway.

So that’s that. You need to be patient, even if you are an excellent writer and an SEO expert.  Good things come to those who wait, anyway. 

How Many Blog Posts Does It Take to Get Traffic? Key Takeaways

Now that I’ve fully shirked my responsibility to give you a straight answer with instance after instance of “it depends,” I can make a good faith attempt to tell you, on average, how many blog posts it takes to get traffic. 

Remember, this is a very rough average. I consulted Google for this and reflected on my own experience with personal ventures and client SEO campaigns. 

To offer a conservative estimate, it would seem that it will take somewhere between 12 to 16 months before you start to get appreciable traffic, organically, from blogging alone. 

That is only if you publish high-quality, purposely optimized content – no fluff, no nonsense, and no long posts that are long only for the sake of it. 

It also assumes you are going after keywords and search terms that are substantiated by volume. Even if you post a good article once per day on your blog, if you go after keywords with no search volume, you will never get traffic – not a lot, anyway. 

I also don’t think you necessarily need to post every day. If you can get out a post a week, that’s pretty decent. The more, the better, but never sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity and I cannot stress that enough. 

So there you have it. 

Insider Tips on How Many Blog Posts It Takes to Get Traffic: Getting There More Quickly 

Now let’s take a fairly quick glance at a few things I’ve learned from experience, and which you can put into practice which might hopefully tip the scales of time and SEO in your favor. 

Compile Questions from Competitors and Answer Them All in One Place 

If you’re ever at a loss for what to publish and you want to really climb the SEO ladder, look up a search term for which you want to rank. 

Take a (good) look through the top 5 results. See what sorts of queries they answer and what sorts of information they provide. 

Then, take the best of all of them, and compile all of that information in one post. The great thing about this strategy is that it’s unlikely that all of those posts will have quite the same information. 

Your job is to take the best bits of each and compile them in one place. This creates a more comprehensive post that, should it rank well, will likely outrank the competition, even if it takes a little bit longer. 

Answer a Question No One Has Asked Yet (It Has to Make Sense, Though)

If you happen to have a great deal of personal experience in an industry about which you are writing, one of the most effective, replicable, sure-fire ways to rank well is to write a post about something no one has covered before. 

For instance, let’s say you want to write a post about a coat – and the actual keyword has a ton of search volume and is fairly attainable from a position of competition. 

Let’s also say page one is covered by reviews and buying guides. Don’t compete for those things, since the market is already saturated. 

Answer a different question. Write a post on how to clean or care for the coat, or how to create a series of outfits using the coat as the foundation. 

I’m basically encouraging you to be different. You will still get impressions for the main keyword, but you’ll be covering a “new” topic, which will give you a competitive edge. 

Do More Than You (Think You) Need to 

One more technique I’ve followed is basically this: do more than you think you need to do. 

Let’s say you have a 1,500 word post queued up on a topic; call it a buying guide or a care guide or just an intro to a topic. 

Let’s say you have all good, original information in there and you already believe (justifiably) that it will rank well, organically. 

You may be right. But my advice is to go the extra yard. That will give you another competitive edge and will make it that much harder for a competitor to look at your post and skyscrape you in the coming weeks and months. 

Throw in another section that’s relevant to the keyword or topic or go in Google and pull a question from the “People Also Ask” section. 

Answer that, and it will give you a little more SEO “juice.” 

Another technique is experiential. If you’re writing about something, don’t just rely on research. Anyone can do research, but not everyone has experience. If you can write from experience and not need to rely on looking things up, you already have a competitive advantage. 

Optimize the Little Things 

My last suggestion is this: if you’re just starting out, you need all the help you can get. Optimize everything you can, and I mean everything. 

Target the keywords you choose carefully. Where possible, include the keyword in the title and in several headers throughout the body copy. Include the keyword in the URL slug if you can, and put it in the meta descriptions. 

Do not use AI to generate copy on your page. I don’t care what the “SEO experts” suggest. I have used it extensively and it never produces good results. 

Honestly, I wouldn’t even use it to help me draft. Going back and editing what AI puts out just requires more work from me in the long run anyway and I don’t have time for that. Nothing worth having comes easy. Just write the old way, like we’ve all been doing for thousands of years. It still works and machines aren’t going to be doing it better than we do anytime soon. 

And don’t take my work for it. Using AI to generate content for SEO purposes is considered black hat. I think it’s only a matter of time before Google cracks down. You’ve been warned again. 

Optimize your images, too. Among all the pages I’ve looked at, collectively, most of the problems associated with them (from an SEO perspective) are speed issues, and 90% of the time it’s image sizes that are causing the problem. 

Compress your images before uploading them. If possible, name the image file something relevant to your keyword. Include alt text and don’t keyword stuff it. Add captions, as this improves the user experience of the page. 

That’s another thing. Do not use stock images. Take your own pictures. Average images that you took yourself are better than the highest-quality stock images out there – you’ve been warned, once more.

Include internal links to other pages, specifically blogs, you’ve written about. Give new blogs a boost by linking to them from older blogs that are already generating traffic. This will transfer some authority from them to the new pages and will increase the likelihood that they rank. 

Where it makes sense, include links to external sources. Time and again I’ve seen guides suggest against including external links as they claim it hurts SEO, but I disagree. In my experience, if you include external links that supplement the user’s quest for knowledge in a positive way, they will improve your blog’s metrics from the perspective of time on page. 

Request indexing from Google Search Console early on, and if you’re using a platform that does not automatically update the sitemap, make sure you add the new blog URL to it as soon as it is live. 

That’s most of what I put into optimizing a blog page or a CMS page for a website, from the ground up. From there on out, it becomes a matter of just being patient and letting Google, and readers, do their thing. 

Be patient, and keep at it. As I already said, good things come to those who wait. 

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