Is Blogging the SEO Boost You Need? | FatRank

James Dooley: The question is how important blogging is for SEO. I would produce you five blogs a month. Really did I write that? Yeah sorry. That's an old school content myth. Don't just write content for the sake of writing content. People are writing too much content. You need to make sure you've got the most relevant internal links. It's a very old school SEO agency tactic just to get paid. I think Karl is going to come back and say you need more links. Karl Hudson: So here's one of the questions we've been asked and it's an important one. How important is it to keep up the blogging for SEO? This is quite an old concept. Way back in the day you would knock out blogs and SEO agencies still tell business owners they will produce five blogs a month. That's an old school concept. What we prefer to do is look at the site as a whole and the niche as a whole. We work out a contextual map and check if you are covering all the topics in that map. If you're not, you have work to do. That doesn't necessarily mean writing blogs. It could be creating power pages focused on specific niche topics. Eventually it becomes about editing, improving and progressive optimisation. James Dooley: On that point about how many blogs you need to do a day or a week. That's not how it works. It's an old SEO agency myth used to justify retainers. One blog and one backlink a week. You might already have enough links. You might already have enough blogs. It might actually be about pruning some of the blogs you have. We do that a lot. I proactively look for sites with three thousand pages where the competition has two hundred and fifty. They have been told to publish two blogs a day and hired two full time writers. That is blogging for the sake of blogging. There is a concept called the cost of information retrieval. Writing content that gets no traffic harms your site because it increases Google's cost to crawl and store it. Karl Hudson: You're essentially trying to make your website lean with the best information available. More pages means more crawl cost. More indexing cost. More storage cost for Google. You want the most valuable pages, not the most pages. James Dooley: I'm obsessed with making sure you cover the topic in full with a proper topical map. Don't write content for the sake of writing it. It has to get impressions or clicks or feed information into Google's understanding of your expertise. Not every blog needs traffic. Some pages exist for trust signals such as case studies or awards. But generally people are writing too much content. Especially now AI makes it easy. It's not quantity. It's quality. Instead of writing two new articles, go optimise two old articles with potential. Look at Search Console for missed questions. Look at what competitors include. Add entities, synonyms and hyponyms. Improve semantic triples so you can win featured snippets. Make headings clear question-and-answer structures. Order headings by relevance. Putting a more relevant H2 higher up in the macro content can move rankings. I've seen identical content improve just by repositioning headings. Karl Hudson: Something else people might not understand. If you load up Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or JetOctopus and see one page is visited far more by Googlebot, that is an important opportunity page. You should attach your most relevant internal links to it. It will get picked up faster and increase crawl rate for linked pages. Many times we find pages only crawled once every few months, while others are crawled daily but have no internal links. That's a huge opportunity. Link them properly and the whole site lifts. James Dooley: People think I'm going to say you need more links, but you need everything lined up before links give you their full value. Internal links leverage link power. It’s not just link building. Technical SEO, content quality, topical authority and internal linking all need to be right before backlinks deliver their full effect. We often check a site where someone says the links aren't working, and after twenty minutes of technical fixes the site jumps. Sometimes the SSL is broken or pages have run away. Links work. It's the site that doesn't. Karl Hudson: Technical is still fundamental. With AI content everywhere, technical SEO matters more than people want to admit. James Dooley: All pillars matter. Technical, content, topical authority, internal links, backlinks. Get them all right. Blogging just for the sake of it is outdated. Do less but higher quality. Aim for engagement, traffic diversity, a couple of links to each article and strong internal linking. Then the whole site lifts. If you were hit by helpful content updates it usually means you went too wide or too off topic. Bring the site back to its core focus. Do less content but higher quality. Don't expect instant movement. You usually need to wait for the next core update for reclassification. Karl Hudson: So yes blogging is important. Yes you need topical authority. But don't go too wide. Go quality over quantity. Leave any questions in the comments and we’ll answer anything specifically related to blogging for SEO.