Thirteen months. From 16 June 2025 until now, I hadn’t published a single article on this blog. Meanwhile I was writing articles for my clients’ blogs every week. The cobbler’s children have no shoes.
I’m Nico, a freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. I run the blog and content for several businesses as part of my digital marketing work. Now mine too, with a system I explain further down. Here’s what to write, how often, and what I do with the old stuff.
What should a small business write on its blog?
What people ask you. The questions from the first meeting, the WhatsApp messages that keep coming up, the objections before they hire you. Each one is an article, and each article points to the service page that answers it.
Google frames it as a self-assessment in its helpful content guide. Does your content add substantial value compared with what already appears in the results? Does it show first-hand experience? Or does it just rewrite what other pages say? If the answer to the last one is yes, the article isn’t needed.
My filter is shorter. Could an AI model write this without leaving the house? If so, I don’t publish it. What a model doesn’t have is your data. How many quotes you ask for before signing. What people ask you on the first visit. What happened to the client who did the opposite. That’s what gets read and what gets cited.
How often to publish (and why it’s less than you think)
Two new articles a month and two updates to old ones. That’s the pace a small business without a team can keep up for a whole year. Anything more gets dropped by the third month, and a stalled blog says more about you than no blog at all.
Google doesn’t set a frequency. In its December 2022 office hours, someone asked John Mueller whether to publish one article or several a day. His answer: “there is no absolute answer on how often to publish”. And the helpful content guide sums up the most common mistake with a question. Are you adding lots of new content to seem “fresh”? In brackets, Google’s answer: it doesn’t help.
One nuance that does matter. Gary Illyes, from the same team, pointed out that a site that publishes quality content consistently gets crawled and indexed faster. Consistency, not volume. A Wednesday every fortnight without fail gets crawled better than ten articles in January and silence until June.
| Type of piece | What it’s for | Length | How often |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guide (“how to do X”) | Catch the question before they hire | 1,000–1,700 words | One a month |
| Comparison (“X or Y”) | Help people decide; includes a table | 900–1.500 | One every two months |
| Your own case study | The proof: what was done and what changed | 700–1.200 | One a month, with permission |
| Updating an old article | New data, rewritten answer capsule, links checked | Whatever it already has | Two a month |
Update before you create
One topic, one URL. Before you write, search your own blog and Search Console to see whether you already have an article on it. If you do, update it instead of writing another. Two articles on the same thing compete with each other, and Google picks one without asking you which.
Updating properly means four things. New data with its date. The first paragraph rewritten so it answers the question. Links and sources checked. And the “updated” date visible; the original publication date stays as it is. Google’s SEO guide asks for exactly this: review what you’ve published, update it if needed or delete it if it’s no longer relevant.
My best example goes against intuition. The article with the most clicks on my website is from 2021, on the origins of personal branding. 9 clicks from 596 impressions in the last 90 days: the URL with the most clicks on the whole domain. One old article, updated, beats ten new ones.
How I do it: with a system
What kept me stalled for thirteen months was not having a system. And a system is what brought me back to the blog. It works like this:
- One topic a week, chosen with data. Search Console tells you which searches you already show up for. The rest comes from the list of client questions.
- One figure of my own per article. From my client portfolio, with a date. No figure, the topic waits.
- AI draft, my review. An AI assistant prepares the draft with my sources and my style guide. I review, correct and decide. It takes me 40 minutes per article; before, writing it all myself, two and a half hours. Across the blogs I run, around 40 articles have come out with this support.
- Pre-publication checklist. Fifteen boxes. Answer in the first paragraph, figure with a source, table if it compares, FAQs, link to the service, no template phrases. It’s the one you can download below.
- Publishing is my job. The system leaves drafts. I’m the one who presses the button, after reading it out loud.
With AI you can churn out a whole blog in an afternoon. Google calls it scaled content in its spam policies: “using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value”. It gets detected and removed. One article a week with a figure of yours in it is safe. Forty identical ones with nothing of yours, on thin ice.
What I see with my clients
The blogs I inherit have two illnesses. The first: thirty 400-word articles on “trends” and “tips”, without a single figure from the business, written to tick a box. The second: two good articles from three years ago, never updated. They still bring in visits and nobody thinks of touching them.
The treatment is the same in both cases. A list of real questions, one topic per URL and a calendar of two new and two updated a month. A figure of your own in every piece. And every article linking to the service page that sells: the blog catches the question and the page catches the decision. I explain how this ties in with the rest of your search rankings in SEO and search rankings.
Start with the list of questions
Is your blog stalled, or does it publish and nobody comes? In 30 minutes I’ll tell you which ten questions to answer first, with your Search Console in front of us. Free Diagnostic Session, two slots a week. Book yours. Still not sure what a consultant does for a small business? Start with digital marketing consulting for small businesses.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (self-assessment: substantial value, first-hand experience, “seeming fresh doesn’t help”; 10 December 2025): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content?hl=es
- Google Search Central, SEO office hours, December 2022 (John Mueller: “there is no absolute answer on how often to publish”; Gary Illyes on consistency and crawling): https://developers.google.com/search/help/office-hours/2022/december
- Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide (reviewing and updating published content; 10 December 2025): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide?hl=es
- Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search (scaled content abuse): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?hl=es
- My own data: Search Console for auvenico.es (90 days) and the Auve Nico writing system log (2026).
Freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. I work on the digital presence of professionals and small businesses with one simple principle: your website as your operations hub. Building websites, doing SEO and running social media with my own hands since 2018.
Get to know me
