Blogging tips for business owners who want posts that bring in customers

A big reason blog posts get no search traffic is also the simplest. Nobody is looking for them. When Ahrefs looked at around 14 billion pages in its 2023 study, it found that 96.55% got no traffic from Google, and the first reason it listed was that the topic had no search demand.

Before you write, check that real people ask the question. Your customers' questions, your Search Console queries and a keyword tool are the three quickest places to look. Our guide to SEO keywords walks through it.

Google's guidance on creating helpful content asks a simple test question. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?

That is a better standard than any word count. A post on how to winterize a sprinkler system should leave the reader able to do it, or able to decide to call you. If it leaves them searching again, it is not finished.

The same Google page asks whether your content provides "original information, reporting, research, or analysis" and goes beyond the obvious. For a business blog, that is your biggest advantage. You have customer questions, project photos, real numbers and opinions formed by years of work that a generic article cannot match.

Use them. A short story from a real job, a mistake you see customers make or a clear opinion on a common debate makes a post worth reading and worth sharing.

Google suggests evaluating content by asking "Who, How, and Why." Its expertise questions include whether content shows clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved and background about the author or the site.

Put a real name on each post, add a short bio that explains the author's experience and link to the sources behind any facts. It costs nothing and makes every post more trustworthy.

Most readers scan before they read. The Nielsen Norman Group's research on the F-shaped reading pattern found that people often read across the top of a page, then a shorter line further down, then scan down the left side. The same article describes a layer-cake pattern, where people scan headings and subheadings and skip the text below them.

Google's SEO Starter Guide gives matching advice. Write content that is easy to read and well organized, break long content into paragraphs and sections and add headings that help readers find their way through each page.

In practice:

• Put the answer near the top.
• Write headings that make sense on their own.
• Keep paragraphs short and start them with the point.
• Use lists for steps and options.

A blog post that ranks but never leads anywhere is a missed opportunity. Every post should end with one clear next step that fits the reader's stage. That might be a related guide, a checklist to download or an invitation to book a call. Match the ask to the topic, so a post about choosing a contractor can end with an offer to quote the job, while a broad how-to post links to a deeper guide.

Google's SEO Starter Guide explains that Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled. Link each new post to two or three related posts and to the service page it supports, and go back to older posts to link forward to new ones. Internal links help readers keep going and help search engines find everything you publish.

Consistency beats volume. One genuinely useful post a month, every month, is better than ten rushed posts in January and nothing after. Pick a pace your team can sustain, keep a running list of topics from customer questions and batch the writing so a busy month does not break the habit. A simple spreadsheet with each post's topic, the question it answers and its publish date keeps anything from being written twice.

Your best posts are worth maintaining. Every few months, check your top posts for outdated facts, broken links and new questions readers ask, then improve them. Google's helpful content guidance warns against changing dates just to make pages look fresh, so change the date only when the content has substantially changed.

For more on the writing itself, see our SEO writing guide, and for building a plan around your posts, our guide to content marketing strategies.