If you run a local business, somebody has told you that you need a blog. Maybe they told you it was good for SEO. I have been publishing steadily for months, so I am in a position to tell you what it actually bought me — with the real numbers, from my own site.
Short version: almost nothing in the way you have probably been sold on. And I am still going to keep writing, at the same pace, because the blog is not really the point. Both of those things are true, and the gap between them is the useful part.
The ninety-day audit
Those are page views over ninety days, pulled from my own Google Analytics. Not impressions, not reach — people who opened the page.
The top of the list is humbling. My best post drew nineteen views. Second place also drew nineteen. After that it drops into the teens, then single digits, then a long tail of posts that one person opened once. Fifteen posts were never opened at all.
For contrast, one page on my site — a single landing page built for paid search — drew 269 sessions and produced 17 conversion events in the same window. One page. It outperformed the entire blog by a margin that is not close.
The part that should have been obvious
The pitch for business blogging is that Google finds your posts and sends you customers. That is the promise, and for my site it simply did not happen. Search traffic to the blog rounds to nothing.
Here is why, and it applies to most local businesses. Ranking for a term takes either genuine authority on a topic or a page that is clearly the best answer on the internet. A contractor in Clarkston publishing a weekly post is competing with sites that have been accumulating links for a decade. You do not win that fight by publishing more often.
Ask them for the search traffic numbers on their own blog. Not impressions. Not “rankings.” Sessions from organic search, and what those sessions did next. I just gave you mine.
The blog was never the channel
Here is the actual reason these posts exist, and it took me a while to say it plainly.
I write them because they feed my LinkedIn and Facebook posts. That is the engine. Something is on my mind — a number I just pulled, a client conversation, a decision I got wrong and had to reverse — and instead of firing off a two-line status about it, I write it up properly. That becomes a LinkedIn post and a Facebook post, and those are what actually reach people.
The blog is where the thinking lives so the social post has somewhere to point.
That ratio is the whole story. Roughly seven in ten people who read anything on this blog got there from a link I shared. Search is a rounding error. So judging these posts on their search performance was always measuring the wrong thing — like judging a business card on how many people find it lying on the street.
Two things this buys me that a plain status update does not.
The social post has something behind it. “Here is what I spent on ads last quarter” is a decent post on its own. “Here is what I spent, and here is every number broken down if you want it” is a better one, and the people who click through are the people worth talking to.
It does not disappear. A Facebook post is gone in two days. The same thinking on my own site is still there in a year, and I can link it again the next time the subject comes up. I have re-shared posts months later and had them do better the second time.
What I am changing
Three things, now that I have looked at the data instead of assuming.
- I stopped writing keyword pages. I had several posts aimed at search terms that never sent a single visitor. Those were wasted evenings, and worse, a pile of thin pages aimed at the same terms can make a site look worse to Google, not better.
- I write for the person who clicked my link. Seven in ten of my readers arrive from something I posted, already interested. So the first screen has to pay off the promise the post made — a real number, a real mistake, something specific. Not two paragraphs of throat-clearing before the point.
- I judge posts on whether people actually read them, not on leads. Expecting a lead from someone three sentences into their first visit was never realistic, and chasing it just produces pages cluttered with buttons nobody clicks.
What this means for your business
If you are a local service business wondering whether you need a blog: you probably do not need one to get found. You need a Google Business Profile that is verified and active, a website that loads fast and says what you do, and reviews. That is the foundation, and it beats forty-four blog posts every time.
But if you are already posting on Facebook or LinkedIn — and most owners I meet are, at least occasionally — the order of operations is worth flipping. Do not start a blog and hope people find it. Start with what you were going to post anyway, and notice the times you had more to say than the box allowed.
That is when a post earns its place. The photo of the finished job with a one-line caption is a good post. The same job written up properly — what the customer actually called about, what you found once you opened it up, what it cost and why — is a better one, and it gives the caption somewhere to point. You are not adding a content strategy. You are giving the thing you were already doing more room.
The mistake is treating the blog as the destination. It is the storage. The post is the thing that reaches anybody.
If you are not sure which of those you actually need right now, tell me what your situation looks like and I will tell you honestly — including if the answer is that you should skip the blog and fix something else first.