Content, on a cadence
Blog writing that answers real questions and lifts the pages that sell.
Most business blogs are a diary nobody reads. A blog that works is a set of answers to the questions customers ask before they buy, each one pointing to the service it supports. Written that way, every post makes the site a little stronger.
What a blog is for, on a local business site
People ask questions long before they are ready to book. How much does an end of tenancy clean cost? What does a property manager actually do? How long does an injury claim take in Nevada? Each of those is a search, and each is a chance to be the business that answered it well.
A blog post that answers one of those questions properly earns trust with the reader and gives Google another reason to see the site as knowledgeable about its subject. If it links to the service it relates to, it also passes some of its strength to the page that takes bookings. That is the whole purpose. Posts written for any other reason, to fill a calendar or chase a trend unrelated to the business, compete with the pages that matter and dilute the site.
What Google says good content looks like
Google's guidance on creating helpful content asks three questions of any page: who created it, how, and why. On the why, it says the answer should be that you are creating content primarily to help people, content that is useful to visitors if they come to your site directly. It suggests authors are made clear, with bylines that lead to more about them.
Among its self-assessment questions: does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis? If it draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting them? Is it the sort of page you would want to bookmark or share? And it lists warning signs of search-engine-first content, including producing lots of pieces on many different topics in the hope some perform, and writing to a particular word count because of a belief Google prefers it.
How I plan a blog
Start from the services
Each post supports a service. The questions come from what people ask on the way to buying that service, not from a list of trending topics.
Collect the real questions
From Search Console, the questions your site already appears for. From your phone calls and emails, the questions customers actually ask. From research, the questions nobody in your area answers well.
Check nothing overlaps
Each question gets one post. If an existing page already answers it, that page is improved instead of a new one written.
Date it before the month begins
Every post is mapped to a search and given a date before the month starts, with seasonal questions planned ahead of their season.
Give each post its parent
The service page it links up to, with the words it will use, decided before the writing starts.
What goes into each post
The answer, early
The reader gets the direct answer near the top, then the detail. Nobody should have to scroll through a story to find out what a thing costs.
Detail only you could write
Your experience of the question: what usually happens, what surprises customers, what goes wrong elsewhere. This is the original information Google's guidance asks for.
Facts checked at the source
Laws against the statute, rules against the regulator, platform behaviour against the platform's own documentation. Every figure with a source and a date.
Plain words
Written for a busy reader, often a worried one. Short sentences, headings that say what each section answers, no filler.
A link to the service
Placed where the reader would naturally want it, with words that describe the service page.
The kinds of post that work for a local business
Cost questions
What something costs, what changes the price, what is included. In my experience they are among the questions customers ask most in every trade I have worked in, and many businesses still avoid answering them on their own site.
Process questions
What happens during the job, how long it takes, what the customer needs to do. They reduce the uncertainty that makes people delay.
Comparison questions
One option against another: deep clean or regular clean, property manager or letting agent, settling or going to court. Honest comparisons build trust even when the answer is not you.
Problem questions
What to do when something has gone wrong: a failed inspection, a denied claim, a listing that vanished. People searching these are often ready to hire someone that day.
Local questions
Rules, procedures and conditions specific to the places you serve, which national sites rarely cover well.
Signs your current blog is working against you
Posts outrank your service pages
A blog post shows for a search your service page should win, and it has no price and no way to book.
Many posts on the same subject
Five posts about the same question, written over the years, each weaker than one good post would be.
Posts on subjects unrelated to what you sell
Trend pieces and general news that bring visits from people who will never become customers, and blur what the site is about.
Posts Google refuses
A large share of the blog in Search Console's Crawled, currently not indexed bucket. Google has read them and decided they are not worth showing.
Cadence, and what it produced
The largest cadence I have run was four Las Vegas brands in August 2026: 195 pieces researched, dated and scheduled before the month began, two a day for an injury firm and a property firm, one a day for a second law firm. Every piece was mapped to a real search and linked into its part of the site, and every legal fact was checked against the statute before it was scheduled.
Most blogs need far less. For a cloud and DevOps academy, twenty six pieces over seven months, each mapped and linked, helped move the tracked searches from an average position of 21 to 10. When the map showed new posts were adding weak keywords and dragging the average down, publishing paused for a month while other work caught up. Knowing when not to publish is part of running a blog.
Length
Google's own guidance lists writing to a word count as a warning sign. Posts here are long when the question needs it, which for questions worth answering is usually well over a thousand words, because a full answer covers the edge cases, the costs, the exceptions and what to do next. Length is the result of answering properly, never the goal.
AI, and how it is used
Google's guidance asks sites to be open about how automation or AI was used in creating content. I use tools for research, checking and drafting help, and a person decides what every post says, checks every claim against its source, and rewrites it in a voice that sounds like your business. Nothing is published that has not been read and checked line by line.
What you receive
The monthly plan, with each post's question, target search, parent page and date. Each post written, checked, and published with its title, description, image and links set, then checked on the live site. A record of every post in your portal, and a monthly view of which posts are collecting searches and passing visitors to your service pages.
Posts that are not earning after a few months are flagged for rewriting or merging rather than left to pile up.
Questions about blog writing
How often should a small business blog
As often as there are real questions worth answering and you can keep the quality up. For many local businesses that is weekly or a few times a month; more is not better if the questions run out.
Should blog posts target the same keywords as my service pages
No. Service pages target the searches from people ready to buy. Posts target the questions asked earlier, and link to the service pages.
Who is shown as the author
Whoever the business decides. Google's guidance favours making authorship clear, so a named person with some background is better than no byline.
Can old posts be improved instead of writing new ones
Often that is the better move. A post that already collects searches but answers them poorly can be rewritten to do much more.
What if a post gets no traffic
It is checked against its search after a few months. It may need rewriting, merging with a related page, or a different search entirely.
Want a blog that earns its place?
Send me your site. I will tell you which questions your customers are asking that your site does not answer yet.