Is blogging worth it for a local business, honestly

A dentist pays for twelve articles a year about the importance of flossing. Nobody reads them. Nobody was ever going to read them. At the end of the year the invoice has been paid twelve times and the practice has the same number of patients.

This happens constantly, and it is why a lot of local business owners have concluded that blogging does not work. They are half right, and the half they are right about is the half worth understanding.

The sceptics are half right

Here is the concession, made properly rather than as a rhetorical move.

For a business selling one service in one town, publishing general articles about that service is close to worthless. The searches are national, the competition is national, and the handful of local people who read the piece were already customers. If your entire market is thirty minutes wide, a blog aimed at everyone is aimed past them.

Most local business blogs are exactly this, which means most local business owners have drawn a reasonable conclusion from a fair sample.

What a blog has to do instead

There are three jobs a local business blog can do that pay for themselves. Everything outside these three is a hobby.

Job one: answer the questions that precede a purchase

Not "what is a heat pump". More like: "can I put a heat pump in a unit with no outdoor space", "do I need council approval", "what does it cost to run compared to what I have".

These are searched by people three weeks from buying. They are specific enough that the national sites have not covered them well, and they are questions you get asked on the phone constantly, which means you can answer them better than anyone writing from a brief.

Job two: answer the questions that follow the quote

The objections. Why yours is dearer than the quote from the bloke on Facebook. What the warranty actually covers. What happens if it goes wrong in year three. Whether the cheap version is a false economy and in what circumstances it is not.

These pages get very little traffic and close a surprising amount of work, because you send them to people who are deciding. A page that saves you one repeated phone conversation a week has already paid for itself, and search traffic on top is a bonus.

Job three: prove you have done it before

A finished job, written up. What the problem was, what you found, what you did, what it cost, how long it took, and a photo that is not from a stock library.

This is the most under-used content type in local business and the most convincing. It is also the easiest to produce, because it requires no research: you already did the work and you already took the photos for the invoice.

How often

Whenever you have one of the three above, and not otherwise. A schedule is the enemy here, because a schedule with nothing to say produces flossing articles.

Eight genuinely useful pages published over a year, each answering a real question, will outperform fifty scheduled ones. And a page that is still accurate in three years keeps working, which is not true of anything you publish to fill a slot.

When to skip it entirely

• Your service pages are not finished. Fix those first. A blog cannot compensate for a homepage that does not say what you do.
• Your listing is not sorted. That is a bigger lever and a shorter job.
• Nobody researches your service before buying. Emergency trades sell to people with no time to read. Answer their questions on the service page instead.
• You would be outsourcing it to someone who has never done your job and would not brief them properly. The output will be flossing articles and you will have proven the sceptics right.

If your service pages are the thing that actually needs work, the on-page essentials covers what they should contain, and title tags covers the line people actually read.