What a plumber, dentist or salon should actually blog about

Nobody runs out of topics. They run out of topics that come from a list of industry blog ideas, which is a different problem with a different fix.

Everything worth publishing is already in your business. Here is where it is.

Source one: your sent messages

Open your email or your texts and read the last thirty replies you wrote to customers. Not the pleasantries, the ones where you explained something.

Every explanation you have written twice is a page. You have already done the hard part, which is working out how to say it to someone who does not know the trade, and you did it in the customer's own vocabulary rather than yours.

Source two: the questions asked on the phone

Keep a piece of paper by the phone for two weeks. Every time someone asks something, put a mark next to it or add it to the list.

What comes back is not what you would have guessed. In our experience the top three are almost always about price, about how long it takes, and about something going wrong. Those three are what your content should be, and almost nobody's is.

Source three: the jobs themselves

Every finished job is a page, and this is the most under-used content source in local business by a wide margin.

Not a gallery. One job, written up: what the customer thought the problem was, what it actually was, what you did, what it cost, how long it took, and what made it awkward. Twenty minutes to write, requires no research, and it demonstrates first-hand experience of the exact thing the reader is worried about.

The four kinds of page these produce

The money question

What it costs, what moves the price, and why the cheap quote is cheap. The highest-volume search in almost every trade and the one most businesses refuse to engage with, which means the page has very little competition and enormous demand.

The what-happens-next question

How long it takes, what you have to do to prepare, whether you need to be home, how much mess. Low search volume, extremely high closing power, and you can send it to people who are deciding.

The should-I-worry question

Is this urgent. Can I leave it until next month. Is this normal. What happens if I do nothing. These convert unusually well because the honest answer is sometimes no, and a business that says so is the one they call when the answer is yes.

The job write-up

One real job, in detail, with photographs you already took for the invoice.

Worked examples, by trade

• Plumber: what a burst flexi hose actually costs to fix at 11pm, why your water bill jumped without a visible leak, what we found under a Chermside floor last month.
• Dentist: what a crown costs and what changes it, what happens if you leave a cracked tooth, what the first appointment involves for someone who has not been in ten years.
• Salon: how long a colour correction takes and why it is quoted in hours, what to bring to a consultation, why the price differs between stylists.
• Electrician: whether a flickering light is urgent, what a switchboard upgrade involves and what it costs, why the quote went up after the walls came off.
• Vet: what an emergency consultation costs at 2am, when a limp needs seeing today, what to expect from a first visit with a nervous dog.

None of those required a keyword tool. All of them are questions the business is asked weekly.

What not to write

• Anything with 5 Tips in the title. It signals content produced to fill a slot, and it usually is.
• General education about your industry. Nobody chose a plumber because of an article about the history of plumbing.
• Seasonal filler. A post about spring cleaning from a business that does not clean anything.
• Anything you would not send to a customer who asked. That is the test, and it eliminates most of what gets published.

If you would not send it to a customer who asked the question, do not publish it. If you would, publish it today.

How to actually get them written

1. 01Pick the question you have answered most often this month.
2. 02Answer it out loud into a voice recorder while driving. Three minutes.
3. 03Have it transcribed and tidied. Do not have it rewritten into marketing language, which removes the only thing that made it good.
4. 04Link it to the service page it relates to, in a sentence, where it helps the reader.
5. 05Do one a month. Twelve a year is more than most competitors will manage.

If you are still deciding whether the hours belong here at all, weigh it against the other channels available to you first, because content is the slowest of them and the only one that compounds. And whatever you publish should link into the pages that sell, which is part of the on-page essentials.