A guy on ContractorTalk got one of those automated website reports. It scored his site and told him he needed a blog. His question underneath was the right one: what on earth would I even write about?
Before I answer, the disclosure, because it changes how you should read this. I sell blog posts. Weekly content is part of my middle package. So I'm the last person whose opinion on this you should take at face value.
You get the full answer anyway, including the parts that cost me money.
What a post actually does
One thing, mostly. It answers a question your service pages can't answer without getting weird.
Your water heater page needs to sell water heater work. It can't also be 900 words about whether a leaking tank can be repaired, because then it stops selling and starts explaining. So the post handles the question, and the service page handles the sale, and the post sends people to the page.
That's the whole mechanism. Somebody searches a question, lands on your answer, decides you know what you're talking about, and now you're the guy they call instead of a stranger.
There's a second use that nobody talks about and it might be the better one. You now have something to send. Customer asks whether they should repair or replace, you text them a link to your own page about it instead of typing the same three paragraphs for the ninth time. That's worth something on its own, whether or not Google ever sends you a single visitor.
What it does not do
It will not rank you for the big money search. Nobody's blog post about drain maintenance is going to win "plumber near me." That's decided by your Google profile, your reviews, and how close you are to the person searching. Blog posts don't touch that fight.
It will not work in 30 days. Or 60. A new post on a small site typically sits there doing nothing for a couple of months before search engines decide it's worth showing anybody. I wrote a whole post about that timeline because it's where most people quit.
And volume doesn't rescue a bad plan. Twenty posts about nothing are worth less than three posts about the questions your customers actually ask. Agencies love volume because it's easy to invoice. Volume doesn't make the phone ring.
The only posts worth writing
The filter is free.
Think about the last month of phone calls. What did people ask you that you had to explain? Skip the stuff you find interesting. Write about what they were confused or nervous about.
- The repair or replace question. Every trade has one. It's the biggest source of anxiety a customer has, because it's the difference between $400 and $6,000.
- What a job like this costs. Even a range, even with heavy caveats. People search this constantly and almost nobody in the trades will answer it.
- How long it takes and what happens to my house. Will there be dust, will my water be off, do I need to be home. Nobody writes this and everybody wonders it.
- Is this an emergency or can it wait until Monday? The single best kind of post, because the person reading it at 10pm on a Saturday is about to either call somebody or not.
- Why did this happen. The failure they just experienced, explained plainly, without blaming them for it.
Five posts. That's a year of blogging for most one-truck operations, and it'll do more than 50 generic ones.
The posts that are a waste
You know the ones. "5 Tips for Spring HVAC Maintenance." "The Importance of Regular Gutter Cleaning."
Nobody searches those and nobody reads them. They exist because somebody was paid to produce a post and needed a topic. If you're paying for posts and they look like that, you're funding somebody's word count.
Same for anything that could have been written about any company in any town. If you swapped your name out and it still reads fine, it's not doing anything for you. The version that works has your town in it, your actual jobs, the specific thing that happens in houses built around here in the 1960s.
How to tell in 90 days
This is the part that keeps everybody honest, me included.
Set up Google Search Console. It's free and it takes about ten minutes if you already have a website. It shows you, per page, how many times you appeared in a search and how many people clicked.
Ninety days after a post goes up, look at it. If it's showing up for nothing, it was the wrong topic, or the title doesn't match anything a human types. If it's getting shown and nobody's clicking, the title's the problem and the post is fine.
That's a real feedback loop and almost nobody uses it. Ask whoever's writing for you to show you that screen. Skip the report they made and ask for the actual Search Console numbers, per post. If they can't or won't, that tells you what you're buying.
Doing it yourself, badly, still beats not doing it
You do not need to be a writer. You need to be the guy who knows the answer.
Talk it into your phone on the drive home. Answer the question the way you'd answer it to a customer standing in a basement. Get it transcribed, clean it up, put a title on it that's the question a person would type, and post it. Four hundred words is fine. Nobody's grading you.
The badly written post by the guy who actually does the work reads better than the polished one by somebody who's never been in a crawlspace. It's more specific, and specific is the whole ballgame.
Take pictures while you're on the job too. A post with three photos of the actual thing you're describing does more than another 300 words about it, and you're already standing there with a phone in your pocket.
So should you pay for it
If you'll do it yourself, do it yourself. Five posts a year answering your five most common calls will cover most of what a blog can do for a small contractor. Save the money.
Pay for it if you know you won't do it. That's the real decision. Writing ability has nothing to do with it. Plenty of guys buy posts for the same reason they buy a lawn service, which is that it'll otherwise never happen. That's a legitimate reason.
If you do pay, my middle tier includes weekly content and the pricing is all written down. But a post every week is more than most one-truck operations need, and if that's you, buy the smaller thing or write them yourself and put the difference into asking for reviews.
My ranking, from a guy who sells the thing: profile first, reviews second, service pages third, blog posts fourth. Anybody selling you posts while your profile is a mess has the order wrong.
If you want a straight answer on whether posts would do anything for your specific trade and town, tell me what you do and where. Sometimes the answer is that your market is too small for it to matter and you should spend the money on something else.