Somewhere on your website there is probably a page called Blog, and on it there are two posts. One is from the week the site went live, written because the designer said Google likes fresh content. The other is from a month when you felt guilty about the first one. Both have titles like "5 Tips for Choosing a Reliable Electrician".
Nobody reads them. You know this, and it nags at you, because everybody says you should be blogging. So let me give you the honest answer, and it starts with some reassurance: you were probably right to stop.
In short: you need pages that answer the questions your customers ask before they decide to call you, and most of those questions have a natural home either on a service page or on a short, plain answer page. Whether those pages sit in a section called Blog changes nothing for Google or for an AI assistant. What decides everything is whether the page says something specific, true and useful that the reader could not find elsewhere.
Where the advice came from
The instruction to blog is old, and it was once sensible. Years ago Google rewarded sites that published often, and a stream of articles about anything loosely related to your trade did improve rankings for a while. An entire industry grew up writing those articles, and the habit survived long after the effect faded.
What Google rewards today is a page that answers what a person searched for better than the other pages available. It looks at the page, at the question, and at the alternatives. It has no opinion about whether the page was published under a heading called Blog, News, Insights or nothing at all. And the AI assistants that a growing share of customers now ask first behave the same way, only more so: they look for a passage that states a fact plainly, and they quote it.
So the useful question is this one: which questions do my customers ask that my website does not yet answer?
The test that decides it
Here is what I ask every owner who wonders about this. Take a sheet of paper and write down the last twenty questions a customer asked you, on the phone, by email, or standing in your shop. Real ones, in their words. "Do you do Saturdays?" "How much for a two bedroom?" "Will you take the old one away?" "Can you do it while we are on holiday?"
Now cross out every question that one of your existing pages already answers clearly. Be strict. If the answer is technically on the page but buried in a paragraph of marketing, it does not count.
What remains on the paper is your writing list. For a great many small businesses it has four or five items, and here is the interesting part: those four or five are typically the exact questions people type into Google and ask assistants at eleven at night, because the questions that reach you by phone are the same questions that reach the search box. The person who does not know whether you do Saturdays is searching "electrician open Saturday" right now.
Write those four or five pages. Properly, in your own words, with your real prices or at least your real way of pricing, your real timings, and the real exceptions. Then stop, until a new question appears on the list.
That is the whole strategy. It sounds too small to be called a strategy, which is why so few businesses do it.
What a good answer page looks like
Take "how much for a two bedroom", if you are, let's say, a cleaning company. A tips article would give ten factors that affect the cost of cleaning and never name a number. The page your customer wants states how you price a two bedroom flat, what is included at that price, what adds to it, how long the visit takes, and what happens if they are not satisfied. It names your town. It has a date on it so the reader knows the information is current.
Notice what makes this page strong: everything on it came out of your head, and a competitor could not copy it without lying. That is the quality Google's own guidance keeps pointing at when it talks about helpful, people first content, and it is the quality an assistant needs when it decides which business to quote. We wrote in more detail about this in how to write website content that actually ranks.
The tips article, by contrast, is one of ten thousand identical articles, and the reader of a tips article is a person comparing trades in general. The reader of your pricing page is a person about to call someone. Write for the second reader.
What a blog is genuinely good for
Having said all that, there is a real use for a blog section, and it is worth naming so that you are not tempted to delete the whole thing.
Some questions do not belong on a service page. What to do when your boiler makes a particular noise. Whether a certain kind of stain comes out. How to prepare a house for the movers. Which permits a small extension needs in your municipality this year. These are questions people search before they know they need you, and a plain, honest answer, written by somebody who does the work, earns trust before the sales conversation begins.
A blog is also where seasonal and local knowledge lives. What changed in the local regulations. What you learned from a job last month. Why the material everyone asks for is a poor choice in a wet climate. This is the writing that only you could produce, and it is exactly what assistants quote when somebody asks a specific question about your town.
And it is where you show the work. Photographs of a job with three sentences about the problem and the solution. That single page does more for a nervous customer than any amount of "we pride ourselves on quality".
What a blog is bad for
Posting to a schedule. The moment you write because it is Tuesday, the quality drops to the level of the tips article, and you have spent an evening producing something Google will ignore and your customers will never see. There is no bonus for frequency. A page that answers a real question keeps working for years; we looked at why in why informational content stopped working and what replaced it.
Company news, unless you run the kind of business where customers follow the company. The barbecue, the new van, the award from the trade association. Harmless, but do not mistake it for marketing.
And, above everything, do not blog before the service pages exist. If you fit bathrooms and there is no page about fitting bathrooms, no blog post will rescue you. The blog is the second job. The first is one proper page per service, naming your town and describing what is included, and if that is where your site currently stands, close this article and go write those.
Who should write it
The words can come from anywhere. The facts must come from you.
A writer who has never done your work will produce the same general article as everybody else, because they have nothing else to draw on. What makes your page different, and therefore findable, is the price you charge, the process you follow, the mistakes you have seen, the question you hear every week. Give those to a writer if you like, or to an assistant, and let them tidy the sentences. But do not let anybody publish a page under your name that you could not have written from your own experience.
One more thing on this point, because it matters for the assistants in particular. When somebody asks an assistant "how much does a two bedroom clean cost in my town", it is looking for a page that gives a plain answer with a date and a place. Businesses that wrote that answer once, in their own words, are the ones being named. We explained how to check what an assistant currently says about you in how to find out what AI says about your business.
So, do you need a blog?
You need answers. Write the four or five your customers keep asking, put them wherever they fit best, and give them a date. If a section called Blog is the tidiest place for the ones that do not belong on a service page, keep the section, and let it sit quietly between real posts without guilt.
If you are unsure which questions your site already answers and which it misses, our free visibility check reads the site the way a search engine and an assistant do, and reports in plain language which searches you appear for and which pages are missing. The list of twenty questions, though, you can start tonight.