Most service businesses that tried a blog gave up on it, and for good reason. They were told to "post regularly," so they posted generic articles nobody searched for, about topics their customers never cared about. Nothing happened, and the blog went quiet.
A blog is worth it when it does one specific job: answering the questions your customers type into a search bar before they call someone.
What a good article actually does
Someone wakes up to a cold house and searches "furnace blowing cold air." Someone else searches "is a running toilet a big deal." Those people are not looking for a company yet. They are looking for an answer. The business whose page answers the question honestly is the one they remember, and often the one they call when the answer is "you need a pro."
A good article also keeps working. A page answering a common question can bring in visitors every winter for years, long after you wrote it.
What to write about
- The questions you answer on the phone every week. If customers keep asking, others are searching for it.
- Seasonal problems, a few weeks before the season: frozen pipes before the first hard freeze, AC tune-ups before the first hot week.
- Repair or replace decisions. Customers want an honest answer about whether something is worth fixing, and few companies give one.
- Your area. Hard water, old homes in a particular neighborhood, local permit rules. Things a national website cannot say.
THE SHORT VERSION
Write a few honest articles that answer questions your customers already ask, time seasonal ones a few weeks early, and link each one to the service it is about. Skip filler.
How often is enough
Far less than you have been told. One genuinely useful article a month beats four thin ones. Search engines have become good at spotting pages written to fill a schedule, and they push them down. A short article written from what you actually see on the job is worth more than a long one that says nothing.
The same goes for articles written entirely by software and published without a person reading them. If an article could appear on any company's site in any city, it will not help yours.
What makes it pay off
An article only brings in work if the reader can easily take the next step. Every article should point to the service page it relates to, and make your phone number easy to find.
That is how the blog on a LeadPointe site is built. Every article belongs to one category, each category is tied to one of your service pages, and the end of every article points the reader to that page. Your phone number and a call to action sit at the bottom of every article, so a reader who decides they need help is one tap away.