A company blog: why it's worth it and how often to post

A company blog is worth it when it answers the questions your customers already ask, written by someone who actually does the work. How often? As often as you can keep up with good articles. For a small business, one or two a month, kept up all year, are worth more than ten rushed ones in the first month. Google doesn't ask for a particular frequency or word count.

Why it's worth it

Three practical reasons, in the order you'll notice them:

1. Answer once, send the link many times. "What file should I send you for printing?" comes up every week. A good article settles it every time, with pictures and steps.
2. You show up for longer searches. Besides the name of your trade, people search full questions. An article that answers one of those questions exactly has a shot at showing up there.
3. You show you know your trade. A client who has read three of your articles walks into the first meeting with confidence and better questions.

What Google looks for in an article

In August 2022, Google launched its "helpful content" update and published a list of questions for creators. Some of them are warning signs you can check yourself:

• Are you writing mainly to attract search visits rather than for people?
• Are you producing lots of content on very different topics, hoping something sticks?
• Are you mostly summarizing what others said without adding anything?
• Are you writing to a word count because you heard Google prefers a certain length? Google says plainly it has no preferred length.
• Do readers leave the page and search again because they didn't find the answer?

In December 2022, Google added another "E" to the guidelines its quality raters use: alongside expertise, authoritativeness and trust, experience now counts too. That means whether the author has used the product, been to the place or done the work they're writing about. For a small business, that's an advantage: you actually do the things you explain.

What about text written with ChatGPT?

In February 2023, Google said it rewards high-quality content however it's produced. At the same time, it made clear that using automation, including AI, mainly to manipulate search rankings violates its spam policies.

In practice: an AI assistant can help with the outline, headlines or proofreading. The experience, the examples and the photos from the job site, the workshop or the kitchen have to be yours, because that's exactly what generated text lacks. We covered this in more detail in our article on website copy written with ChatGPT.

How often, concretely

There's no magic number. What matters is not stopping. Three realistic rhythms, depending on how much time you have:

Put the articles in a simple calendar and write them before the week they go out. A blog whose latest post is two years old looks like a shop with the lights off. If you can't keep up, posting rarely but reliably beats posting often and then abandoning it.

When something real changes in your field (a law, a new material, a product being discontinued), update the old article instead of writing a new one from scratch.

Where topics come from

Don't hunt for ideas online. You already have them:

• customer emails and messages: any question that comes up twice is an article;
• the mistakes you keep fixing in orders;
• the comparisons you explain over the phone ("what's the difference between…");
• finished jobs and what you learned from them, if the client agrees.

A good article has a headline that says exactly what you'll learn, a first paragraph that answers it, steps or a table, and a link to the relevant service page. If your site doesn't have a good home for a blog yet, or you'd like us to build one with you, see our web studio services.