When a blog is worth it for SEO, and when it isn't

There’s a concept I learned working on clients’ organic traffic that I now use as the first filter when I plan a site’s content: distance from the purchase decision.

At first I thought that distance was easy to measure along the informational/transactional axis. Informational query means far from the purchase, transactional query means close. It’s a convenient simplification, and I was missing a lot of nuance that you end up paying for in results.

You don’t always need a blog to succeed with organic

There are niches, typically local businesses with established market demand and an aware audience, that can take off with nothing more than transactional pages that answer directly. If you’re an eye clinic in Turin you don’t need to worry much about informational pages, at least at the start, to get organic traffic: the person searching “laser eye surgery turin” exists, has their wallet out and is only choosing where to swipe the card.

There the work is covering a finite set of commercial queries well. The blog comes later, if it comes at all.

The mistake I made

This framework doesn’t apply everywhere, though, and I learned that the hard way. After buying Compact Keywords I was enthusiastic and applied it to clients who didn’t have that established, aware demand too. The result was pages that were perfect on paper, with the right commercial intent and the right structure, and zero clicks. Not because they were badly made, but because nobody was searching for those words.

The method wasn’t wrong. What was wrong was the assumption I’d taken for granted without noticing: that the demand already existed, phrased in the words of the service.

When the demand exists, but not in the words of the service

This is the case that had fooled me: almost nobody searches for the service, but a great many people search for the problem the service solves. The demand is there and it’s measurable. It’s just written in a different vocabulary from the offer’s.

When you’re in this scenario, two things change. The first is that keyword research has to be done on the pool of problems, not on the pool of services, otherwise the tools hand you back a desert and you conclude there’s no market. The second is that the pages have to name the category: the reader doesn’t know there’s a professional who deals with that thing, so the page has to genuinely answer the problem and then say, explicitly, when it makes sense to get help. That step is the whole job. It’s the bridge between content that informs and content that brings in a booking.

You still need the set of service pages

There’s an easy overcorrection here that you should avoid: discovering that the volume sits on the problem is not a good reason to give up on service pages. In this scenario they matter more, not less.

The main reason is that the bridge has to land somewhere. A problem page that does its job well leaves the reader with a new question: how does it work, how much does it cost, who are you, what happens at the first meeting. If at that point they don’t find a page that answers, the work that brought them that far goes nowhere.

Then there’s the minority who search for the service by name. They’re few, often very few, but they’re the people closest to a decision you’ll ever see: if they don’t find a page, you’re giving those conversions away. They’re also the cheapest content in the plan, because the set is finite and you write it once, while the work on the informational pool is recurring by definition.

Finally there’s the part you see less. Service pages are what tells Google what you do and who you serve, and content about the problem ranks better when there’s a site with a clear identity behind it rather than a collection of articles. And if the category matures, which happens in some industries, it finds you already in place.

The right way to look at them, in my view, is this: you don’t build service pages for the traffic they bring today, you build them because they’re where everything else lands.

How to tell which scenario you’re in

Before deciding blog or no blog, there’s only one question to answer: are the people who might buy from you already searching for what you sell, or are they searching for the problem you solve without knowing a professional solution exists?

In the first case the plan is short and focuses on a finite set of commercial pages. In the second it’s long, goes through the vocabulary of the problem and needs the bridge. Getting the scenario wrong means writing the right content in the wrong order, and noticing six months later.

If you don’t know which of the two scenarios you’re in

From the outside the difference is almost never visible, and figuring it out isn’t a detail to settle at the start: it decides where the next six months of content go. It’s the first thing I look at when I take over a site, before writing a single page.

If you have a project where you’re about to make this choice, tell me about it.