Is blogging worth it for your business?

For most small and medium businesses, no, not if it means writing articles because someone said you should and then waiting for Google to notice. It's worth it where customers research carefully before they buy, where you have first-hand knowledge to share, and where someone will keep it going for a year. Work out which kind of business you are before you spend a single evening writing.

Our interest, stated first. We sell content strategy: a content plan and first briefs for £2,500. So the answer that suits us is yes. We've tried to argue the other side as hard as the evidence allows, and the evidence is mostly on the other side.

Why the odds are against a blog

Most pages get no search traffic at all. Ahrefs, which sells SEO software and so has its own interest in the subject, studied the roughly 14 billion pages in one of its indexes. In 2023 its search traffic study reported that "96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits". That covers every kind of page, not just the blogs of smaller businesses, but it's a sobering place to start: publishing something and being found are different things.

Fewer marketers say it works, and more can't tell. Orbit Media, a content agency, surveys more than a thousand content marketers every year. In its 2026 blogging survey of 1,042, only 13.9% said their blog delivers strong results, the lowest figure in the survey's history, and 18% said they didn't know whether it delivered results at all. These are content marketers by trade, the people most inclined to say yes.

AI summaries are taking the clicks that general articles used to get. When Google shows an AI summary, people click far less. The Pew Research Center tracked 900 US adults in March 2025 and found they clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with a summary, against 15% of visits without one. As we see it, the questions a summary answers well are exactly the general how-to questions most business blogs are written about. The same shift sits behind the wider question of whether SEO is dead.

It takes more time than it looks. The same Orbit survey put the average time to write one post at 3 hours 20 minutes. One post a week at that pace comes to about 170 hours a year, and that's for people who write for a living.

Six cases where it isn't worth it

In each of these, we'd tell a client not to start a blog.

1. Your customers search for you, not for information. Someone with a burst pipe searches "emergency plumber near me" and rings the first number they trust. They don't read articles. For locksmiths, plumbers, taxis, takeaways and most urgent local services, the work is in your Google Business Profile, your reviews and a clear service page.
2. You already know every buyer by name. If your market is thirty companies, a handful of planners or the buyers of one kind of specialist equipment, your time is better spent talking to them. Write something only if it's something you'll send them.
3. What you'd write is what everyone writes. "Five tips for a tidy garden" has been written thousands of times, and an AI summary will answer it before anyone reaches you. Google's own guidance on creating helpful content asks site owners: "Are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?" If the honest answer is yes, stop.
4. Nobody will keep it going for a year. Search results take months to settle, and a few posts written in a burst of enthusiasm and then abandoned rarely get that long. Knowing how long SEO takes, stage by stage, tells you what you'd be signing up to. If nobody owns the blog, it won't happen.
5. Your website doesn't turn the visitors you already have into enquiries. Sending more traffic to a page that loses people is pouring money into a leaking bucket. Fix the pages that sell first; the usual culprits are the homepage mistakes that cost enquiries.
6. You need enquiries this month. Content is slow. If your cash flow depends on work in the next few weeks, past customers, your Business Profile and, if the sums work, paid search will all get you there faster.

When it is worth it

• Your customers research before they buy. A kitchen, a solicitor, a wedding venue, a care home, a garden design: people read before they pick up the phone, and a clear answer from you is a reason to pick yours.
• You know things first-hand that nobody else writes down. Google asks whether content "clearly demonstrate[s] first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge". A structural engineer explaining what a crack in a particular kind of Victorian wall means isn't competing with generic advice.
• Customers ask you the same questions every week. Write each answer once, properly, and it works as sales material, as an email reply and as a page people can find.
• You can sustain one good piece a month. Consistency beats volume, and twelve useful pages in a year beat fifty thin ones.
• The writing does two jobs. If a piece is something you'd send to a prospect anyway, any search traffic comes on top.

The better answer often isn't a blog

What most small and medium businesses need is a handful of pages that answer what customers actually ask, not a stream of dated posts: what you do, what it costs, how it works, what to expect, and the questions that come up every week. Some of those can live in a blog, but most belong on your service pages. Choosing and briefing them is the heart of content strategy on a small team.

Our own record

Most of the articles on this site are recent, and it's too early to show that they bring in work, so we won't claim they do. What we can say is that each one answers a question customers ask us, and that's the test we'd apply to yours.

What nobody has measured yet

• There's no study of blogs by smaller businesses. Ahrefs measures every page in its index, and Orbit surveys content marketers, most of them at larger organisations. We found no study of whether blogging pays for small and medium businesses in the UK in particular.
• The surveys are self-reported, and the people running them have an interest. Orbit Media sells content services, as we do, and "strong results" is each respondent's own judgement.
• The clicks data is American. The Pew figures come from 900 US adults in March 2025, and we found no equivalent UK study.

None of those gaps changes the advice. If you recognised your business in one of the six cases above, spend the hours elsewhere. If you didn't, and you'd like a plan for what to write and in what order, that's what our content plan and first briefs are for.