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Should a contractor write a blog?

Not first. The pages that bring work are the ones about a job in a town, and most contractors paying for content get a blog instead. If those pages already exist and you have something genuinely local to say, a post now and then earns its keep. Ten posts about spring maintenance tips do nothing that the fifty other sites saying it aren't already doing.

Why the blog gets sold

It's the easiest thing to bill monthly. Four posts a month is a tidy invoice line, it looks like activity, and nobody has to decide anything hard about your business to write them.

The pages that would help are harder to produce. They need to know what you charge for, what the ground does in that town, and which jobs you'd take. That's a conversation with you, not an afternoon with a template.

What Google says about the filler kind

Google's own guidance warns against content that recycles what others on the internet have already said, or that could easily have been produced by a machine that knows nothing about the subject. Generic seasonal tips are the shape it's describing.

Its spam policy also covers pages made at scale mainly to catch searches rather than to help anybody, and it says plainly that writing them by hand doesn't change that. A blog can be exactly that, so volume isn't the win it looks like.

When a post is worth writing

When you know something a stranger writing about your trade could not. What the frost does to a slab on that side of the river. What the permit office in one town wants and the next one doesn't. What a job ran on a street somebody can picture.

Those posts get read, they get linked to locally, and they give an answer engine something true to quote. One of them a quarter is worth more than a post a week of anything else.

The order to do this in

First, a page for each job in each town you'd drive to, because those are the searches that end in a phone call. Then your Google listing lined up with them. Then reviews arriving every month.

After all that, a post when you have something to say. If somebody's proposal starts at step four and skips the first three, that's worth asking about before you sign it.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Look at what you're paying for content today and ask which of those pieces a customer could search for and find. If the answer is none of them, move that money to the pages for the jobs and towns you want the phone to ring for, and let the writing about the trade wait.

Bindingstone builds the pages that answer the searches first, a page for every job in every town you drive to, and the writing after that only happens when there's something real to say.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.