If You Think Blogs Are Old-Fashioned and Useless... You’re Not Entirely Wrong

Whenever I bring on a new client, at some point we get around to talking about their website. Whether they already have one or I’m building one from scratch, we have to decide what pieces and parts we’re going to include.

For some reason, things tend to get a little odd whenever we start talking about adding a blog.

Nobody questions whether the website should explain what the business does. Obviously, it needs service pages. We need an About page, a way to contact the business, and probably some kind of booking or appointment calendar.

Then I mention the blog.

That is when I get the pause.

“Do people even read blogs anymore?”

Sometimes they are more direct.

“Aren’t blogs kind of old-fashioned?”

I can’t say I haven’t heard that one before. And if you think blogs are old-fashioned and useless, you’re not entirely wrong.

Most business blogs are pretty much useless.

They have a few generic articles that were added a few years ago. Or they'll have an article with a tiltle like “Five Tips for a Healthier You.” Not bad but it could belong to almost any business in the health and wellness industry.

Nobody reads them. Nobody shares them. The business owner usually forgets they exist.

If that is what we mean by adding a blog, I’m not sure I would want one either.

But before we decide that blogs have outlived their usefulness, there is a question we should probably answer.

Why would your business have a blog in the first place?

A Blog Is Just a Place to Publish Things

Back in the Stone Age, people followed blogs much like they followed a favorite newspaper columnist. They bookmarked them, subscribed to them, and returned regularly to see what the writer had to say.

Some blogs still work that way.

A personality may use a blog to build a following around their ideas. The subject matter may bring people in, but the writer’s perspective is what brings them back. Over time, the audience develops an interest in what that particular person thinks, even when the topic changes from one article to the next.

For that kind of blog, regular readers matter. The writer is not simply answering isolated questions. They are developing an ongoing relationship with an audience that wants to hear from them again.

A media company uses a blog differently. Its business may depend on attracting as many readers as possible and giving them reasons to keep moving from one article to another. More readers mean more advertising impressions. Also more subscribers, or more opportunities to promote whatever the company sells.

That explains why media companies publish so often and cover so many subjects. The individual article is part of a much larger competition for attention. Traffic is not a side benefit. It is closely connected to how the company makes money.

A software company may have another reason for publishing articles. Its product may be complicated, expensive, or difficult to evaluate during a single visit to the website. A potential buyer may need help understanding the problem and comparing possible solutions. They may be deciding whether the software fits the way their company operates.

The blog gives the software company room to answer those questions over time. An article may bring someone to the website months before they are ready to buy. Another may help them explain the purchase to a boss or compare the software with an alternative. In that situation, the blog supports a long decision-making process.

Online retailers may use articles to connect their products with their customers. A company selling hiking equipment might publish trail guides, and gear comparisons. That naturally lead readers toward the products it carries.

A large company may use several blogs for entirely different purposes. It might publish company announcements in one place and original research in another. And another still for product education, public relations, or industry commentary.

All of these are blogs by definition, but they do not have the same job. So, it would make little sense to judge them by the same standards.

That is where the conversation about business blogging often goes wrong. We talk about “having a blog” as though every business is trying to accomplish the same thing with it.

A blog is not a strategy. It is simply a place to publish information.

Before we can decide whether you having a blog is useful, we have to look at what you need that information to accomplish.

The Old Scorecard for Business Blogging

A lot of the blogging advice many of us remember came from content marketers trying to attract large audiences.

Find a popular search term. See what is already ranking. Create something longer, more detailed, or more useful. Promote it. Get other websites to link to it. Move up in the search results and attract more visitors.

Brian Dean of Backlinko gave one version of this approach a memorable name: the Skyscraper Technique.

The basic idea was simple. First, find an article that was already performing well. Then write something on the same topic that was substantially better. Then contact people who had linked to the original article in hopes that they would link to yours instead.

It made sense for the content strategy Backlinko was pushing. Each article was competing for search traffic, attention, shares, and backlinks.

The problem is that gave us a particular scorecard that may not work for us anymore.

How many people read your article?

Where did it rank?

How many people shared it?

How many websites linked to it?

How much traffic did it bring in?

Judged that way, most blog posts are failures.

Backlinko later published a study of 912 million blog posts. It found that 94 percent had no external websites linking to them. The study also found that most posts received very few social shares.

Hopefully you're not publishing articles hoping that thousands of people will read and share them. IF so, you may be setting yourself up for a little disappointment.

Fortunately, that may not be the reason your business needs a blog.

You're an Independent. Don't Try to Become a Publisher

A massage therapist in Las Vegas does not need to create the internet’s definitive guide to shoulder pain.

A hairstylist who specializes in grey blending does not need thousands of people waiting for her next article. She does not need her post about transitioning from years of dark hair color to go viral.

A chiropractor, esthetician, consultant, or naturopath is not competing with national media companies.

An Independent’s blog has a different job.

Imagine someone considering grey blending after coloring her roots every six weeks for years. She is not looking for a blog to follow. She has questions.

Will she have to cut her hair?

Can the transition happen in one appointment?

Will she have to go completely grey?

What happens to the old color already on her hair?

She may find one article that speaks directly to the question she is asking. That article helps her understand the process and gives her a feel for the professional behind it.

She may never read another article on the website.

That does not mean the blog failed. It means the right article helped the right person at the right moment.

But that is only part of what those articles are doing.

Before People Can Find You, Platforms Have to Understand You

There's not a lot of altruism online. Especially when comes to search engines. They have a multi part problem to solve.

They need to determine what your business is. They need to understand what services you provide and where you provide them. They put all that together to fidure out which searches your business may be relevant to.

Your website helps them do that.

Your homepage introduces the business. Your service pages explain what you offer. Your location information establishes where you work. Your reviews, business profiles, and directory listings add supporting information from elsewhere online.

Your articles give you room to go deeper.

A grey blending service page may say that a stylist provides grey blending. A collection of related articles can demonstrate that she understands growing out permanent color, managing different shades of grey, protecting the condition of the hair, setting realistic expectations, and helping someone choose an appropriate transition plan.

The service page makes the claim. The surrounding articles help support it.

Over time, those articles create a clearer picture of what the business is actually about. They connect the business with a recognizable collection of services, problems, questions, people, and places.

That helps potential clients understand the business. It also gives search platforms more information to work with when deciding where that business belongs.

This is the first job of your online presence: help platforms understand your business well enough to show it to the right people.

Your blog is one of the places where you build that understanding.

Most Independents Aren’t Doing It

Here's something for you to percolate on. Go to Google Maps and search for what you do in your city.

Massage therapist near me. Hairstylist in Gresham. Las Vegas chiropractor. Whatever someone might type when they are looking for a business like yours.

How many businesses show up?

Ten? Twenty? Fifty? Keep scrolling. In most markets, you are going to find more competitors than you realized you had.

Now start opening their websites.

How many have a blog? How many have published anything in the past year? How many are regularly adding useful articles about the services they provide and the problems their clients bring to them?

Probably not many.

A 2026 study of more than 91,000 local-business websites across 24 North American cities found that only 33.9 percent of independent businesses had a blog.

Roughly two out of three Independents did not have one at all. And simply having a blog does not mean the business is publishing useful content on a regular basis.

That should make the field look a little different.

There is an old joke about two hunters walking through a forest. One of them has a pair of running shoes hanging around his neck.

The other hunter asks, “What are those for?”

“In case we run into a bear.”

“You can’t outrun a bear.”

“I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”

Building a useful business blog works a little like that.

You do not have to create the most popular blog in your industry. You do not have to outrank national publications, attract thousands of readers, or persuade hundreds of websites to link to every article.

You are not trying to win the internet.

You are trying to make your business easier to understand than the other local businesses competing for the same customers.

Two-thirds of them do not have a blog. Many of the ones that do are not publishing useful articles regularly.

And if you are not doing it either, guess which side of that fence you are standing on?

The good news is that getting to the other side does not require you to outrun the bear.

But What If Nobody Reads My Articles?

That is possible.

You could publish a useful article that never reaches the first page of Google. It may not attract much traffic. It may never be shared, and no other website may ever link to it.

If we judge every article as a separate attempt to rank for something, we are right back to the old scorecard.

But Google has customers to serve too.

Its customers are the people who use Google to find answers, products, services, and local businesses. If those people repeatedly get results that are unhelpful, misleading, or created primarily to manipulate the search results, they will eventually look somewhere else.

So Google has to keep getting better at separating a genuinely useful result from a website that has simply learned how to look like one.

Keywords are a good example.

Google needs the words on a page to understand what the page is about. But once marketers learned that certain words could help a page rank, they began building pages around those words. Keywords were repeated, articles were stretched to cover every possible variation, and entire websites were filled with content created because someone found a phrase with enough search volume.

The page might contain the right words without providing the right answer.

That is the game Google has been trying to stay ahead of for years. Every time marketers learn how to imitate the signals Google uses, Google has to become better at determining what is actually behind those signals.

That is why modern search cannot be understood as a collection of individual pages competing for individual keywords.

Google is also trying to understand the source.

Who published this? What is this website actually about? Does the person or business appear to have real experience with the subject? Is the content consistently useful, or was it created primarily to capture search traffic? Does the rest of the website support what this page claims?

That brings us to entities, E-E-A-T, and Google’s emphasis on helpful, people-first content.

These may sound like separate SEO concepts, but they are all connected to the same problem: Google is trying to understand what exists behind the words on a page.

Google Is Trying to Understand the Business Behind the Website

Google is not only matching individual pages with individual searches. It is also trying to understand the people, businesses, places, services, and subjects it finds across the internet.

Google calls these recognizable things entities.

Your business is an entity. So are you, the city where you work, the services you provide, and the problems those services address. Google looks for information that helps it understand what those entities are and how they are connected.

That is one reason the complete website matters.

Google also talks about E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It wants to recognize content created by people who know the subject, have experience with it, and can be trusted to provide useful information.

Then there is Google’s emphasis on helpful, people-first content. The idea behind its helpful-content changes was not simply to reward one well-optimized article. Google wanted to better recognize websites created to genuinely help people and reduce the visibility of websites publishing content primarily to attract search traffic.

None of these ideas is really about a single article.

One article cannot fully establish what your business is about. It cannot demonstrate the range of your experience. It cannot create a clear connection between your business, your services, your customers, their problems, and your location.

But an article can contribute to that picture.

One article may explain a service. Another may answer a question that regularly comes up during a consultation. Another may describe a situation you have encountered in your work.

Individually, none of those articles may attract much attention.

Together, they begin to form a pattern.

Your service page may claim that you provide grey blending. A growing collection of articles about transitioning from permanent color, managing different shades of grey, protecting the condition of the hair, and setting realistic expectations gives Google more context surrounding that claim.

Some of those articles may rank. Some may not.

Their collective job is to make your business easier for Google to understand.

There is a name for deliberately building and strengthening that picture: entity reinforcement.

It is not about stuffing the same keywords into every article. It is not about publishing something new simply so your website looks active. And it is not about turning every Independent into a professional blogger.

It is about consistently reinforcing the connections between who you are, what you do, who you help, the problems you understand, and where you do the work.

The goal is not for every article to win by itself.

The goal is for every article to strengthen the website it becomes part of.

Start Painting the Picture

Think of your website as a portrait you are painting of your business.

Your homepage, service pages, reviews, business profiles, and articles each add something to the picture. No single article has to carry the entire image, just as no single brushstroke has to look like the finished portrait.

Its job is to make the picture a little clearer.

If your website does not have a blog, it is time to start painting. If you have one but have not published anything in a while, pick up the brush again.

Each useful article adds more detail to the picture of what you do, who you help, what you know, and where you work.

Just make sure the articles you add are contributing to the same portrait.

Otherwise, you may be making your website bigger without making the picture any clearer.