Here is the ordinary way to plan a blog post: think of a topic, check it has some search interest, write it, and add a link to your contact page at the bottom because you should probably have one.
And here is the reversal that changes the outcome: decide which page on your website needs more enquiries, and only then work out what to write. Same effort, same research, completely different result — because in the first version the destination is an afterthought, and in the second it is the brief.
The short answer
Choose one page you want more business from. Find the questions people ask immediately before they would need that page. Write one post per question, each linking back to it. Six or eight posts pointed at the same destination will do more for that page than twenty posts scattered across unrelated topics.
Why the order matters so much
A blog post has two jobs: get found, and send the reader somewhere useful. Topic-first planning optimises the first and forgets the second, which is how you end up with the most common disappointment in small business marketing — a post that gets decent traffic and produces nothing at all.
There is also a compounding effect that only happens when posts share a destination. Several articles all linking to the same page, all covering related ground, signal fairly clearly what that page is about and that it matters. Scattered posts linking to scattered pages produce none of that.
So the page comes first. Everything else is downstream of that one choice.
Choosing the page
Not the homepage. The homepage is about your whole business, which means it is not specifically about anything, and sending informational traffic to it wastes the visit.
Pick a page where somebody can do a specific thing: one service, one product, one location you serve. Then, among those, pick using business reasons rather than search reasons:
- Where is your capacity? The service you could do more of next month, not the one you are already booked out on.
- Where is the margin? Traffic to your best-paying work is worth several times the same traffic to your cheapest.
- What converts when people get there? If the page already turns visitors into enquiries, more visitors is straightforwardly good. If it does not, fix the page before you send anyone to it.
One page. Not three. The whole benefit comes from concentration, and splitting your first six posts across three destinations gets you a third of the effect in each.
Finding the questions
You are looking for what somebody searches in the hours or days before they would land on that page. Not people ready to buy — those already found you — but people working out what they need.
Four places to look, in order of usefulness:
- Your own inbox and phone. The questions you answer before quoting. These are the best topics you will ever find and no tool can show them to you.
- Google's own suggestions. Start typing the service into the search box and read the autocomplete. Then search it and read "People also ask" and the related searches at the bottom. That is free, it is drawn from real searches, and for a small market it is more reliable than most paid tools.
- The objections you overcome. Every reason someone hesitates is a question somebody else is searching instead of asking. Cost, timing, disruption, whether it is worth doing at all.
- Competitor pages, briefly. Not to copy, but to see what they have not answered. In most local sectors the gaps are enormous.
Ten questions is plenty to start. You will not use all of them.
Sorting them into a plan
Of the ten, some are much closer to money than others. Sort roughly by distance from the enquiry:
Close. Cost questions, comparisons between options, "is it worth it", "how do I choose someone". Somebody asking these is weeks or days away from spending. Write these first — they are usually the least competitive and the fastest to pay off.
Middle. How the process works, how long it takes, what you need to prepare, what goes wrong if you leave it.
Far. Broad educational topics. Larger audiences, much weaker intent. These are fine later and a poor place to start, because a year of them can produce impressive traffic numbers and no work.
Most small businesses do this exactly backwards, starting with the broad educational piece because it feels like the proper thing to write.
One question per post
The temptation, having found ten good questions, is to answer several in one comprehensive guide.
Do not. Google largely has to decide what a page is about, and a page covering six questions tends to be treated as mostly about one of them, with the rest earning nothing. You also lose the reader who arrived for the third question and has to scroll past two they did not ask.
The related risk is the opposite one: writing three posts that all answer roughly the same question in different words. That splits whatever authority you build between pages that then compete with each other, and it is a genuinely common way to waste six months of work. If two topics on your list would be satisfied by the same answer, they are one post.
Linking it back
Each post links to the page it was written for. Two details matter more than people expect.
The link goes in the body, at the point where the reader has just been convinced — usually right after you have answered the thing they came for. Not in a footer, not in a "related links" block, both of which are largely invisible.
And the link text describes the destination. "Our deck building service" tells the reader and Google what is on the other side. "Click here" tells neither.
How to tell whether it worked
The measure is not visits to the post. It is how many people went from the post to the page it was pointing at.
That single number tells you what to do next. A post with modest traffic and a healthy click-through rate is doing its job and the topic is worth more of. A post with strong traffic and no click-throughs attracted the wrong readers, or answered so completely that nobody needed to go further — in which case the answer was right and the link was in the wrong place.
Once a cluster of six or eight posts is pointing at one page, the effect on that page tends to be visible in a way that scattered blogging never is. Then you pick the next page and do it again. That is the whole method, and the research is genuinely the easy part — the discipline is in choosing the destination before you choose the topic.