Setting up a blog takes about an hour. Deciding what the first ten posts should be is what stops people, and it is why so many New Zealand business websites have a blog page containing two posts from 2023 and an apology.
This is the part nobody explains properly, so here it is: your first ten topics already exist, you have been answering them out loud for years, and there is a much better source for them than a keyword tool.
The short answer
Put the blog at yoursite.co.nz/blog on your main website. Get your first ten topics from the questions customers actually ask you on the phone. Publish one every two weeks rather than five in a burst. Point each one at a page where somebody can hire you. That is the whole thing.
Where the blog should live
On your own domain, in a folder: yoursite.co.nz/blog/the-post-title. Not on a subdomain, not on Medium, not on a separate site you built for the purpose.
The reason is that everything a post earns — the credibility, the links, the search history — accumulates to whatever domain it sits on. Put the content somewhere else and you spend a year building up a property you do not own, while the website that actually takes enquiries gets nothing.
The practical test is whether someone reading a post can reach your contact page in one click without leaving the site. If not, fix that before you write anything.
Where the first ten topics come from
Not from a keyword tool. Tools are useful later for checking, but they are a bad place to start because they can only show you phrases somebody already thought to look up.
The better source is your own week. For the next five working days, write down every question a customer asks you — on the phone, in an email, standing in a driveway. Do not filter them. By Friday you will have somewhere between fifteen and forty, and the ten that come up more than once are your first ten posts.
This works because a question you get asked repeatedly is a question people are also typing into Google, and those people are further along than anyone browsing. Somebody asking "how long before I can walk on it" has already decided to get it done.
A few that turn up in almost every trade and service business:
- "How much does it cost?" — the most searched and most avoided. A page with an honest range beats a page saying "contact us for a quote", and it filters out the people who were never going to book.
- "How long does it take?" — both the job itself and how far out you are booked.
- "Do I need consent for this?" — enormous in anything building-related, and almost nobody answers it clearly.
- "What's the difference between X and Y?" — the comparison you explain in every quote.
- "Can you do it in winter?" — seasonal viability, which in this country is a real question for half the trades.
- "What goes wrong if I leave it?" — the consequences conversation, which is also the one that converts.
One question per post
The strongest temptation when you finally sit down to write is to answer everything at once, producing one enormous page covering costs, timing, process and consent.
Resist it, for a practical reason rather than a stylistic one. Somebody searching "what does a new deck cost in Hamilton" wants that answer, and a page that opens with four hundred words about timber selection has lost them. Google also struggles to rank one page for six different questions — it tends to decide the page is mostly about one of them and ignore the rest.
Six focused pages will out-perform one comprehensive one, and they are easier to write. A thousand words on a single question you know well is an evening. A four-thousand-word guide to everything is a project you will abandon.
What each post needs
Not a formula, but these four things, and posts missing any of them tend not to work:
- The answer near the top. If the title asks what something costs, a number or a range should appear within the first hundred words. Readers who have to hunt for it leave, and so do the answer engines that might otherwise quote you.
- Something only you could have written. Your prices, your region, a job you did last month, the mistake customers make most often. This is what separates your page from the generic article currently outranking it.
- A link to where they can act. One clear link to the relevant service page, placed where the reader is already convinced rather than at the very bottom.
- An honest ending. Not a summary of what you just said. Either the thing you would tell a friend, or the case where your answer changes.
A cadence that survives a busy month
The usual failure is not laziness. It is picking a schedule that assumed a quiet year.
People commit to weekly, manage three weeks, hit a busy patch in October, and never restart because by then it feels like a failed project rather than a paused one. Fortnightly is far more survivable, and consistency matters more than frequency — steady publishing appears to do more for you than the same number of posts dumped in one week.
Twenty-six posts a year at that pace. Most of your competitors have four in total.
If two weeks still sounds like a lot, monthly is fine. Twelve genuinely useful pages answering twelve real questions is a serious asset, and it is twelve more than the business down the road has.
What the first three months look like
Nothing much, and you need to know that going in or you will stop.
Your first post will be indexed within a week or two and will then sit somewhere on page four while Google decides what it is. You will check the analytics, see eleven visits, and feel foolish. This is the normal shape of it, not a verdict, and we have set out the month-by-month timeline so the quiet part is less alarming when you are in it.
The thing worth watching in those first months is not visits but impressions in Google Search Console — how often your page appeared in someone's results at all. Rising impressions means it is climbing. Set up Search Console on day one; it is free and it is the only honest feedback you will get for a while.
The bit that actually matters
Of everything above, the part people skip is the week of writing down customer questions, and it is the part that determines whether any of this works.
A blog built from real questions is a blog that answers what people search. A blog built from brainstormed topics is a blog about what you find interesting, which is a different thing and reliably gets less traffic. The week costs you nothing and it is the difference between ten pages that earn and ten pages that sit there.