For years and years and years I’ve written about the importance of crafting content to aid in the search engine visibility and micro-moments discovery of your business, services and products.

 

I’ve written about content strategy and the life cycles of evergreen content.

 

I’ve written about micro-moments and using them in your content strategy

 

I’ve written about how to convert search engine traffic through intent

 

… and I could go on and on with maybe another dozen articles I’ve written over the years.

 

But recently I was forwarded an Instagram Reel where an “influencer” was letting me in on a secret, that “blogging never died and you should be writing” in her influence for a type of local business. Her tactic was to encourage these businesses to “write the answers to questions that people are asking on the internet”, something I wrote about 7 years ago in August of 2015.

 

The problem with this Influencer’s advice was that the targeting was way off. See, her audience is probably 90%+ small, local focused businesses. Probably companies less than 5 employees, and again, all locally focused. The content that she was encouraging them to write would be found in a Google Search via the organic (general) web, NOT in the local-targeted results. As such, the content would almost never be seen via the search engines by their local potential customers/clients, while also fighting for ranking against a national or global audience. And how much “juice” would a small business have against a larger company that likely has multiple establishments in different jurisdictions? Very little.

 

All of that effort would be 99% wasted time.

 

And you shouldn’t take my word for it, this is something that you can test for yourself if you have Google Analytics and goal tracking set up for your website. If you haven’t set up Analytics and goal tracking on your website please do that immediately.

 

First Step: identify your top organic blog posts. You can do this by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels, clicking on Organic Search, and then clicking to switch to the primary dimension of Landing Page.

 

 

 

Second Step: create a custom segment using Conditions (see the image). You’re going to create a filter that looks at Users (switched from Sessions), with a landing page matching your top blog post and a default channel matching Organic Search.

 

 

 

 

Apply this segment and see just how many goal completions you received as a result of organic search traffic from your top “performing” blog post. Do this with as many blog posts as you’d like and see them in aggregate.

 

Count the goal completions, then consider the time and money that were required to create the blog post and promote the blog post.

 

Was it worth it?

 

For many businesses, primarily those with a broader target audience, blogging and content creation like this can be incredibly valuable.

 

But for many local-focused small businesses, blogging is a huge waste of time.

 

What should those small businesses be focusing on instead? In my opinion, their Google My Business (map/search) listings. They should be actively working to have their most passionate and engaged customers/clients posting lengthy positive reviews on their GMB listings. We’ve seen how much local impact these listings can have, as well as the value in Progressive Semantic Influence.

 

Let’s learn to use our time and other resources wisely.