Most local businesses do not need more content

The most commonly sold piece of local search work is four blog posts a month. It is easy to price, easy to deliver, and easy to show in a report. It is also, for most of the local businesses I meet, close to the least useful thing that could be done with the same money.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument against writing. It is an argument about sequence.

What the constraint usually is

When a local business is not getting enough enquiries, the reason is almost never a shortage of articles. In the ones I look at, it is one of a short list.

• The Business Profile is filed under the wrong primary category, so the business does not appear for the searches that matter. The 47 specialists in Whitespark's 2026 ranking factors survey put the primary category first of 187 factors for the map pack.¹
• There is no real page for the service that makes the money, only a mention of it on a homepage.
• Reviews stopped arriving two years ago and nobody replies to the ones that do. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, 74% looked for reviews from the last three months.²
• The details disagree across the profile, the site and half a dozen directories. Complete, accurate business information is one of the few things Google's local ranking help says outright makes a profile more likely to show up.³
• The site takes six seconds to load on a phone, which is where nearly all of this traffic is.

None of those are solved by publishing. All of them are cheaper to fix than a year of content. And a business with a strong foundation and no blog does considerably better than a business with a weekly blog and a broken profile.

Publishing into a broken foundation does not fail loudly. It just costs money for a year and then gets blamed on the algorithm.

When content does earn its place

There is a version of this work that pays for itself, and it looks different from a blog. It answers the questions a customer actually asks in the weeks before they buy, in enough detail that they stop looking elsewhere.

1. 01Write down the questions you get asked on the phone before somebody books. Not the questions you wish they asked. The real ones, including the awkward ones about price.
2. 02Answer each one properly on its own page, with specifics: numbers, timescales, what is included, what is not, what goes wrong and what happens then. The test in Google's guidance on helpful content fits well here: will the reader leave feeling they learned enough to do what they came to do?⁴
3. 03Say who the service is not for. This costs you nothing and it is the fastest way to sound like somebody who knows the work.
4. 04Link those pages from the service page that sells the thing, and from the profile where it is relevant.
5. 05Leave them alone for six months, then check which ones bring enquiries and write more of that kind.

Ten pages built that way will outperform a hundred posts about industry trends, and they keep working for years because the questions do not change much.

The assistant angle, briefly

This has become more true, not less, as people started asking assistants instead of searching. Specific, quotable pages are exactly what gets retrieved and summarised. General commentary is not, because there is an unlimited supply of it and none of it answers anybody in particular. The research points the same way. In the GEO study (Aggarwal and colleagues, KDD 2024), adding quotations, statistics or cited sources to a page gave relative gains of 30 to 40% on the authors' main measure of how visibly it was used in generated answers, while adding keywords did little.⁵ That was a benchmark of test queries, not a live local market, but it matches what I see. I have written about how that retrieval appears to work.

What I tell people who want a content plan

That we should look at the foundation first, and that if it is sound I will happily plan content, and if it is not then I would be taking money to build on sand. That conversation is shorter than the proposal usually is, and it has never yet lost me a client I wanted.

If you are not sure which position you are in, the first five checks in an audit will usually tell you, and they cost a fraction of a year of publishing.