Does blogging help small businesses grow?

Yes, but not overnight. Blogging helps you answer common questions, demonstrate expertise, and get found by people searching for your services. Over 6-12 months of consistent publishing, you should see more qualified leads finding you through search and better conversion rates from prospects who’ve read your content first.

What are the best topics for a small business blog?

Case studies from your work. “How we helped [type of client] solve [specific problem]” shows your expertise in action. Change names if needed, but share the specifics. Behind-the-scenes content. How you approach projects, what your process looks like, the tools you use and why. This humanizes your business and helps prospects understand what working with you would be like. Opinion pieces grounded in experience. Your perspective on industry trends, based on what you’re seeing with your clients or in your market. This is where your unique value shows up. Problem-solution posts. “Here’s a challenge my clients face and how I help them address it.” Practical, specific, and demonstrates your expertise without being promotional. Local or niche-specific content. If you serve a specific geographic area or industry, write about topics relevant to that audience. You won’t compete with national sites, but you don’t need to.

How do I promote my blog if I don’t have a big audience?

Share posts directly with people who need them – send links when someone asks a question your post answers. Build an email list (even a small one). Link your posts together. Share on social media without depending on it for traffic. Reference your content when speaking at events or participating in industry discussions.

Is it better to have a blog or focus on social media for my business?

Both serve different purposes. Your blog is the one place online you control – it builds long-term search visibility and demonstrates expertise. Social media is for conversations and visibility, but platforms want to keep people there, not send them to your site. Use social media to share your blog content, but don’t depend on it as your only marketing channel.

Do I need technical skills to run a business blog?

Basic writing for the formatting knowledge is helpful, but most business blogs need simple technical optimization: clean URLs, compressed images, alt text, and proper heading structure. If you can format a document and upload images, you can create a blog. You can also record video or audio and get it transcribed if writing isn’t your strength.

Can I benefit from blogging without a dedicated marketing team?

Most successful small business blogs are written by the business owner. You already have the expertise – blogging is just documenting what you know and answering questions you’ve already answered dozens of times. Start with what you know, write in your own voice, and publish consistently. You can do it!

I want to create videos but where should I upload them?

YouTube is usually the better choice for most small businesses. It’s free, handles all the technical stuff (encoding, streaming, mobile optimization), and YouTube itself is the second-largest search engine. Videos on YouTube can show up in both YouTube and Google search results, giving you two chances to be found. Hosting video directly on your site can slow down your pages and require more technical management. For most small businesses, embedding YouTube videos on your blog posts gives you the best of both worlds: your content lives on your site with the transcript, but YouTube handles the video infrastructure.

How do I create a transcript of my audio or video content?

Tools like Descript, Otter.ai, or even YouTube’s auto-captioning can handle transcription. Clean it up a bit (remove the “ums” and false starts), add some paragraph breaks and headings, and you have a blog post. Rev.com has pretty accurate AI transcription, you can also connect Zoom to Fathom or use it's AI transcription tool. Google it - there's tons of options.

Search Engine Optimization Archives

A year of working on my content: what happened in Search and AI
Citation-mania
In the 1630s, the price of a single tulip bulb in Holland could exceed a skilled tradesman’s annual salary, traded on nothing but the promise that whoever bought it next would pay more. Tulip mania measured everyone else’s confidence that the price would keep climbing until, over about a week in February 1637, it didn’t, and the market for tulip bulbs collapsed by ninety percent or more.
I think about this case study in market speculation whenever people get hot to join a bandwagon, as with recent advice on “showing up in AI”. There’s a fast-growing crowd of llms.txt files, AI-visibility subscriptions, and warnings about competitors already “winning” a channel no one can measure reliably. Adopted because … adoption is visibly rising, not because it has been shown to work sustainably over time. This is also concerning because clients asking AI to “optimize” their content will often get dubious recommendations and sources.
How do I show up when someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation?
As the team at SEOPress put it, “SEO isn’t packing its bags, it’s just changing the address.” The answer to “how do I get cited by AI” relies on the same fundamentals that apply to “how do I rank for a search”: who is this content for, and does it genuinely serve them better than what already exists. Most content development work skips that question entirely.
An AI overview can answer a question well enough that nobody ever clicks through to the article it pulled from, so writing something adequate and generic won’t help you. Results from ChatGPT queries carry a particular kind of persuasive weight, because it plays on a natural tendency to confuse cause and correlation. A confident, well-worded AI answer feels like harder evidence than a vague-sounding blog post, but that feeling is mostly manufactured by the specificity of the artifact. This is where creating original, thoughtful, specific content – even if you publish less frequently – can make a bigger difference.
Quality content is harder to automate, because it still requires someone to think critically about a real question rather than just produce at scale.
Since I am always recommending to my clients that they should write blog articles, I wanted to walk through a year of my own content, sorted by what I was interested in exploring.
Disclaimer: This is not rigorous research, just my own experimentation with search optimization techniques as my time and interest allows.
Content, meet Audience
Writing about something because you’re genuinely excited about it is a completely legitimate reason to write. It’s just a different activity, with a different bar for success, than writing to rank, convert, or build authority. You won’t rank for something nobody is searching for, no matter how well you write it, and you won’t convert a reader who was never the intended audience.
In practice, most small business content falls into three groups:
1. Content you write because you find it interesting. If inspiration strikes, go for it. But this is mostly for you, it’s not written to rank or convert anyone.
2. Content written for people in your field, not your clients. The audience is peers, not prospects. The payoff is reputation inside a professional community, not a phone call.
3. Content written to reach and convince a specific buyer. Even here, it matters whether you’re trying to win over a stranger who’s never heard of you, or reinforcing trust with someone already in a conversation with you.
Peer content: solving my own problem in public
A chunk of what I publish isn’t written for clients at all. Posts on WordPress development, ACF block patterns, digging into variable font use – these posts originate from real problems I’m trying to solve where I couldn’t find a definitive resource. The audience is other WordPress developers and being useful to the community I work in is my purpose.
Judged on those merits, these articles are working exactly as intended. Three clicks on 1,052 impressions for “acf blocks” is a fine outcome for a peer-audience post.
Content built to be shared directly, that may also have search value
In November and January, I published two posts – one on phishing and fake domain renewal emails, one on why WordPress updates matter for security. The intent wasn’t to win cold, comparison-shopping searches from strangers. Clients has asked me these exact questions directly, over email and in project calls. I wanted a canonical piece I could point to instead of re-explaining the same warning signs from scratch every time, and something that also reinforces the trust that conversation is built on.
Both posts ended up ranking well anyway. The November post has an average position of 9.5 with 1,950 impressions. The January post is at 8.3 with 570 impressions. Total clicks across both: zero.
Look at what they’re ranking for: “siteground copyright infringement email,” “fake domain renewal,” “‘final notice’ antivirus renewal scam.” These are searches from someone who just got a scary email and needs an answer in the next thirty seconds, not the audience I was writing for.
Out of curiosity, I checked what’s ranking above my results for a couple of those queries: SiteGround’s own official knowledge base, ICANN’s own fraud alert, established security publishers like Malwarebytes already covering the same scam campaign. I was never going to win that search.
Which points at something the ranking data can’t tell me either way: whether the posts are fulfilling their purpose. Have they made a real conversation easier? Saved me from re-explaining the same thing over email? Given someone something reassuring to forward along? That’s not a Search Console metric, and it’s not something impressions or position can confirm or deny. The job of these articles is to support existing relationships of trust, not to manufacture it out of a cold search.
Buyer-aware content that did the research: my “site maintenance” page
My WordPress maintenance page has existed since 2021, doing fine, unremarkable work. Last fall I noticed it was pulling far more impressions than my other service pages but almost none of that visibility was becoming inquiries. So this time, before rewriting anything, I compared it to pages that were ranking well for the same terms and asked what they had that mine didn’t.
The gap was specificity and comprehensive breadth (not necessarily good or useful writing, alas). My content was vague where theirs was concrete. So in October and November of 2025, I rewrote it: adding client testimonials, refining the offer, rebuilding the FAQ around client questions and the “people also ask” prompts Google surfaces for that exact search.
Nine months later, the rankings side of this looks like the earlier examples: average position climbed from the 40s and 50s to the 13–14 range, weekly impressions grew from under 500 to a peak near 4,800, and total clicks across the whole twelve months landed at five. Judged purely on Search Console, this would read as another wash.
When a prompt requires current, specific, or verifiable information – which includes most commercial and research queries – LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini retrieve relevant documents from external search indexes before generating their response. For these queries, the retrieval step is key: if your content isn’t indexed and ranking in the search engine, it cannot enter the model’s context window.
Lily Ray, Your GEO Strategy Might Be Destroying Your SEO
In the spring and summer of 2026, three new maintenance inquiries came in from people who, when asked how they found me, said some version of “I asked ChatGPT.” They couldn’t point to an exact page they were referred to, just that they’d asked an AI tool for a recommendation and gotten mine.
It’s tempting to draw a straight line from “I rewrote the page in October” to “ChatGPT recommended me in June”. But is that true or truthy?
Pattern v. Coincidence
SE Ranking – AI Visibility Chart (6 months): shows the share of tracked prompts for which a selected Large Language Model (LLM) provides at least one source link in its response.
A general AI-visibility tracker I run through SE Ranking climbed from roughly 10–15% in late April to a sustained 50–75% through most of June, which is close to the window those three inquiries arrived in. That’s a percentage across a small set of tracked prompts, measured daily, which is exactly the kind of series where a good week can look like a trend.
Rand Fishkin’s research on AI-driven search makes a relevant point – these tools give inconsistent answers to the same question asked twice, and there’s rarely a reliable way to trace one recommendation back to one piece of content.
To get mathematical about it, there’s a <1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI, if asked 100X, will give you the same list of brands in any two responses. Claude is just slightly more likely to give you the same list twice in a hundred runs, but even less likely to do so in the same order.
Rand Fishkin, SparkToro.com – Ais are highly inconsistent
Fishkin’s argument predicts exactly this kind of result: he’s said full-funnel, page-level attribution doesn’t really work anymore for AI-driven visibility, and the best move is tracking aggregate brand presence instead of chasing which single URL gets the credit.
The other pattern is publishing volume. From September 2025 through April 2026, I put out 18 posts spanning WordPress, web development, content strategy, SEO, UX, accessibility. Only a handful touched security or AI specifically. I shared my articles on LinkedIn and BlueSky. Lot’s of LinkedIn traffic referrals, mostly from the peer-driven topics.
If there’s a finding in this, showing up consistently, across a normal range of real topics, seemed to matter more than picking one narrow niche and hammering it. That’s a more realistic goal for most small business owners than an aggressive content marketing strategy that demands multiples posts per week paired with social media campaigns.
In writing articles, I also wanted to maintain a standard of quality that mattered to me. I wanted my work to be moderately creative and personally satisfying. If you can match the specificity and depth of what’s ranking, and also make something that is “good” (human, genuine, original, well-written), it should perform better over time.
Before you publish, make sure you ask the right questions
If your process right now is “someone writes something, I glance at it, we hit publish,” here’s an an adjustment which will increase your potential benefits that costs maybe thirty extra minutes:
1. What is the purpose of your content (before writing or prompting)? Enthusiasm content you create for yourself, peer content, and buyer content have different jobs and different success metrics.
2. Who’s going to read this? A stranger, or someone already talking to you? If it’s a stranger finding you cold, find the exact question they’d search, then check who already owns it – other businesses like yours, or a name-brand a worried person would already trust more, like a bank, a host, or a government site? If it’s the second one, that’s important to know before you spend an afternoon competing for a click you were never going to get (in this case, explore a longer tail keyphrase).
3. Check your own site before creating something new. Improving an existing page can be a better use of limited time than adding another thin post to a pile.
4. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Save context for after. This is what makes a section quotable, to a human skimming and to an AI system deciding what to cite.
5. When you’re the one editing, check for specificity, not just tone. Ask “would this paragraph describe five other companies or is it unique to us – does it have a point of view or strong opinion?”
6. Don’t wait for a perfect content plan. My own results came from eight months of ordinary, unglamorous publishing, not an engineered content cluster. Pick a bucket, pick a real question, and keep the habit going.
Work in Progress
A lot of real content is blended. An FAQ can serve both a worried client and a curious peer at once, and the security posts are arguably evidence of that: written with buyer intent, but the query behavior that got exposed (panic-searching, trust-brand competition) suggests the actual audience search intent was closer to “verify this isn’t a scam” than “evaluate a WordPress maintenance provider.” That could be treated as a missed research step, which is true, but it’s also a reminder that intent isn’t fully something a writer decides.
Searcher intent is the thing that governs the outcome of your search optimization work, not tricks to exploit short‑term loopholes. Research and experimentation show you what intent your audience has, how to satisfy it with the right content and format, and what moves your metrics over time.
Image: A Satire of Tulip Mania by Jan Brueghel the Younger (c. 1640) depicts speculators as brainless monkeys in contemporary upper-class dress. In a commentary on the economic folly, one monkey urinates on the previously valuable plants, others appear in debtor’s court and one is carried to the grave. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands., Public Domain
Emily Rapport
August 1, 2026
AI Search, Search Engine Optimization

Your WordPress Media Library is a Mess

If you have a website, it’s likely that your media library has accumulated some unoptimized files.

I recently did an audit for a small nonprofit that had been running their WordPress site for about ten years. What we found was an overstuffed digital attic: huge PNG images, videos eating up hundreds of megabytes of server space, old PDFs nobody had accessed in years, and zip archives that probably shouldn’t have been uploaded in the first place.

Up to 90% of digital data is not used. We collect. We store. We create and then don’t use. Data is the atomic structure of digital. Words, music, images, films, videos, software. It all ends up as data. Most data is like single use, throwaway plastic. What sort of society accepts 90% waste?
Gerry McGovern, “World Wide Waste“

That’s the law of space (and time): the more space you have, the more junk you will fill it up with. Adding storage is always easier than deleting what you no longer need. But there are real costs to this seemingly infinite, intangible digital space: to your site performance, to your hosting bill, and to the environment.

Back in my day…

If you built websites in the dial-up era, you already know this story. But, let’s wax nostalgic for a minute:

File size wasn’t an abstract concern in the early days of the web. A 200 KB image on a 56k modem cost you 60-seconds and a beep boop … and your image loaded incrementally.

Choosing the wrong file format, or skipping optimization, could mean the difference between a site that worked and a page full of broken image icons.

We had three formats to choose from (and we had to walk 3 miles in the snow to get to school every day):

BitMap and GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) – were the first graphics formats supported by HTML. GIF was perfect for simple graphics, logos, quick animations, and those blinking “under construction” banners that were everywhere on the early web. Capped at 256 web-safe colors. Photographs had to be dithered if saved as a GIF and the results were always pixelated.
The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) became the standard in 1992 and was a revelation for photographic images, introducing lossy compression that could squeeze a photo down to a fraction of its size. You chose your compression level deliberately, previewing the quality tradeoff before you committed.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) – developed as a patent-free alternative to GIF with better quality and more colors.

Screens added another layer of constraint. Many monitors ran at 800 x 600 pixels (smaller than today’s phone screens in raw pixel count). If you sized an image incorrectly, it could overflow the screen, get clipped, or be resampled poorly. We weren’t just picking a format, we were working within a strict pixel budget.

Screen resolutions improved. Broadband arrived and storage got cheap. Suddenly, the limitations we had been working with evaporated and file size stopped feeling like anyone’s problem. The costs of our unoptimized media have became cumulative and hidden rather than showing up as a spinning progress bar.

Even if you live in a 5G world, speed matters

Broadband and fast wifi are easy to take for granted when you’re working at a desk with a new machine and a reliable connection. But we should not assume that’s the default experience of our website’s visitors.

Many people access the internet on pay-as-you-go mobile plans where every megabyte of data has a real dollar cost. Others are on older devices, slower connections, or both. The person managing your site and the person visiting it are often living in very different bandwidth realities, and designing only for the former is making a big assumption.

Page speed has direct SEO implications

Core Web Vitals are a Google ranking signal, and large images are one of the most common causes of poor scores. Mobile users on cellular connections still feel oversized images.

More data uses more energy

Files stored on a website live on servers that run 24/7, drawing electricity and generating heat that requires additional energy to cool. An old, unlinked file is still occupying storage and contributing a small share of the site’s overall resource use.

Multiply that across millions of unmaintained sites and cloud storage services and it’s part of why data centers in the US currently consume 4–5% of total national electricity, a figure that could reach as high as 17% by 2030 – thanks AI.

The big picture on file sizes

Before looking at fixes, let’s get a sense of the scale involved:

Unit	Size	What it feels like
1 KB	1,024 bytes	A short plain-text email
100 KB	~100,000 bytes	A well-optimized web image
1 – 2 MB	~1 million bytes	An unoptimized JPEG or PNG, ~1 min of MP3
5 – 10 MB	~5–10 million bytes	A larger PDF on your website
1 GB	~1 billion bytes	~200 smartphone photos, ~4 min of 4K video

Many websites I work with have been around for a few years and they are often host 10 GB or more of data. Most of that is content no one ever sees or even remembers uploading.

Is PNG making a comeback?

At first glance, PNG looks like a reasonable default; it supports transparency, it’s lossless, and it handles crisp interface elements well. These days, everything exports as a PNG — it’s the standard format for apps like Canva and Figma, screenshots, and even iOS images.

A lot of what gets uploaded to websites may not even see the inside of a photo editing tool. AI-generated PNG images go straight from the slop-machine to your website as 7MB graphics, form submitted images shunted right back up to the cloud with a single click.We take it straight to the web now, baby!

PNG may have the best PR team on the web but it’s the single biggest source of unnecessary file bloat I see in images on websites.

Remember, PNG is designed for flat-color graphics: logos, icons, illustrations with hard edges. Use it for photographs or gradient-heavy images and you can end up with files 3 to 10 times larger than necessary, with no visible quality difference.

Please, stop with the PNG files.

Use a modern image format

Format	Best for	Notes
`WebP` (yay!)	Photos, artwork	Best option, smallest file size at good quality
`JPEG`	Photos, artwork	Widely supported, solid fallback
`PNG`	Logos, flat graphics only	Avoid for photos, it’s HUGE
`SVG`	Logos, simple graphics	Ideal for logos, tiny and infinitely scalable

The target for most web images is around 100 KB (or less), aim for a hard ceiling of around 300 – 500 KB for large hero images. If an image is over 1 MB, it almost certainly needs to be optimized before upload.

When should we optimize? Before we upload!

The best time to optimize is before the file goes into WordPress (or your CMS of choice). This may feel like an extra step but it’s faster than fixing things later, and let’s be real, you probably won’t fix things later.

For individual images: Affinity Photo is now free. It’s a full-featured image editor (Canva acquired it in 2024) available for both Mac and Windows.
For batch processing images: Affinity Photo has a batch job feature (File > New Batch Job) that lets you point it at a folder, set your output format and dimensions, and convert everything at once.

On Mac, ImageOptim is another excellent free option. Drag any image or folder into the app and it compresses files in place. The Windows version requires a paid license.

Replacing existing images in WordPress

If you’ve already got oversized images live on your site, you don’t need to hunt down every page they appear on. The Enable Media Replace plugin lets you swap a file directly in the media library and automatically updates all references site-wide.

Optimizing media already in your library

SmushIt is popular but I’m personally not a fan; the configuration and dashboard is harder for clients and there’s too many paid upgrades here. Check this blog post on Dev.to for Smush Alternatives for WordPress.

Converter for Media is a nice one not mentioned but it may require some extra config by your web host and/or developer. It does a great job converting to WebP format!

Dorian Gray in his attic — Dorian Gray enjoying his attic. The painting is by Ivan Albright and can be seen at The Art Institute of Chicago.

What else is lurking in your digital attic, I mean, media library?

Images are usually the first priority, but a full media audit looks at all of the other stuff you’ve squirreled away:

Videos hosted directly in WordPress should be moved to YouTube or Vimeo and embedded instead. Video files can quickly exceed 100 MB. That’s not what your web hosting is designed for.
PDFs and documents that aren’t actively linked from a public page don’t belong in the media library. Move them to a public Google Drive folder and link from there if needed.
Zip archives almost never belong in a media library. If you see them, they’re almost certainly safe to delete.
Sort images by file size and look for anything over 500 KB. PNGs are usually the culprit.

A note on “unattached” media: because of how some WordPress themes handle images, unattached doesn’t always mean unused. Download a file before deleting it if you’re not sure.

Better digital habits start today

Like all good habits, the hardest part of a media audit isn’t the cleanup, it’s preventing the same accumulation from happening again.

Start including these habits into your digital workflow:

Check file size before uploading.
Don’t upload that PNG.
Run a batch conversion on folders of new images before upload, especially if you’re dealing with bulk image submissions.
Schedule a media library review quarterly or annually. It doesn’t take long once the initial cleanup is done.

A well-maintained media library isn’t just tidier, it’s faster for your visitors, cheaper to host, and a small but real contribution to running a leaner, greener operation overall.

Emily Rapport

April 1, 2026

Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips, Website Development

What’s worth writing about (and reading)?
Humans tend to favor the things we enjoy and that we have learned to be successful at. If blogging feels like “Ugh, I have to write this,” try reframing it: “I want to document what I know so I can stop explaining it repeatedly.” Moving from obligation to choice will make the work feel less like a burden and more like building something useful that will benefit you (and your readers).
Business blogging that supports your work
The value of genuine expertise has increased in direct proportion to rise of generic content (affectionately termed, “AI slop“). Most informational queries (think “how-to” or compiled “best of” articles) are answered in AI overviews.
You’d do better to focus your efforts on content that AI can’t easily create:
- Answers to questions you’ve been asked. Look through your email. Check your last few client calls. What did people ask? What did you explain? Write that.
- Content based on your experience. Not “10 Tips for Better Time Management” but “Here’s what I learned managing three major projects and a why I’ll never do that again.”
- Your take on industry developments. Not hot takes for the sake of being controversial, but “Here’s how this new regulation affects my clients” or “I’ve been watching this trend for three years, here’s what I’m seeing.” You have context others don’t.
- The stuff no one else is saying. Every industry has conventional wisdom and biases. If you know something that contradicts or offers new perspective on standard advice (and you can back it up with your experience), that’s valuable content.
- Deep dives into specific problems. Better to thoroughly address one specific challenge than superficially cover ten related topics.
Consistency over frequency
How often should you publish on your blog? It depends…
But for the sake of having a goal, let’s say: 1-2 solid posts per month is realistic for most small businesses. That’s enough to build a library of content over time without making blogging your entire job.
What matters more than frequency:
- Consistency over time. Better to publish monthly for two years than weekly for two months before burning out.
- Quality over quantity. One genuinely helpful 1,500-word article beats five rushed 400-word posts that don’t say anything.
- Strategic focus. Writing about topics that support your business goals, not just filling space.
Some months you’ll do more. Some months you’ll skip entirely because you’re busy. Totally acceptable.
Gaps in the content resume: when you stop blogging (and start again)
I stopped blogging in 2018.
Not because I didn’t think it was valuable. I stopped because I’m a company of one and at the time I was running two businesses, a gallery and my web design agency. Finding four hours (my minimum) to write a quality article while managing client work, admin tasks, gallery events, and life stuff was physically impossible.
This fall, I started writing again. And I remembered that I really enjoy writing. For me, it’s an active exploration that deepens my own understanding of a topic.
I accept that publication schedules can be flexible. I’m sharing on LinkedIn and BlueSky (getting a little dopamine hit when a few people “like” or share). I’m not trying to become a influencer (gross, Gen X person here) or build a following. I do want to develop a backlog of articles that support my authority and expertise (and link back to my service pages).
If you’re not a writer: video and audio can be a big advantage
Nearly everyone adds pictures. But a minority are adding contributor quotes and videos. A small percentage add audio or publish podcasts. The less common the element, the more likely it is to correlate with performance. Greater efforts drive greater impact.
Andy Crestodina, “What content works in 2025?“
If talking feels more natural than writing, record yourself. Answer a common client question on video. Explain a concept on audio. Embed the media on your post and include a transcript.
- You sound like yourself. When you’re talking, your authentic voice comes through. No fighting with how to phrase things or what sounds “professional enough.” You just explain it the way you’d explain it to a client.
- It’s (maybe) faster. Recording a 10-minute video or audio explanation takes 10 minutes. Writing a 1,500-word article takes hours. If you edit your videos, there probably won’t be much time savings though.
- It’s highly shareable. Video clips work well on social media. Audio can become podcast episodes. The transcript becomes your blog post. One recording, multiple formats.
Always, always include a transcript. You may be creating awesome video or audio content but if you don’t include a transcript, you are missing a key opportunity and doing an accessibility fail. Search engines can’t watch videos, they need text to understand and index your content. Transcripts make your videos accessible to people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or who prefer reading. Transcripts also help visitors quickly scan for information rather than watching the entire video. Learn more about what media needs a transcript.
Making blogging more manageable (not perfect)
The internet is full of blogging advice that assumes you have a content team, unlimited time, or that “growing your platform” is your primary business goal. Blog posts are supposed to support your business, not become the work itself.
The best advice I can give you is to just start writing (or recording). Don’t get stuck in the analytical mind of comparison and judgment. This is a process and you’ll be reviewing how articles perform over time, so don’t overcomplicate your work. We’re not aiming for perfection.
Perfect is the enemy of good (and done).
Voltaire (mostly)
- Write what you know. Writing 101! Look at questions you’ve answered in calls or meetings this month. Write about those. Follow your own curiosity and dig deeper than the superficial answers.
- Write the way you talk. If you write like a corporate press release on your blog, people will lose interest. Use plain language, keep it relevant to your reader, avoid jargon.
- Repurpose and reuse. One blog post can become an email newsletter, several social media posts, a resource to send prospects, or an answer to forum questions in your industry.
- Batch your writing when possible. Some people write better if they draft three posts in one session, then edit them later. This can be a handy way to block out 1-2 days a month and get all of your writing and scheduling done.
Hit publish, wait for applause…
Crickets.
Even great content doesn’t magically attract readers. Be deliberate about getting it in front of people. If you loathe self-promotion, remember that sharing your content is about sharing your expertise – not trying to “sell” yourself. You’re building your authority and engaging authentically with your community and audience.
- Share it directly with people who need it. When someone asks a question your blog post answers, send them the link. When you see a relevant discussion in a professional group, share it (if it’s helpful, not promotional).
- Email it to your list. If you’re not building an email list, start. Even a small list of people who want to hear from you beats hoping Google sends you traffic someday.
- Link your posts together. Linking is the magic glue of the interwebs. When you write something new, go back and add links from older related posts. This helps readers find more of your content and helps search engines understand what you’ve written about.
- Use social media, but don’t depend on it. Share your posts there, yes. But remember those platforms want to keep people on their platforms, not click away to your website. Social media is for brand visibility and conversation, not traffic (usually) – though it can have some relevance in AI search results.
Reference your own content in other contexts. Speaking at an event? Mention your blog post on that topic. Answering questions in industry forums? Link to your relevant content.
Don’t obsess over analytics
So you’ve started blogging. You’re sharing posts on social media. How do you know when it’s working?
Track the basics in Google Search Console
- Which posts are getting impressions in search
- Which keywords people are using to find you
- Which posts are getting clicks (and which aren’t)
Check Google Search Console maybe once a month. Try not to obsess over this data. Look for patterns. Notice which topics are getting traction. Capitalize on what works and keep experimenting.
Pay attention to direct responses
- Are people mentioning your posts in conversations?
- Has anyone sent you a question that references something you wrote?
- Are prospects coming to calls having already read your content?
- Which posts get engagement (comments, shares, saves)?
- Are people asking follow-up questions?
Qualitative signals matter as much as traffic numbers. On LinkedIn and BlueSky, engagement matters more than views. A post that sparks three meaningful conversations is more valuable than one that gets 1,000 views and no response.
Give it time before judging results
- 3-6 months minimum before you’ll see any significant search patterns
- At least 10-15 posts before you can see patterns in what resonates
- A year before cumulative impact
The metric that matters most: Are you getting more qualified inquiries from people who found you through your content?
This, again, isn’t just about posting any old content – it’s about creating unique and useful content that has the potential to rank and includes a compelling call to action. It’s critical to do keyword research if you are serious about crafting content that will match the intent of those long-tail search queries and result in conversions.
What you won’t see: Overnight success. Viral hits (probably). Thousands of daily visitors (for most small businesses, volume is less important than getting in front of the right people at the right time).
Frequently Asked Questions
Does blogging help small businesses grow?
Yes, but not overnight. Blogging helps you answer common questions, demonstrate expertise, and get found by people searching for your services. Over 6-12 months of consistent publishing, you should see more qualified leads finding you through search and better conversion rates from prospects who’ve read your content first.
What are the best topics for a small business blog?
Case studies from your work. “How we helped [type of client] solve [specific problem]” shows your expertise in action. Change names if needed, but share the specifics.
Behind-the-scenes content. How you approach projects, what your process looks like, the tools you use and why. This humanizes your business and helps prospects understand what working with you would be like.
Opinion pieces grounded in experience. Your perspective on industry trends, based on what you’re seeing with your clients or in your market. This is where your unique value shows up.
Problem-solution posts. “Here’s a challenge my clients face and how I help them address it.” Practical, specific, and demonstrates your expertise without being promotional.
Local or niche-specific content. If you serve a specific geographic area or industry, write about topics relevant to that audience. You won’t compete with national sites, but you don’t need to.
How do I promote my blog if I don’t have a big audience?
Share posts directly with people who need them – send links when someone asks a question your post answers. Build an email list (even a small one). Link your posts together. Share on social media without depending on it for traffic. Reference your content when speaking at events or participating in industry discussions.

Is it better to have a blog or focus on social media for my business?
Both serve different purposes. Your blog is the one place online you control – it builds long-term search visibility and demonstrates expertise. Social media is for conversations and visibility, but platforms want to keep people there, not send them to your site. Use social media to share your blog content, but don’t depend on it as your only marketing channel.

Do I need technical skills to run a business blog?
Basic writing for the formatting knowledge is helpful, but most business blogs need simple technical optimization: clean URLs, compressed images, alt text, and proper heading structure. If you can format a document and upload images, you can create a blog. You can also record video or audio and get it transcribed if writing isn’t your strength.

Can I benefit from blogging without a dedicated marketing team?
Most successful small business blogs are written by the business owner. You already have the expertise – blogging is just documenting what you know and answering questions you’ve already answered dozens of times. Start with what you know, write in your own voice, and publish consistently. You can do it!

I want to create videos but where should I upload them?
YouTube is usually the better choice for most small businesses. It’s free, handles all the technical stuff (encoding, streaming, mobile optimization), and YouTube itself is the second-largest search engine. Videos on YouTube can show up in both YouTube and Google search results, giving you two chances to be found.
Hosting video directly on your site can slow down your pages and require more technical management. For most small businesses, embedding YouTube videos on your blog posts gives you the best of both worlds: your content lives on your site with the transcript, but YouTube handles the video infrastructure.

How do I create a transcript of my audio or video content?
Tools like Descript, Otter.ai, or even YouTube’s auto-captioning can handle transcription. Clean it up a bit (remove the “ums” and false starts), add some paragraph breaks and headings, and you have a blog post.
Rev.com has pretty accurate AI transcription, you can also connect Zoom to Fathom or use it’s AI transcription tool. Google it – there’s tons of options.
Need help developing a content strategy that fits?
Let’s talk about what blogging for your business could look like.
Explore content strategy and copywriting services or reach out:
Schedule a complimentary call
Just start writing
Here’s a starter for your next blog post:
- Pick a question someone asked you last week and answer it.
- Record a five-minute video explaining something you know well.
- Write 500 words about a common problem your clients face.
Send me a link to your article. I’d love to read it!
Need help or have a question? Leave me a comment or send me an email. I’m always happy to discuss content strategy and answer any questions you might have.
Emily Rapport
November 21, 2025
Content Strategy, Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips, User Experience
Write better blog posts: 13 blogging mistakes and how to fix them
If you aren’t a writer, creating blog posts can feel like a chore. And when a task is not something we want to be spending our time on, it’s easy for that task to fall to the wayside.
Maybe you’ve started to use AI writing tools to fill the gap, or you have a marketing team or intern cranking out posts for your website and social media. Still, the content you create isn’t attracting the traffic and conversion results to match the effort invested.
Tell me again why I need to write blog posts?
Blog content can serve your overall marketing strategy by meeting people where they are in their decision-making process.
- Build trust and awareness for your brand
- Reach potential customers searching for solutions to their problems
- Target niche audiences with specific questions and needs, allowing you to compete for more achievable keywords
- Repurposed for social media, your content can be shared across channels, provoke discussion and debate, all of which helps surface your content in both traditional search engines and AI search
Companies that blog regularly generate 67% more leads than those that don’t. But to see these results, your blog posts need more than just regular publishing, they need strategic improvements.
Google and other search engines seek fresh, useful, timely content. Yes, a lot of informational queries are now answered in AI overviews. That’s not necessarily bad – if it satisfies the intent of the search query.
When you position yourself as a subject matter expert, with a thoughtful and unique perspective, dynamic blog content begins to gain traction. “Yes,” you say “but there’s so MUCH content being created every day, how can my post stand out and make it into the top 10 SERPs?”
Avoid common blogging mistakes: “Them’s table stakes”
Technical flaws, generic content, and incompleteness can undermine your credibility and make it harder to appear in search results. I’ll walk you through 13 common blogging mistakes that prevent your content from reaching its full potential.
Ready to implement these fixes? Download my free Blog Post Checklist at the end of this article to keep these 13 improvements handy every time you publish.
Content strategy and planning
1. Random posts with no content strategy
Publishing random blog posts whenever you have time leads to inconsistent results. Without a clear content strategy, your blog becomes a collection of unrelated articles that don’t build on each other or serve your business goals. Having a plan means front-loading some discovery work which, you may argue, you don’t have time to do. But, if you have time to do it wrong … I think you see where I’m going with this.
Your content strategy helps you to maintain clarity of purpose with firm boundaries around what makes sense for your business. Don’t waste time following the lead on trending topics. Find the content gaps in your industry, add your own angle, and offer a unique perspective that ties back to your business and what you do best.
Develop your content strategy:
- Define your target audience and their pain points
- Brainstorm topic clusters around your main services or expertise
- Whittle it down to core topics you can commit to writing about
- Plan content themes for each month or quarter
- Develop a content calendar to maintain consistency – if you can manage 1 post a week, that’s great, but pick a schedule that works for you (be realistic)
- Advanced: Align blog topics with your sales funnel stages
Topic clusters can work particularly well for business blogs and build that E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) signal Google loves. Develop a comprehensive pillar post on a core topic, with supporting posts that dive deeper into specific aspects, shows search engines (and readers) the depth of your expertise.
2. Writing for your business instead of your audience
Many business blogs focus on telling: company news, product updates, and internal achievements. Rather, we should be showing our expertise by crafting content around the topics readers care most about.
As a small business, you are more likely to have direct access to your customers than larger organizations. You have first-hand knowledge of real customers problems and questions. That’s content which can provide unique value to readers in showing (not telling) your understanding of, and solutions to, customers’ real-life challenges.
Plan first. Then write for your audience:
- Think about the questions your customers ask most often
- Research those topics to discover what other published, ranking content exists and what gaps you might be able to explore
- Address specific pain points your audience faces
- Use language your customers use, not industry jargon
- Share insights that help readers succeed
- Focus on benefits to the reader, not features of your business
Before writing any post, ask: “What’s in this for my reader? How does this help them?” If you can’t answer that clearly, reconsider the topic.
3. Skipping keyword research
You might have a fantastic idea that you would love to write about. But great ideas without planning … will disappear like tears in rain. In order to compete, you must consider audience intent (you got this, this is your business!) and the words that real people use to describe their problems.
Keyword research should inform your topic choice, not be pinned on blindly like a donkey tail after the fact. Use free tools like Google Keyword Planner, AnswerThePublic, or Google Trends to find keywords and run your own Google search analysis to discover what people are actually searching for.
Understanding the search volume around your keywords is another aspect to consider. If the keywords you are optimizing for have no traffic, well – they won’t result in any clicks if no one is searching for those terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) doesn’t have to be complicated, but ignoring it is an opportunity lost.
Essential SEO practices for every blog post:
1. Research keywords before writing
2. Include your primary keyword in the page title, first paragraph, and variations throughout the content (be cool, keep it natural)
3. Use descriptive headings (H2, H3) that include related keywords
4. Write compelling meta descriptions (155-160 characters with your keyword and a call to action) – these blurbs can encourage clicks when your post appears in search
5. Add internal links to other relevant posts on your site
6. Include external links to authoritative sources – “be helpful”
7. Optimize images with descriptive filenames and alt text, and size them for web use
Focus on creating content for humans first, then optimize for search engines. Keyword stuffing and other manipulative tactics will hurt your rankings. Learn more about SEO fundamentals from Google’s own documentation.
4. Trying to cover everything in one post
Trying to cover everything in a single blog post often results in surface-level content that doesn’t provide real value. A comprehensive article on a specific, narrow topic is fine – but you want to avoid the generic 101 overview.
Narrow your focus, stand apart from the crowd:
- Choose one specific problem to solve per post
- Break broad topics into a series of related posts
- Target one primary keyword per post
- Provide actionable advice readers can implement immediately
- Link between related posts to create topic clusters
- Approximate length of an article: 1,500 – 2,000 words (more if this is a comprehensive or pillar page)
Instead of a “Complete Guide to Vegetable Gardening,” break it up into separate posts like “When to Plant Tomatoes in Your Region” and “How to Prevent Common Tomato Diseases”.
Tip: Create an editorial calendar around this series of articles and connect it to an email list specific to this topic. You can use these articles to create a drip campaign in email and social channels.
Writing & formatting
5. Formal, dense content distances readers
Using flowery words and complex sentences doesn’t impress readers and may repel the very people you’re trying to attract.
If you make your content easy to read, you aren’t ‘dumbing down’, you are opening up your information to anyone who wants to read it. You are making it accessible.
Sara Winters, “Thoughts on the ‘dumbing down’ argument“
Online readers prefer conversational, easy-to-digest content that feels like it’s written by a real person. Dense paragraphs and complex language make your content harder to read, especially on mobile devices.
Engage readers with conversational content:
- Write like you’re talking to a friend
- Use short paragraphs (2-3 sentences maximum)
- Ask questions to engage readers
- Use contractions and casual language when appropriate
6. “Walls of text” without formatting and structure
Large blocks of text are intimidating and difficult to read, especially on mobile devices. Structural elements (like headings and lists) help readers scan and process information and get to the content they care about more quickly.
Reader-friendly post structure:
- Include headings each new topic and subtopic, approximately every 200-300 words
- Use bullet points and numbered lists
- Add relevant images, charts, or graphics with concise alt text
- Use bold text sparingly to highlight key points
- Include white space between sections
- Consider adding videos or other multimedia when appropriate
Structure helps machines (AI and Google) better understand and serve your content. Why would you want to make it harder for these tools to connect you with your potential audience? Take the time to add meaningful structure to your posts.
7. Treating blog posts like advertisements
Nobody visits your blog to read sales pitches. Readers come for helpful information and solutions to their problems. Blog posts that focus primarily on promoting your products or services will drive readers away.
Let people see you as human. Be real. Ask yourself, Who would you rather see at your door, a friend or a door-to-door salesman?
Bernard Roth, The Achievement Habit
Provide value without being salesy:
- Focus on solving reader problems, not selling solutions
- Share industry insights and best practices
- Provide actionable tips readers can use immediately
- Tell stories and share case studies (without heavy promotion)
- Mention your products naturally when they’re truly relevant
When you do promote your services, try to make it feel natural and helpful rather than a hard sell.
8. Skipping the proofreading and editing process
Writing is editing. Unclear writing, as well as typos and grammatical errors, can undermine your credibility as a trusted expert. Through editing, you’ll connect loose threads and find deeper themes to develop. You can tighten up unclear messaging and maybe even discover a new angle you hadn’t thought of before.
Even after you hit publish, you can always come back and make changes to your web content. Step away from your writing for a day or two, you’ll catch so many things you missed: awkward phrasing, logic gaps, unnecessary repetition – and moments of inspiration that, on reflection, serve only your burgeoning writers ego (guilty!).
Help your inner blogger emerge with an editing workflow:
- Write your first draft, then step away for a few hours (overnight if possible)
- Read your post aloud to catch awkward phrasing
- Use tools like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor for basic grammar and readability
- Check that your main points are clear and well-supported
- Verify all links work and statistics are accurate
- Have someone else review important posts
Investing ONE hour in refining and editing your content shows readers you value their time.
Technical optimization (pre-publish checks)
9. Long, unedited URLs confuse readers and Search Engines
Long, convoluted URLs like “yoursite.com/blog/2024/03/15/this-is-a-really-long-title-about-our-latest-product-announcement-and-why-you-should-care” hurt both search rankings and user experience. And you definitely want to avoid keyword stuffing in URLs.
Search engines prefer concise, descriptive URLs. People are more likely to click on and share short, readable URLs. It’s all about trust and meeting expectations.
Lead with your primary keyword (the main thing people are searching for). In the example below, “marketing strategy” is the primary search term, with “small business” being the qualifier.
Long and confusing: /how-to-choose-the-best-marketing-strategy-for-your-small-business-in-2024
Optimized: /marketing-strategy-small-business/
Removing the date also makes this evergreen content that you can improve and add to over time.
Clean up your URLs and keep them human-readable:
- Keep URLs under 60 characters when possible (3-5 words)
- Include your main keyword
- Remove unnecessary words like “and,” “the,” “of”
- Use hyphens to separate words
- Edit the default URL WordPress creates
- Don’t keyword stuff or create misleading, “clever” URLs
10. Oversized images l o a d i n g . . .
In the digital world, three seconds is an eternity. A single uncompressed image may be several megabytes, causing your blog post to load slowly, even on good internet. “So long mobile users and people on slow networks and older devices…” you whisper to yourself as you upload a 3MB PNG image exported from Canva to your latest post.
Page speed directly impacts both user experience and search rankings. Google considers speed a ranking factor, and users expect pages to load in under three seconds. Many free tools like TinyPNG or built-in WordPress features can automatically optimize your images without noticeable quality loss. My favorite tool is ImageOptim.
Optimize images before you upload them:
- Compress images before uploading (aim for under 100KB when possible)
- Use the more modern and compressed WebP and AVIF formats if available
- If you can’t, use JPG for photos and PNG for solid graphics – using PNG for gradient images will 10X the image size (I’m looking at you and shaking my fist in an agitated manner, Canva!)
- Resize images to the maximum display size needed (most blog content areas are 800-1200px wide – not 4000px)
11. Missing alt text on images hurts accessibility and SEO
Alt text (alternative text) describes an image for people who can’t see it visually. Don’t exclude visitors with visual impairments, people on slower connections, and people using reader mode from fully experiencing your content.
Alt text can also help search engines understand your content. When search engines can’t “see” your images, they also miss important context about your content.
Alternative text should always be used when images convey contextual meaning. This also applies to images posted to your social media channels and used in your newsletter.
How to write effective alt text:
- Describe what’s actually in the image
- Keep it under 125 characters
- Include a relevant keyword IF you can do it naturally, but recognize that this is not the purpose of alt text and you should not use this as a place to stuff keywords
- Don’t start with “image of” or “picture of”
- Skip alt text for images that are purely decorative
Learn more about writing effective alt text from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
12. Missing calls to action leave readers without a next step
A blog post without a CTA is like giving a great presentation, dropping the mic and walking offstage. Your audience may be left in awe, but they are probably not taking that next step to subscribe to your email list or contact you about your service. Obstacles to action generate inaction.
Guide readers toward the next step, whether that’s subscribing to your newsletter, downloading a resource, or contacting your team.
Provide that logical next step:
- “Download our free [relevant resource] to get started”
- Natural mentions like “If you need help with [challenge], here’s how we approach it”
- “Get weekly tips like these delivered to your inbox”
- “See our complete guide to this [topic]”
Need help creating an effective content strategy? See how we can help your business blog reach more customers.
Post-publication: don’t forget to share your work (and make it shareable)
Lucky 13. Publishing without promoting your content
Hitting publish doesn’t mean you’re finished. I know, crafting that great blog content took a lot out of you. But creating the content is only half the battle. If you don’t actively promote your posts, they may never find their intended audience. Content promotion extends your reach and helps drive brand awareness as well as more traffic to your website.
Content promotion strategies:
- Share on your business social media accounts (share snippets from your article, multiple times over several weeks) – if creating a post on LinkedIn, let the first comment be a link to the actual article.
- Include recent posts in your email newsletters
- Engage with industry communities and forums where your audience is
- Reach out to people mentioned in your post
- Repurpose content for different platforms
- Add social sharing buttons to your post to make sharing easy
How do I know when I’ve made it? Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Studies has a lot of great content around marketing strategy and analysis, here’s one on measuring content performance.
I see better blogs in your future…
To recap, do these things:
- Pre-writing research (keyword research, topic validation)
- Create SEO-friendly URLs
- Optimize images
- Write engaging content that speaks to your audience
- Promote your posts
Focus on providing real value to your readers. You may not skyrocket to international acclaim and Google’s coveted Top 10 results overnight, but over the next 3-6 months, ceteris paribus, you might just become noticed as a trusted expert.
Get your free better blog post checklist
Ready to put these fixes into action? Download the Blog Post Checklist – Keep it next to your desk or bookmark it in your browser. Before you hit publish, run through the checklist to catch common blogging mistakes before they go live.

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Images used in this post created by Naila Conita
Emily Rapport
November 7, 2025
AI Search, Content Strategy, Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips, User Experience
Small business SEO: Search engine rankings and how to get them
Search engine optimization (SEO) can feel overwhelming for small businesses. You know you need to do it, but where do you start?
Why is SEO important for small businesses?
When potential customers need what you offer, they search online. If your business doesn’t show up in those search results, you’re invisible to them.
SEO helps small businesses get found by people actively looking for their services. Unlike paid advertising that stops working when your budget runs out, SEO builds long-term visibility. When you rank well for the right searches, you’re there 24/7, capturing customers with commercial intent who are ready to hire someone.
Trust is everything
Appearing in organic search results signals legitimacy. People trust businesses that rank naturally more than they trust ads.
This is why having your own website is essential. You can’t rely on Facebook or social media to represent your business. While social media content may appear in AI search results, it won’t build authority for your business. Your website is the only digital property you control, and it’s what search engines use to understand and rank your expertise.
Not every keyword is worth chasing
The most popular “head” terms are dominated by major corporations and high-authority sites that small businesses simply can’t compete with. The intent around those terms can also be ambiguous. A local search engine marketing strategy can help you turn popular head search terms into achievable ranking goals, better positioned to convert a view into a click. Let’s look at how to find the specific searches you can rank for that bring you the right customers.
Understanding search intent
The secret to optimizing SEO for small businesses is understanding search intent. What does the person typing that search actually want?
Google’s entire business depends on providing the best possible answer to every search query. If people get poor results—low-quality, keyword-stuffed content that doesn’t actually help them—they’ll stop using Google. So Google has gotten very good at understanding what searchers want and matching them with content that genuinely answers their question.
This means your job isn’t to trick Google with keywords. Your job is to create content that is the best fit for what the person searching needs. When you understand their intent and provide the right answer, Google will begin to trust your pages and reward you with better rankings.
Search intent typically falls into these categories:
- Informational intent: The searcher wants to learn something or understand a concept. They might search “what is instructional design” or “how does SEO work.” They’re not ready to hire anyone—they’re gathering information.
- Commercial intent: The searcher is actively looking for a service or product. They might search “instructional design services near me” or “affordable SEO consultant.” These people are ready to make a decision.
- Navigational intent: The searcher wants to find a specific website or page. They know where they want to go.
Your service pages need to match commercial intent. Your blog posts can capture informational searches and guide readers toward your services. Navigational is generally your home page (brand) or an AI result—people likely know where they want to go and just need a link to get there.
Why broad keywords don’t work for small businesses
Let’s say you want to rank for a broad term like “instructional design.” When you Google it, what do you see? Probably an AI definition to start with, then Wikipedia in the top three results. Maybe a university or another major publication after that.
That’s not an accident. Google understands that most people searching this term have informational intent. They want basic information, not a service provider. They want the definition and so the AI result or Wikipedia link make sense. Google gives users what they want (and so should you!).
There’s another layer to how search ranking operates: authority.
The authority challenge
Head keywords are intensely competitive. High-authority sites like Wikipedia, major universities, industry publications, and established corporations dominate these rankings. They’ve earned Google’s trust through years of quality content, thousands of backlinks, and proven expertise.
Your small business website simply isn’t in the same weight class. And that’s okay.
Trying to outrank Wikipedia for “instructional design” is like a local gym challenging a national fitness chain on day one. You’re not going to win, no matter how good your content is.
Building trust through content strategy
What can a small business owner do? Build Google’s trust gradually by pursuing long-tail, specific keyphrases.
When you write the best possible article on “creating accessible e-learning modules for healthcare compliance training,” you’re competing in a much smaller arena. You can actually rank. You can actually help people. And those people are much more likely to become your clients.
Each time you rank well for a specific search, Google notices. You’re proving your expertise in your niche. Google starts to trust you for broader topics related to your specialty.
This is how small businesses compete: not by going head-to-head with giants, but by owning specific corners of expertise that serve real customer needs.
Specific keywords can better match intent
The more specific the search term, the clearer the intent becomes:
- Broad search: “instructional design” (ambiguous, informational intent, high competition)
- Specific search: “instructional design consultant for healthcare training” (commercial intent, lower competition, higher conversion)
When you target more specific keywords (longer keyphrases with five or more words) you attract people who know exactly what they need. They’re closer to hiring someone, and your content matches their intent perfectly. These longer searches also have significantly higher conversion rates because the searcher has already narrowed down their needs.
To recap, when you target specific, long-tail keywords, you:
- Face less competition
- Attract people who are closer to hiring someone
- Match the exact solution searchers need
- Build Google’s trust in your expertise
As you rank for these specific terms, Google sees you as an authority. Your site gains credibility in your niche. Over time, this opens doors to ranking for broader terms, if those broader terms serve your business goals.
Search traffic trends
- 33% of all clicks go to the #1 search result
- 17% of clicks go to the #2 result
- 90% of people never click to page two of results
- The top three results capture most of the traffic
This is why long-tail keywords are so powerful for small businesses. You might not get the massive search volume of broad terms, but ranking #1 for a specific search that perfectly matches your service is far more valuable than ranking on page 3 for a high-volume keyword that brings the wrong audience.
Speak your customers language, and you’ll match their searches
Start with the simplest tool you already have: Google itself.
Search for the terms you want to be found for. Pay close attention to:
- Auto-suggest phrases: What does Google suggest as you type? These are real searches people are making.
- Sites currently ranking: Who’s on page one? Are they high-authority sites like Wikipedia or major publications?
- Ads at the top: Multiple ads often mean high competition and commercial intent.
If you see lots of high-authority results or many ads, that keyword is probably too competitive. Add more words to your search phrase to make it more specific and targeted. For example, instead of “instructional design,” try “instructional design for manufacturing training programs.”
This specificity improves the likelihood you can actually rank.
As you research, ask yourself:
1. What keywords have the best traffic potential that you can realistically rank for?
2. What words do your ideal clients use when they search?
3. What problems are they trying to solve?
The answers won’t be those broad head keywords. They’ll be the specific phrases your target customers actually type.
This is where matching the language people actually use becomes critical and why keyword research is important. You need to understand not just what you call your services, but what your customers call them.
Check Google Search Console to see the actual queries people use to find your content. These real searches reveal the exact words and phrases that bring visitors to your site. Pay attention to the language customers use when they talk to you or ask questions: in emails, phone calls, or consultations. They often use different terminology than industry professionals do, and those are the phrases you should target.
If your customers say “help with employee training videos” but you only optimize for “instructional design services,” you’re missing the connection. Speak their language and you’ll match their searches.
Optimizing your service pages
Your service pages are critical for local search engine marketing. These pages have commercial intent. Your visitors are actively considering hiring someone. Make them actionable and easy to navigate with these essentials:
- Reflect your current expertise. Does each page show what you want to be known for now? Update content that no longer matches your goals.
- Speak your client’s language. Use the exact words and phrases your customers use, not clever marketing copy or internal lingo.
- Show your work. Connect your portfolio or case studies to each service page. People want proof you can deliver.
- Balance information with action. Service page visitors need enough information to make a decision, but they’re here to take the next step. Don’t bury them in details.
- Include clear, compelling calls to action. Make it obvious what to do next. “Schedule a free consultation,” “Get a custom quote,” or “See how we can help” should be easy to find and act on.
- Keep it clean and scannable. Single-column layouts with clear sections work best. Cut the fluff and keep only what serves the searcher’s needs. Use headings, short paragraphs, and white space to guide the eye.
Crafting good content that supports your business goals
Writing content is hard. It’s often difficult to step back and objectively write about your own services while keeping your content accessible, using the right keywords, and making sure you speak to real customer pain points. Writing for the web is different than writing a business document or a brochure. It requires a different approach to structure, language, and purpose.
AI tools can help with this process, but they don’t provide a one-stop solution. Now, instead of a blank page being the problem, I am seeing weak, generic content that doesn’t demonstrate real expertise. I also see highly over-optimized content using keywords suggested by AI tools, not research.
Don’t make bad content like this:
- Generic, AI-generated content with no editing. If you’re publishing AI content without adding your unique perspective, experience, and voice, it’s just noise. Search engines are getting better at identifying generic content.
- Keyword-stuffed content that doesn’t sound human. Some businesses use AI to generate “optimized” content crammed with keywords, but it reads terribly and doesn’t help anyone. Google sees through this and will penalize you and possibly un-index your page.
- Content that reads like a Mad Libs book. If your service page could describe any company in your industry, it’s not going to rank well. Specificity and authentic expertise are always going to beat marketing fluff.
Instead, spend time crafting content that people want to read:
- Tighten up existing content to be more concise and focused on one clear topic per page.
- Pull detailed points into separate blog posts that target long-tail keywords. Each post should dive deep into one specific aspect of your service area.
- Link strategically. Connect your blog posts back to your main service pages. When you write about a specific topic, link to the service page where visitors can take action. This helps readers find what they need and tells Google which pages are most important on your site.
- Create internal pathways. Related blog posts should link to each other, building a web of connected content that keeps visitors engaged and demonstrates your expertise across related topics.
- Focus each page on one search intent. Don’t try to answer every question on every page. Match the content to what that specific person wants to accomplish.
Interested in how I can help you to optimize existing content or work with you develop a high-performing website? Reach out to request a complimentary call.
SEO is an ongoing process
Rankings change constantly. Search trends evolve. AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are changing how people find information.
Small businesses are better able to adapt to constant change, to shift strategy and service focus to meet new demands. Do this for your search engine marketing too.
- Make a habit of reviewing your keyword performance. Use Google Search Console to understand: What’s working now? What’s changed since last quarter?
- Update content as your services evolve. Your expertise grows, make sure your website reflects it.
- Monitor what your competitors rank for. The competitive landscape shifts. Stay aware of who’s ranking for your target terms.
- Adapt to how your customers’ search habits change. This includes traditional Google searches and emerging AI search tools.
- Double down on what AI can’t replicate. AI can spew generic content, but it can’t duplicate your unique experience, case studies, and proven results. Quality content that demonstrates real expertise (and uses good page structure like headings, lists and FAQ content) matters.
Finding your niche and optimizing for the right search terms isn’t a one-time task. It’s an ongoing process that pays off when you stay committed to serving your specific audience and understanding what matters most to them.
Your next steps
1. Audit your current service pages—do they reflect what you want to be known for?
2. Research the specific phrases your ideal clients actually search
3. Target long-tail keywords you can realistically rank for
4. Create content that matches your searcher’s intent
5. Look for internal linking opportunities
6. Track your progress and adjust as needed!
Remember, small business SEO isn’t about ranking #1 for the most popular keywords. It’s about being the best answer for the right searches, the ones that bring you ideal clients who are ready to work with you.
Have a question about SEO for your small business? Contact me.
Emily Rapport
October 12, 2025
AI Search, Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips
Building a Coaching Website That Attracts the Right Clients
Building a successful coaching or consulting practice starts with your expertise. Your website can serve as a helpful resource that introduces your work, builds your brand, and signals your authority and expertise. A thoughtful online presence is key to helping potential clients understand your value and approach.
Why your coaching website is your most important marketing tool
More professionals are offering coaching and consulting services than ever before. Trends driving this growth include the rise of online coaching, increased demand for personal and professional development, and the diversification of coaching niches. All of which means potential clients often have many options when seeking help. A professional (not Facebook) online presence gives your prospect a way to learn about your approach and determine if you might be a good fit for their needs.
Your own website gives you complete control over how you present your work and expertise. Unlike social media platforms where your content must compete against opaque algorithms, your website is a finely tuned environment where you own the content, the presentation, and the experience. This builds stronger credibility than scattered posts across platforms you don’t control.
Most importantly, your website will appear in search results when potential clients are looking for solutions, and establish the trust and authority critical to building your business.
Essential elements of a successful coaching website
Clear messaging about your coaching niche
The biggest misstep coaches (and any new business venture) can make is trying to appeal to everyone. Ironically, it’s tough to follow our own good advice. You may coach your clients to focus on a specific audience or outcome, but when it comes to your own messaging, think narrowing down feels risky. “I help people reach their potential” or “I coach anyone who wants to improve their life” sounds inclusive but actually attracts no one. Potential clients need to feel that you address their unique concerns and they need to understand the specific benefits they will gain from working with you.
When in doubt, be more specific. Consider something like “I help overwhelmed executives develop leadership skills and work-life balance” or “I work with women entrepreneurs launching their first business.” Honing in on a more specific group and challenge helps the right people recognize themselves in your messaging while naturally filtering out those who aren’t a good fit.
Creating content that shows your coaching expertise
Content creation allows you to showcase your coaching philosophy and give potential clients insight into how you work. When people can see examples of your thinking and approach to common challenges, they begin to trust you and can imagine what it would be like to work with you as their coach.
Focus on addressing questions that come up frequently with your coaching clients. Share insights from your coaching experience (while maintaining confidentiality), frameworks you use in your coaching sessions, and your perspective on challenges specific to your coaching niche.
Don’t worry about giving away your “secrets” through content. Sharing your methodology helps to build trust. People want to understand your coaching approach before committing to work with you. Regular content creation also positions you as a thought leader in your coaching specialty.
How professional coaching website design can help build credibility
When someone is considering hiring a coach, they’re making a significant personal and financial investment. A professional, well-organized coaching website helps build the confidence they need to take that step.
Position yourself as an expert by highlighting your real-world experience that’s relevant to your coaching niche. Did you lead teams before becoming a leadership coach? Did you successfully launch a business before coaching entrepreneurs? Did you navigate your own career transition before helping others do the same? This lived experience often provides more credibility than formal certifications alone.
This includes having a website that functions well across all devices, using consistent branding that reflects your coaching personality, and maintaining professional communication throughout your site. Details like working contact forms, clear navigation, and professional photography contribute to an overall impression of reliability and attention to detail. All qualities potential coaching clients want to see in their coach!
Essential coaching website tips
Making the right first impression on your homepage
Your consulting website homepage should immediately communicate what type of coach or consultant you are and who you can help. A clear headline that addresses your ideal coaching client’s primary challenge or goal is a great way to start. For example, “Leadership Coaching for Overwhelmed Executives” or “Life Coaching for Career Transitions.” Follow this with a brief explanation of your coaching approach and clear next steps for interested visitors.
Consider including client success stories, coaching certifications, or results in a visible area of your homepage. This social proof helps visitors feel more confident about exploring your coaching services further. A brief video introduction that allows potential clients to get a sense of your coaching personality and communication style can also be highly effective and set you apart from other consultants in your niche.
Building trust and connection on your About page
In any service-based industry, you are the product. People want to understand your background, coaching credentials, and what led you to coaching before considering your services.
Consider framing your content development with the question every potential consulting client has: “Can this coach help me?” Share your experience with clients similar to them and how your background relates to their challenges.
Frame service offerings within a bigger picture
Some coaching websites list features instead of benefits: “Weekly 60-minute sessions,” “Email support between sessions,” “Personalized action plans.” While these details matter, potential clients care more about what they’ll achieve through coaching. You’re selling your expertise and an aspirational goal, not a productized “session.”
Changing your framing to a value-based approach also helps you focus pricing around the transformation you provide rather than hourly rates or fixed deliverables, positioning your coaching as an investment in results rather than a commodity service.
Should I show my coaching rates?
You may find that you struggle with whether to display coaching prices. Price is likely a top consideration when choosing to work with a coach or consultant. Clear pricing answers one of the main initial questions clients have, improving likelihood of conversion and speeding up the decision-making process.
On the other hand, if your services vary widely by client or project scope, displaying a fixed price can set wrong expectations and create more confusion or pushback. Offering price ranges or starting prices can help orient visitors without overcommitting to fixed fees. In general, I recommend experimenting with pricing. The great things about web pages is they aren’t print. So, test out some pricing structures and see what works best.
Just ask: coaching testimonials and client results
Don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials. People genuinely want to help others who have made a positive impact on their lives. If you feel awkward, consider these approaches for getting coaching testimonials:
- During your regular check-ins when clients share wins, “That’s awesome! Can I share that result?”
- Send a follow-up email 2-4 weeks after coaching ends
- Request specific feedback: “What was most valuable?” “What changed for you?”
- Make it easy by providing a simple form or asking just a few specific questions
- You can also include a request for feedback on your email signature or in your newsletter footer
Satisfied coaching clients are a tremendous resource and can be your biggest advocates. Plus, authentic testimonials with specific details and outcomes create valuable content that search engines recognize as trustworthy, helping your coaching website rank better for relevant searches.
Consulting articles and resources help establish your expertise
A regularly updated coaching blog serves multiple purposes: it improves your website’s search engine visibility, provides value to potential clients, and demonstrates your ongoing expertise in your coaching niche.
- Create content that answers questions or objections that you frequently encounter in your work.
- Write about real concerns – this can help you develop authority around long-tail keywords that support your core services.
- Consider offering free resources with a prompt to subscribe to a newsletter. These can provide immediate value while giving interested visitors a sample of your coaching approach and a reason to stay connected with your work.
Coaching contact & client intake
It may seem obvious but these interactions are often overlooked. Your contact page should make it simple for potential coaching clients to reach out while also beginning the client qualification process.
If you offer free discovery calls (which many coaches do), explain what potential clients can expect from these conversations. Be clear about the purpose: is it to determine mutual fit, provide immediate value, or both? Help them prepare by suggesting they think about their goals and what they hope to achieve through coaching with you.
Need help with your coaching website?
Whether you are looking for a redesign, starting from scratch, or in need of a few updates – I can help. Request a complimentary call:
Request a free consult
View my websites for coaches and consultants.
SEO 101 for coaches & consultants
Understanding how people search for coaching services
Effective SEO for coaches starts with understanding how your ideal clients search for coaching and consulting services. This boils down to search intent. People searching for problems expect helpful content and solutions, while those searching for specific services expect to find providers and pricing. Websites that match their content to how their audience actually searches will rank better and attract more qualified visitors.
Are people searching for “business coach” or “life coach”? Or, are they approaching their search from a problem-solution mindset? Research the language your potential coaching clients use to describe their challenges.
- “How to get promoted at work” (executive coaching)
- “Starting a business while working full time” (entrepreneurship coaching)
- “Confidence coaching for women” (life coaching)
- “Leadership training for new managers” (leadership coaching)
- “Career change at 50” (career coaching)
Make sure to include long-tail keywords that reflect specific challenges in your content as well as broad coaching terms. “Leadership coaching for introverted managers” is a long-tail, specific key phrase that can help support and inform queries around a head term like “leadership coach.” Over time, this approach builds topical authority and helps you rank for both specific problems and general coaching searches.
The web is made of links. Internal linking between related pages helps search engines understand your content structure and connects visitors to relevant, useful content. Linking to external, authoritative websites is also good (when you are providing more useful, relevant information). Don’t forget to link your articles back to their related service pages!
Creating coaching content that ranks in search results (yes, you can use AI)
With the help of AI, we no longer have to stare at a blank page tapping our pencil and wondering what to write about. AI is so good at producing thousands of words! And, Google has said that it will reward high-quality content, however it is produced, so it’s not cheating…
Although AI can be a helpful tool, it’s important to understand it’s limitations as well as its strengths.
Search engines reward website content that consistently provides unique, useful, relevant content to a matched search query. AI can help you generate ideas and drafts but it is even more important to craft your own unique voice, to push your LLM of choice to be critical, provide clarification, and to question its eager assumptions. Prompting AI is a bit like “programming in prose“. In the end, LLMs just make patterns of words. They aren’t really connecting ideas and they don’t understand or remember what they’ve written (fingers crossed / yet).
That’s still your job.
Thought Leadership Content
Thought leadership content demonstrates your expertise by sharing unique perspectives on industry challenges and emerging opportunities. AI systems and search engines increasingly recognize and reward original insights, personal experiences, and professional commentary that can’t be replicated by automated content generation.
Share your take on industry developments, challenge conventional wisdom when you have evidence from your coaching practice, and ask better questions that help others think differently. This type of authentic, experience-based content builds authority and trust that generic information cannot match.
Building your coaching website: ready to start?
Start by establishing a clear messaging about your coaching niche, draft essential pages and services that reflects your consulting style.
- Focus on one area at a time rather than trying to perfect everything simultaneously. Is it good enough? Hit publish.
- Remember that your coaching website should evolve with your practice. What works for a new coach building credibility differs from what works for an established coach expanding into group programs or online courses.
- The investment you make in your coaching website today will help you build the coaching or consulting business that supports your life in the future, rather than letting the ups and downs of business dictate what comes next.
A strategic, professional coaching website doesn’t just showcase your services. It becomes your most effective business development tool, attracting your ideal clients and positioning you as the clear choice when people are ready to invest in personal and professional development.
Reach out to me to discuss any questions you have or comment below!
Emily Rapport
September 1, 2025
Content Strategy, Conversion Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips, User Experience
The Future of SEO in an AI World (Don’t Panic)
You’ve just finished tweaking your meta tags, optimizing your H1s, and crafting some valuable long-form content. You hit “publish,” sit back with your coffee, and move on to the next project.
A few weeks later, you’re reviewing your monthly performance report and notice something strange: your traffic looks fine, but your clicks have dropped significantly.
Welcome to the new frontier of search, where AI writes the summaries, answers the questions, and sometimes doesn’t even need to send users to your site.
So what does that mean for your SEO strategy? Let’s walk through what’s actually changing and what you can do to stay visible when helpful robots are running the show.
AI and Traditional Search
AI is reshaping how search engines interpret and serve your content. Instead of simply pointing people to your site, both search engines and AI platforms are increasingly providing direct answer to queries—often using content from your site to do it.
Google blends generative AI into how it understands user search intent, ranks results, and serves features like AI Overviews. Meanwhile, standalone AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are becoming alternative ways people search, sometimes skipping traditional search engines entirely.
What’s happening:
1. Fewer clicks, even when you rank #1. “Zero-click” searches are now common, but they often represent a better user experience. When someone gets the answer they need immediately, that’s still a touchpoint with your brand—especially if AI draws that answer from your site.
2. Traditional SEO fundamentals matter more, not less. Generative AI models rely on structured, well-formatted content to understand and surface accurate answers. Semantic HTML, clear heading hierarchies, and schema markup help AI understand the relationships between your topics and key information.
3. The audience of “humans and Google” is expanded to include “humans and machines.” AI summarizes, interprets, and repackages your content, so the clearer and more valuable it is, the more likely it is to be surfaced in AI-generated results.
Local businesses have a major advantage
Here’s where smaller, local businesses have an advantage: while big publishers might dominate AI summaries for broad topics like “best chocolate chip cookie recipes,” they can’t compete with you on local, transactional searches.
Local and transactional searches still drive action
When someone searches “emergency plumber in [your town],” “custom birthday cake [your city],” or “therapist accepting new patients near me,” they need to take action locally. AI can provide the basics, but it can’t complete transactions or bookings (yet).
Your Google Business Profile is your secret weapon
A complete and up-to-date Google Business Profile has more impact on local discovery than trying to rank nationally for broad topics. Make sure your address, photos, hours, services, links, and reviews are current and comprehensive.
Hyper-local content creates competitive advantages
Is there a local event that is related to your business? Or perhaps a local cause or organization that can be tied in to an About page? For example, you could highlight local community connections through partnerships, board memberships, volunteer experiences, or other aspects of local life that are meaningful to you.
If applicable to your business, content like “Best venues for small weddings in [your county]” or “What to expect from physical therapy after a car accident” can leverage your insider knowledge and local expertise in ways that big publishers can’t match.
The key is avoiding what I call the “vanity SEO trap”—chasing broad, high-volume keywords that won’t drive local business. Optimize for what people in your area are actually searching for: services, needs, and location-based solutions.
Get cited: structure content that AI will love
The most actionable strategy for any business now is creating content that AI can easily pull from and attribute. This requires some attention to how you format and present information.
1. Lead with direct answers. Don’t bury key information in long paragraphs. Start sections with clear, concise responses: “Yes, we offer evening appointments” or “Our deep cleaning service takes 3-4 hours.” When AI encounters this structure, it can easily extract and cite your answer.
2. Embrace structured formats. Think FAQs, how-to guides, numbered lists, and tables. These formats help both humans and AI quickly find and use your information. For example, a therapist might create content answering “What should I expect in my first therapy session?” with clear, step-by-step information.
3. Create comprehensive topic clusters. AI understands topics and relationships, not just keywords. Build one comprehensive guide supported by specific pages—like a “Guide to Therapy Services” pillar page with dedicated pages for different conditions or treatments. Link strategically between related content to show AI the depth of your expertise.
4. Use schema markup and structured data. This helps AI understand your content context, especially for local businesses. Rich snippets displaying hours, pricing, and reviews can appear directly in search results even when users don’t click through to your site.
Google Business Profile strategy
Your Google Business Profile isn’t just a listing, it’s your primary tool for appearing in AI overviews, voice search results, and local pack listings where most local discovery happens.
Post regularly with purpose
Aim for 2-3 posts per week that answer common customer questions, share service updates, or highlight your expertise. These posts appear directly in search results and map listings, giving you visibility even in zero-click scenarios.
Optimize for mobile and “near me” searches
Over 80% of local searches happen on mobile, and your Business Profile is often the first thing potential customers see. Complete profiles with current information significantly improve your visibility in these critical searches.
Use the Q&A section strategically
Encourage satisfied customers to ask and answer questions about your services. You can also seed this section with common questions you receive, providing clear answers that AI can surface in search results.
Building authority that AI recognizes
AI doesn’t just regurgitate content—it makes quality judgments about which sources deserve to be cited. Your goal is becoming one of the chosen few by demonstrating expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Display credentials prominently
For professional services, clearly show licenses, certifications, years of experience, and professional affiliations. AI systems are increasingly sophisticated at evaluating these trust signals.
Create content that demonstrates real experience
Share case studies (with appropriate privacy protections), lessons learned, and behind-the-scenes insights that only someone with hands-on experience could provide. Generic advice that sounds like it could be written by AI won’t stand out.
Keep content fresh and updated
AI tools favor recently updated pages. Regular updates signal that your information is current and reliable.
In an AI-driven search world, being the most helpful, accurate, and locally relevant source wins…
Get the free Local SEO Action Checklist.
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Measuring success in the AI era
Traditional metrics like organic traffic and click-through rates don’t tell the complete story anymore. Focus on these indicators instead:
- Brand mention tracking. Monitor when your business appears in AI-generated summaries or featured snippets, even without clicks. Tools like Google Alerts can help track brand mentions across the web.
- Local engagement metrics. Phone calls, direction requests, and form submissions from your Google Business Profile often matter more than website visits for local businesses.
- “Near me” search visibility. Track your rankings for location-based searches in your service area. These searches typically have higher commercial intent.
- Question-based keyword performance. Monitor how you rank for queries that start with “how,” “what,” “where,” and “when” related to your services, as these are prime targets for AI summaries.
Don’t be discouraged, your human expertise is more valuable than ever
The future of SEO isn’t about outsmarting algorithms, it’s about showcasing your unique knowledge and experience in ways that both people and AI can easily understand and share.
Your website, content, and local expertise matters. Success now means being the most helpful, authoritative voice in your field and location. So, grab a towel, go forth and make your content clear, helpful, and true to your business.
Questions about implementing these strategies on your website? I help local businesses like you create websites that speak to your audience and perform well in today’s search landscape. Reach out for a free consultation – I’d love to help you get more qualified leads for your business.
Emily Rapport
June 27, 2025
AI Search, Content Strategy, Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips
Conversion Rate Optimization for Therapy Practices vs. Fast SEO Fixes
If your therapy website only converts 2-3% of visitors into client inquiries, the solution isn’t more expensive Google Ads or chasing “therapist near me¹” keywords. It’s conversion rate optimization (CRO)—turning more of your existing website visitors into actual clients. This approach provides measurable results without constantly increasing your marketing budget.
Download the CRO Checklist
Stop chasing traffic at any cost
Most therapy practice owners fall into the same trap: thinking more visitors automatically equals more business. This leads to constantly increasing Google Ads budgets or hiring SEO agencies promising “10x more website traffic.”
But, if your website converts poorly, more traffic just amplifies your problem. You’re paying more money for the same conversion rate.
Top-performing therapy websites convert 15-25% of visitors into inquiries. Small, strategic improvements to your existing site can dramatically increase conversions without spending another dollar on traffic.
A sustainable approach focuses on maximizing the value of visitors you already have. This means optimizing your intake process, improving trust signals, and creating clear pathways for potential clients to take action.
Note: Email marketing for healthcare providers significantly outperforms other channels—achieving an 11.4% conversion rate² compared to just 4% from paid search and 5% from social media marketing.
3 Trust-building tips critical for therapy practices
Mental health clients face unique barriers—anxiety about seeking help, concerns about stigma, and fear about confidentiality. Your website must address these concerns before focusing on conversions.
1. Establish professional credibility
- Staff bios with photos: Show education, certifications, and specializations with relaxed, approachable headshots
- Credentials prominently displayed: License numbers, education, professional associations
- HIPAA-compliant contact forms instead of email addresses
- Clear service descriptions for specific approaches and areas of specialization
2. Trust signals & social proof
- Professional associations: APA, state licensing boards, specialty certifications
- Security badges: HTTPS:// website address, HIPAA compliance, secure forms, privacy policy, option to disallow tracking
- Google reviews integration: Display star ratings and recent feedback – respond to reviews, especially any negative ones
3. Address mental health stigma directly
- Empathetic language: Avoid clinical jargon, use warm, understanding tone
- Normalize seeking help: “Therapy is a valuable tool for anyone navigating life’s challenges”
- Emphasize confidentiality: Include prominent privacy statements and non-judgmental messaging
Conversions in mental health marketing aren’t just about sales. Mental health clients often face barriers like anxiety or fear about asking for help, so your website becomes the first place to establish a relationship based on acceptance and understanding.
See my work: I’ve been helping therapy and holistic healthcare practice owners with their websites since 2009.
Content readability: a cornerstone of conversion
Readability directly impacts your conversion rate—and the data proves it. Pages written at a 5th to 7th-grade reading level achieve a 10.8% median conversion rate, while complex language significantly reduces conversions. In fact, as the reading level increases, the median conversion rate drops exponentially. At the 10th to 12th-grade level, the conversion rate drops by a whopping 55.6%.
Simple content fixes that boost conversions
Replace clinical jargon with everyday language—swap “anxiety disorder” for “feeling anxious or worried.” Keep sentences under 20 words and use active voice. Structure content with emotional benefits in headlines like “Feel better starting today” rather than clinical descriptions.
Use warm, action-oriented language
- “We’re here to help” vs. “We provide therapeutic interventions”
- “Schedule your first session” vs. “Initiate therapeutic consultation”
- “You” and “we” instead of “patients” or “clients”
It’s not too simple, it’s more clear
People seeking mental health support are often anxious, overwhelmed, or in crisis. Dense, clinical language creates barriers when they need clarity.
This isn’t oversimplifying—it’s meeting people where they are. Plain language helps search engines understand your content³ and benefits all readers, especially those under stress.
Design pages that help anxious visitors take action
Contact & scheduling optimization
- Multiple contact methods: Phone, secure contact forms, online scheduling
- One-click scheduling: Integrate calendar booking systems
- Specific response promise or automated follow-up
Service pages that convert
- Problem-focused pages: “Teen anxiety therapy,” “Couples counseling”
- Clear outcomes: What will clients achieve through therapy?
- Process explanation: What to expect in first session, therapy approach
- Insurance information: Accepted plans, payment options, sliding scale
Strategic call-to-action (CTA) placement
- Primary CTA: “Schedule Free Consultation” (reduces commitment anxiety)
- Secondary CTA: “Learn More About Our Approach”
- Emergency resources: Crisis resources for immediate needs
- Multiple CTA placement: Header, middle of content, footer
Mobile optimization for crisis
Mobile optimization is critical for therapy practices since more than 60% of all Google searches now happen on mobile devices. Mental health searches often occur during moments of crisis or high anxiety when immediate help is needed, increasing the need for speed.
- Load in under 3 seconds: Anxiety increases with wait time
- Large click-to-call buttons: Make phone contact obvious and easy
- Simplified forms: Minimize fields, use dropdowns for service selection
- Clear visual hierarchy: Visitors need to know where they are and how to get help
People will scroll⁴, but they need clear signals about where they are on the page and easy ways to convert at multiple points in their journey. Structure your pages with clear visual hierarchy and place multiple contact opportunities throughout—phone numbers in the header, contact forms mid-page, and scheduling links in the footer—so visitors can easily reach out whenever they’re ready to take action.
Apply psychological principles to reduce barriers
1. Reduce decision anxiety
- Clear service categories: Organize by issue (anxiety, depression, relationships)
- Therapist matching: Help visitors choose the right fit
- No-pressure language: “Explore whether therapy is right for you”
2. Build emotional connection
- Empathetic headlines: “You don’t have to face this alone”
- Warm imagery: Peaceful, calming visuals
- Personal stories, therapist profiles
- Hope-focused messaging: Recovery and growth are possible
3. Address common concerns
- FAQ section: Cost, insurance, confidentiality, what to expect
- First session explanation: Reduce unknown anxiety
- Telehealth options: Convenience and comfort of home
- Flexible scheduling: Evening and weekend availability
Measuring what matters
Testing and clear measurement are the only reliable ways to know if your optimization efforts actually work. Without proper tracking, you’re making changes in the dark and potentially hurting conversion rates while thinking you’re improving them. Before testing anything, establish some baseline metrics.
Essential baseline metrics:
- Form submissions: Contact forms and appointment requests
- Phone calls: Use call tracking to see which pages generate calls
- Email inquiries: Monitor secure contact methods
- Actual appointments: Track from inquiry to scheduled session
Performance factors that impact conversions:
- Page speed: Fast loading is crucial for anxious visitors
- Image optimization: Compress therapy office photos and staff headshots
- Mobile testing: Use real devices, not just desktop browser testing
Test and measure, and let data—not assumptions—guide your optimization decisions.
Ready to stop chasing quick fixes and start building sustainable practice growth?
Get the free Therapy Practice CRO Checklist and start improving your website conversion rates today.
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Building long-term results through conversion optimization
The temptation to chase quick SEO wins—buying multiple domains, generating AI content, or constantly increasing ad spend—is understandable when you need clients now.
But sustainable practice growth requires a different approach: treat your website as a dynamic presence that grows stronger through consistent improvement, testing, and refinement.
While competitors exhaust budgets chasing the latest marketing trick, practices that invest in conversion optimization develop lasting competitive advantages. Focus your energy on quality content, authentic client relationships, and systematic testing.
This approach may seem slower initially, but it creates compound returns that outpace any quick fix.
If you have questions about your website content strategy, SEO, or are wondering where to start – reach out and ask. I’m happy to schedule a complimentary call or run a free website audit on your site to identify key improvements that are worth your time!
1. “Therapist Near Me” Keywords: Mobile-First Reality – The phrase “therapist near me” is primarily a mobile-focused search query driven by location-based intent rather than content optimization. When someone searches “therapist near me,” Google almost always returns local results with Google Business Profile listings. Success with these searches depends heavily on local SEO factors like Google My Business optimization, location schema markup, and consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) citations across directories—not on cramming “therapist near me” into your website content. With over 60% of Google searches now coming from mobile devices and 46% of all searches having local intent, these queries are won through local authority signals and proximity to the searcher, not keyword density on your pages. ↩︎
2. Source: Unbounce 2025 CRM Report ↩︎
3. Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension, NN/g, by Jacob Nielson ↩︎
4. UX Matters, “Debunking the myth of the fold” ↩︎
Emily Rapport
June 26, 2025
Conversion Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips, User Experience
Google Search Console ‘Errors’ Explained
You’re feeling productive and ready to analyze your website performance on Google Search Console. You click on the Pages report and suddenly feel like your website is having a total meltdown…
Take a deep breath. You haven’t broken the internet.
Most of those scary-looking “errors” in your Google Search Console Indexing report aren’t actually errors at all. They’re just Google being chatty about what it’s up to behind the scenes. Let’s decode this digital drama together.
What’s This Indexing Business All About?
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let’s define our terms. Indexing is basically Google’s way of deciding which pages deserve a spot in its massive digital filing cabinet. Just because you built a page doesn’t mean Google automatically files it away for searchers to find.
Think of Google like that friend who’s impossibly organized—they won’t keep everything you give them. If your content is thin, repetitive, or just plain unhelpful, Google might politely decline to add it to their collection. And honestly? That’s probably doing you a favor.
Quick Reality Check: Crawling ≠ Indexing

Want to know more? Check out the “How Search Works” series on YouTube!
Here’s where people often get confused:
- Crawling = Google’s robot (Googlebot) stops by to check out your page
- Indexing = Google decides your page is worth keeping in search results
Google discovers your content through links—both from other sites and within your own. I often talk about “content relationships” when working with clients. How content is connected helps Google, and people, understand the context and relevance of your content.
You can help Google crawl your site by submitting an XML sitemap through Google Search Console or using the URL Inspection tool for individual pages. A sitemap tells search engines which pages and files you think are important on your site, and provides valuable information about these files like when they were last updated. It’s important to remember that, as mere mortals laying honey and nectar before the Great Googlebot, submitting a sitemap is only a hint. It doesn’t guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use it for crawling URLs on the site.
Google might also visit your page but choose not to index it. That doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong—it might mean you’ve done something right by not cluttering the web with duplicate content. For Google to actually prioritize your content, make sure your site isn’t blocked by robots.txt, loads properly, and offers useful, original content that’s well-connected through internal links.
Google’s Crawl Budget (Don’t Panic If You’re Small)
Crawl budget sounds super technical and important, but here’s the TL;DR version: if your site has fewer than 500 pages, you probably don’t need to worry about this. Google’s pretty good at crawling smaller sites efficiently.
If you do have a massive site, then yes, crawl budget matters. Think of it like Google’s daily energy allowance for your website. If you’re serving up thousands of thin, duplicate, or pointless pages, you’re basically making Google waste its time on junk instead of your good stuff.
Decoding Those “Scary” Status Messages
Let’s break down what Google is actually telling you (and why most of it isn’t cause for alarm):
“Crawled – currently not indexed”
What Google’s saying: “I looked at this page, but meh, I’m not filing it away right now.”
Why this happens:
- Your content is thinner than a grocery store receipt
- It’s too similar to other pages (Google’s already got this covered)
- No other pages on your site link to it (Google thinks, “If you don’t care about it, why should I?”)
What to do:
- Make the content more helpful and unique
- Add some internal links to show it matters
- Give it time—Google can be slow to warm up to new content
Possible red herring: This might not even be a problem.
“Discovered – currently not indexed”
Translation: “I know this page exists, but I haven’t gotten around to checking it out yet.”
This is like Google saying, “It’s on my to-do list!” Common reasons:
- Your server was having a bad day when Google tried to visit
- Google’s prioritizing other stuff on your site
- Your site’s internal linking could use some work
The fix: Make sure your important pages are easy to find and your server isn’t taking coffee breaks when Googlebot comes knocking.
“Alternate page with proper canonical tag”
Google’s message: “I see what you did there with that canonical tag—nice work!”
This is actually Google giving you a high-five. You told Google which version of similar pages to prefer, and it listened. You might see this for:
- Product pages with tracking parameters (yoursite.com/product?utm_source=email)
- Print versions of pages
- Mobile vs. desktop versions
Action required: Absolutely none. You’re doing great!
“404 (Not found)”
The dreaded 404. But wait—is it actually dreadful?
Sometimes yes: If you have typos in your sitemap or broken internal links, fix those.
Sometimes no: If these are genuinely deleted pages that you’re not bringing back, just let them be. Don’t redirect every dead page to your homepage—that’s like telling someone asking for directions to the bakery, “Just go to the town square, you’ll figure it out from there.”
“Duplicate without user-selected canonical”
What happened: Google found similar pages and picked a winner for itself, since you didn’t specify which one you preferred.
This is like letting Google reorganize your closet without asking your opinion first. It might work out fine, but wouldn’t you rather be in control?
The solution: Add canonical tags to tell Google which version you prefer.
“Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”
Translation: “You specifically told me not to index this, so I didn’t.”
This isn’t an error—it’s Google following your instructions! You might use noindex on:
- Thank you pages (nobody’s searching for those)
- Login pages
- Duplicate content you can’t get rid of but don’t want in search results
Just double-check you didn’t accidentally noindex something important.
What Actually Counts as a Real Problem?
Real errors usually involve:
- Important pages that should be indexed but aren’t due to technical issues
- Server problems (5xx errors)
- Accidentally blocking valuable content with robots.txt
- Broken URLs cluttering up your sitemap
Most other statuses? They’re just Google being transparent about its process.
The Right Way to Get Your Content Noticed by Google
Before we get to the action plan, let’s talk about how to properly submit your content to Google. There are good ways and… well, let’s just say there are ways that make SEO experts cringe.
Sitemaps: Your Website’s Table of Contents
Think of your XML sitemap as a helpful table of contents you hand to Google. It’s not a guarantee that everything will get indexed, but it’s like saying, “Hey Google, here are the pages I think are worth your time.”
How to do sitemaps right:
- Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console (Index > Sitemaps)
- Keep it updated automatically (most CMS platforms can do this)
- Only include URLs you actually want indexed—no thank-you pages, no admin areas
- Make sure every URL in your sitemap returns a 200 status code (not 404s or redirects)
Pro tip: If you’re using WordPress, plugins like Yoast or RankMath generate sitemaps automatically. Just don’t forget to submit the sitemap URL to Google Search Console!
The IndexNow Temptation (And Why You Should Probably Skip It)
You might have seen plugins promising instant indexing through something called IndexNow. IndexNow is a protocol that lets you ping search engines immediately when you publish or update content.
Sounds amazing, right? Well, just because we can, it doesn’t mean we should.
Reality check:
- Google doesn’t officially support IndexNow (that’s more of a Bing thing)
- These plugins often create more noise than signal
- Google prefers discovering content naturally through crawling and sitemaps
- Some plugins spam search engines with every tiny change, which can actually hurt your crawl budget
A better indexing strategy:
1. Internal links: Link to new pages from high-authority pages on your site.
2. XML sitemap: Keep it clean—no 404s, redirects, or noindex pages.
3. Use structured data: Help Google understand your content faster.
4. Fetch as Google (judiciously): Use the URL Inspection tool in GSC to submit truly important updates.
5. Content quality: Pages that are useful, unique, and well-linked get indexed faster. No plugin can fix weak content.
Exception: If you’re publishing time-sensitive news content, the manual “Request Indexing” feature in Google Search Console can be helpful. Just use it sparingly—Google gives you a limited number of requests.
Your Search Health Action Plan
1. Focus on what matters: Are your main service and product pages indexed? If yes, you’re probably fine.
2. Use the URL Inspection Tool: This gives you real-time info on individual pages and is way less overwhelming than staring at the full report.
3. Keep your sitemap clean: Only include URLs you actually want indexed. Think quality, not quantity.
4. Look for trends, not daily drama: Check your indexing report monthly, not daily. Google’s index fluctuates, and obsessing over every change will drive you bonkers.
5. Remember the golden rule: Google will always exclude some pages. That’s not a bug—it’s a feature.
The Bottom Line
Google Search Console isn’t trying to give you an anxiety attack—it’s just showing you what’s happening behind the curtain. The key is understanding that “not indexed” doesn’t automatically mean “broken.”
Let Google index your content on its own terms. Everything else? Don’t let it keep you up at night. Focus instead on creating valuable pages and a crawl-friendly site structure—that’s the real (long term) win.
Need some help with your website?
Need help cleaning up your Google Search Console issues or optimizing your site for better search performance? Let’s chat about how to get your most important pages the attention they deserve.
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Emily Rapport
May 27, 2025
Search Engine Optimization, Tool-Tips, Website Development

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