A quiet blog is the normal case, not a sign that you did something wrong. If you want to know how to get more traffic to a business blog, don’t start by writing more of the same. Start by asking whether each post answers something a customer would type, and whether anyone knows it exists.
In a 2023 study, Ahrefs found that 96.55% of the pages in its index got zero traffic from Google. That covers every kind of page, not only business blogs, and we haven’t found a newer study that answers the question as directly. Its three reasons are worth keeping in mind. Nobody searches for the topic, no other site links to the page, or the page doesn’t match what the searcher wanted.
Why most company blogs stay quiet
Three habits cause most of it. The posts are about the business, when customers search about their own problem. The posts are written once and never told to anyone. And the blog gets three posts in January, then silence until summer.
Even professionals struggle with this. In Orbit Media’s 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers, 14% said their blog delivers strong results, the lowest share in the survey’s history. These are people who do this for a living, and the figure is their own opinion of their own results.
So don’t judge the blog by the monthly total alone. Judge each post by the question it answers. A post titled “Spring update” was never going to be found. A post titled “Why is my air conditioner running but not cooling?” could be. For the wider question of whether a blog deserves the effort, see is having a blog good for SEO.
Five ways to get more people reading
None of these needs a bigger budget. All of them need a post worth reading, which means the first one comes first.
Way 1: Write the question your customers ask on the phone
Google’s SEO Starter Guide tells you to think about the words someone might search to find your content. For a local business, those words often include a place. Use your customer’s wording in the title and name the towns you serve where it reads naturally.
Say you run a septic company in Easton. A post called “How often should a septic tank be pumped?” is something you answer every week, and you can answer it better than a national website can. It is useful to exactly the people who might call.
Then be patient, because a new post can take weeks before you can tell whether it helped. The same guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months. This is one part of the wider work on our local SEO page.
Way 2: Make sure Google can find the post
Google’s guide suggests typing site: followed by your web address into Google. If your pages show up, they’re in the index. If a post is missing months after publishing, something on the site may be in the way.
The guide also says Google primarily finds pages through links from pages it already knows. A post nothing links to is hard to discover. Link it from the service page it relates to, and link back from the post. That costs ten minutes per post, and most owners skip it.
Way 3: Email it to people who already know you
Your past customers are the easiest readers you’ll ever have. A short note that says “here’s what to check on your heating system before the first cold week” is useful to them, and it brings them back to your site.
Google’s guide suggests the same thing, with the audience’s permission, and warns that you can overdo promoting your site. One email a month is plenty for most small businesses. Our article on running email marketing for a small business covers the setup.
Way 4: Share it once, with a real photo
Publishing a post tells nobody. Share the main point in a sentence or two, add a photo from a real job, and link to the full post. A good post can be shared again when its season returns.
Photos from your own work beat stock images, and Orbit’s survey found that the more visual the content, the more likely marketers were to report that it performs. A picture of the corroded fitting you replaced explains more than a paragraph. If keeping up the posting is the hard part, our social media management service can take it on.
Way 5: Share readers with a neighbor
In the Orbit survey, working with outside experts and influencers was the single best predictor of success. Marketers who did it beat the benchmark by 2.6 times. That finding comes from marketers, and the local version is our reading of it.
Picture a garden center in Chalfont and a lawn care owner who writes about preparing beds for fall. The garden center might happily share the post, or add its own advice on plants. Ask who already serves your customers before or after you do. Send them something worth passing along, and offer to share theirs in return.
Count readers who matter
More visitors sounds like the goal. But which visitors? If a thermostat post gets read across the country, the report looks better and none of those readers can hire you. For a local business, the readers worth having live in your service area and have the problem you fix.
Traffic is a signal, not the result. What we’d want to know is whether readers go on to look at a service page, call or fill in a form, where tracking is available. That needs your side: which inquiries mentioned something they read, and which turned into work. Nobody controls where a post will appear or how many readers it brings. Email and sharing can bring readers sooner, but only as many as your list and followers allow.
Check one post this week
Pick your best post, the one that answers a real customer question. Search site: plus your web address and see whether it appears, then confirm your service page links to it. That takes about fifteen minutes and costs nothing. If it’s missing or unlinked, you’ve found a problem before spending a dollar.
Show us the blog and tell us what you want it to do for the business. We’ll look at what’s there and tell you what we’d change and why. Your first consultation is free. You can send us a message or call (215) 368-8900.