Spearmint Copy

Category: Advice

  • “We need to do a blog this week” is not a content strategy

    “We need to do a blog this week” is not a content strategy

    These words will trigger something in anyone that’s worked in marketing. 

    There might be an overall marketing calendar, there might even be a content calendar with these things planned out. 

    But there’s a constant nagging feeling that it’s a waste of time. Is anyone going to read this?

    In my experience, this is how most businesses still approach new website content. 

    I’ve audited around thirty sites so far this year, and more than 90% of them suffer the same fate. It’s a shame because the positive intent is there. New content, site looks current, business feels relevant. Quite often brands will publish something ‘just to look as if the business is still going’. I sort of understand that sentiment. But it’s misplaced. Someone senior asked for it. Someone junior gets landed with the writing. It’s all a bit of an afterthought.

    There are millions of blogs out there, and most of them are a waste of time

    7.5 million1

    Blog posts published every single day

    4 hours2

    Avg. resource required for a business to create a blog post

    These stats by the way, are before the AI slop era. I’d expect those to be rookie numbers in 2026 and beyond, as more people continue to post absolute drivel. Just like LinkedIn.

    It’s problematic because 96.6% of all web pages get zero traffic from Google3. 

    If you got as far as measuring performance of your blog and saw that well, there was none. You’re not alone. The issue is near-universal. And the outcome — businesses say ‘it doesn’t work’ and then give up. Or even worse, lower the quality bar and continue to just blast out even-less appetising content. I’m looking at you, ChatGPT… Volume has increased exponentially overnight, strategy, sadly, hasn’t.

    In 2026, we need less, better content, not more drivel.

    Some business owners might see this and worry — if all this content is basically, invisible, ’why should we be spending time and money creating content then?

    I’d reframe that thinking and say that if you can create something valuable, that’s actually worth reading, you’re going to set yourself apart from nearly every business out there.

    Nobody asked the only question that really matters

    “What do our customers actually want to read?”

    OK, some businesses might brainstorm this and come up with some good ideas. An excellent team might even ask the sales department what the most commonly asked queries they receive is. Bravo to you guys.

    But the problem isn’t the content that’s being produced, it’s that it doesn’t align with customers search intent. It’s the difference between:

    “Let’s half-arse a blog on [insert inane topic that no one but the MD cares about]”

    and

    “Let’s look at what customers want to read about — proven by data”

    Again, this isn’t an isolated problem — fewer than half (47%4) of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy — and B2B is where content marketing arguably matters most. Content without direction typically isn’t worth creating.

    The real cost of directionless content creation

    For every blog post written that takes the team the best part of a day, and receives 3–4 clicks when you post it on LinkedIn, that could have been something useful that:

    • Answered the questions your customers are already searching for
    • Built trust with potential buyers before they ever contact you
    • Ranked for terms your competitors are already gathering market share from
    • Moved people closer to a purchase decision at every stage of the funnel
    • Worked for you for years, long after you hit publish
    • Turned one piece of research into months of compounding traffic
    • Given your sales team something worth sending to a warm lead

    Are your blogging efforts a waste of time? A checklist

    If you’ve got more than a couple of these, it might be worth understanding what’s going on:

    • Are you publishing often but none of them are driving any traffic?
    • Posts don’t have target keywords?
    • Posts are written when someone has time, not as a priority
    • Topics are chosen by ego, not using data
    • Nobody is even reporting on blog performance metrics
    • The blog exists because the web development team said you should have one
    • You’ve published multiple posts which feel as though they’re basically the same
    • The most recent post is dated during COVID
    • ‘The person that writes the blogs’ has left and now it’s no one’s responsibility
    • You’re writing for your industry, your chums, or your peers — not your customer
    • Content sounds like a stream of press releases

    You don’t need to do more, you need to do it better

    For some reason, business owners tend to be sceptical here. Perhaps it’s the addiction to ‘instant ROI’ channels like paid search.

    If you’ve been posting consistently, building out a content calendar, and getting familiar with your CMS, you’re getting there. What’s missing (for most brands, anyway) is strategic. As it usually is, it’s the important bit.

    Blog content strategy can range from super simple, to super complicated. It depends what type of resource you can throw at it, how well it is likely to work as a channel in your niche, how commoditised your product is, and how search engines reward content around the specific query. 

    Minimum viable strategy

    • A target keyword, for example ‘resin vs epoxy flooring’

    More effort, better results

    • Target keyword
    • Search intent (what the reader actually wants)
    • Competitor analysis (what’s already ranking and why)
    • Content format (listicle, guide, comparison, etc.)
    • People Also Ask / related searches
    • FAQs
    • Internal linking opportunities
    • CTA aligned to funnel stage
    • Word count benchmarked against ranking pages
    • Heading structure mapped to search intent
    • Semantic keywords and related terms to include
    • Featured snippet opportunity (is there one to target?)
    • Existing content to update or consolidate first
    • Where it sits in the content calendar
    • Who it’s written for (persona/stage)
    • How it connects to a product or service page
    • At either end of the spectrum, you can see results.
    • When did you last check the performance of your blog content?

    Your team can do the first one for sure, and that’s a great start. For the later, you might need my help.

    Inspiration to get you writing, or something like that.

    Companies with a documented content strategy see 33% higher ROI5

    The sheer amount of content out there, demonstrates that companies know that this can work. They just often are misaligned in terms of effort and strategy.

    Businesses blogging consistently with a plan see 13x more positive ROI6. The strategy isn’t just a nice to have, it should guide every decision, and will determine whether your blog section earns attention, or burns through your resources.

    Curious about how blogs can drive performance in the real world?

    Case study: What I did in financial services to get the attention of global banks
    Case study: Using blogs to support your most commercial pages and keywords
    Case study: Using your teams’ expertise to help with blog creation

    Traffic from search to a single section of a hobby site (not even a commercial site), compounding over three years

    If this sounds exactly like your blog strategy (or lack of)… 

    You are not alone. Most of your competitors are wasting their content budget too, hence the goal is wide open for you. The opportunity is to cut through the noise, build relationships with potential customers, and create content that gives them value. If you want to find out where your blog is falling short…

    I’ll happily give you a free assessment to tell you whether it’s up to scratch or not

    Start with a free audit

    I’ll quickly run through your site and give you the ammunition to say that it needs help, you need to be producing *something*, or actually, to say hey we’re doing OK (but we could use a little guidance). Book a free 30-minute call and I’ll assess how much work needs to be done.

    Book a free consultation call
    1. https://www.internetlivestats.com/blog-posts-written-today/ ↩︎
    2. https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-survey/ ↩︎
    3. https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/ ↩︎
    4. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/research/ ↩︎
    5. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/research/ ↩︎
    6. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics ↩︎

  • Why most websites don’t generate a single lead

    Why most websites don’t generate a single lead

    Or, why thinking of your website like a brochure is an outdated and tired concept.

    There is so, so much money spent on websites by businesses. Even in a world where today you ‘can vibe-code one in like 93 seconds, bro1‘, most of this budget is spent on how the site looks, not what it actually does. And they are not cheap marketing expenditures:

    Almost half of UK SMEs report spending between £2,500 and £10,000 on their websites2.

    Especially when you consider that the average lifespan of these sites is less than two and a half years3. If there’s one thing that business owners, and sadly, sometimes marketing leaders, love, it’s a new website build.

    The trouble is:

    The brief is ‘we need a new website‘. Not ‘we need more leads‘.

    The new site arrives (late). It looks amazing. It’s got a branded corporate video as the header (of course). An AI chatbot (yawn). But it doesn’t bring any more leads than the last site did. It might even bring in fewer.

    It’s not an uncommon problem, in fact,

    96.6% of websites receive zero traffic from Google Search4

    When you consider the capital expenditure that goes on these sites, it’s a bit depressing.

    This is a ridiculously common issue and it’s been the same for twenty years. The site is never bad — it’s just that performance is an afterthought. But, and I bang my head against a wall on a frequent basis on this one — the website should drive the performance. That’s the whole point.

    OK, what is a ‘brochure site’?

    No beef towards web agencies, but they love selling these. They’re templated, they require the least amount of work, and the process is more about visual identity than performance. It’s their bread and butter work. You’ll spend more time picking colours, making it pop, adding yet another logo, tweaking a homepage slider (sigh), and images of the HQ than deciding what the page actually says about your business.

    Think about which of those things you need your customers to care most about.

    Brochure sites commonly have:

    ☑️ Fewer than ten pages
    ☑️ A homepage that either does nothing or tries to pack in absolutely everything
    ☑️ Service pages that describe what you do, not why anyone should care
    ☑️ No common customer questions being addressed on key pages
    ☑️ No thought to customer journey beyond home → service → contact
    ☑️ No measurement framework in place to even qualify the engagement on the siteNone of your teams expertise on the page, it’s all locked away in their heads
    ☑️ A blog that hasn’t been touched since it was populated with a ‘new site’ post
    ☑️ CTAs that just link to the contact page

    ❌ Absolutely zero inbound leads being driven to them

    These sites are built as if they were a PDF brochure. They’re for the business, not for the customer.

    This isn’t a web agency problem

    Web agencies build great websites. They’re teams of designers, creatives, and developers, and their job is the look, the feel, the responsiveness of the build. They’re not content strategists, nor should they be. Occasionally, an agency will have the resource to manage both. They’re rare though.

    The disconnect is between what the business owner asks for and what a website should do. The agency was tasked with ‘making it pop’. Too many people were involved in the project, so the site gets designed by committee. And not one of those people considered content strategy, search visibility, lead quality, or content design.

    Someone might have shouted ‘it needs to be fast’. Great, it’s fast. But was anyone benchmarking lead quantity before and after the launch? Probably not.

    And the cost of doing nothing just went up

    Therein lies the problem, Search is changing — and it is changing incredibly quickly. With AI Overviews, Claude, Perplexity et al, more and more people are getting answers without clicking through to a website at all. If your content is thin or generic, AI crawlers have nothing to work with. You don’t get cited, you don’t get surfaced.

    1.9x

    Websites updated regularly are 1.9x more likely to appear in AI answers5

    55%

    Businesses that blog get 55% more traffic than those that don’t6

    84%

    Of sites are considered dormant — receiving no new content7

    Standing out in a sea of AI-generated sameness requires content that’s actually worth indexing. The businesses with clear, well-structured, genuinely useful content on their sites are the ones being pulled into AI answers, and the ones that customers take the time to engage with. The ones with five thin pages and an abandoned blog? Not so much.

    Or, even worse for you and your customers — your CFO said ‘let’s just get ChatGPT to write it’. Quelle horreur.

    Great website design is not an inbound lead strategy.

    — me, 2026

    What actually works

    The good news: if your site looks great, you’ve already got solid foundations. The design, the brand, the infrastructure — that’s done. What’s missing is the content strategy to make it represent your brand, and speak to your customers.

    This, unsurprisingly, is what will make your website start driving leads for your business.

    That means building pages around what your customers are actually searching for. It means service pages that target real intent, answer real common contentions and questions, and give your site something meaningful to rank for.

    And blogs should exist to drive traffic. Not just posts about your new hires and awards you’ve won — though, those are pretty great too. Keyword strategy, search intent, structure, internal links — with a little thought, a dead blog can easily turn into a top-of-funnel acquisition channel.

    Businesses have buckets of useful information contained within the heads of their staff. It needs to come out on the page. If you don’t outwardly say that you offer a service on your site, how are customers meant to know — never mind ChatGPT?

    Getting a content strategist involved during the scoping process — or even after launch — is more cost-effective than carrying on with a site that looks the part but doesn’t deliver. It saves time, and it means those worries about traffic can be turned into traffic opportunities.

    What this looks like in practice

    A service-based business came to me with a site that ticked every brochure-site box: five pages, a homepage that tried to do everything, and service pages that described what they did without once mentioning what their customers were searching for. Within six months of adding intent-led content and a properly structured blog, their organic traffic had become their primary source of inbound leads — ahead of paid search, referrals, and social combined.

    When you start from zero, it can sound difficult. But the above example is not exceptional at all. It’s what happens when the content matches what people are actually looking for.

    Don’t get stuck in the cycle of a new site every few years to fix an inbound lead problem.

    Start with a free audit

    Your site’s already there and it looks ace.

    To hit your leads target this year, the site just needs the content strategy behind it. This is what I do every day. If any of this sounds familiar, book a free 30-minute call and I’ll assess how much work needs to be done.

    Book a free consultation call
    1. Some AI bro on LinkedIn, obviously ↩︎
    2. https://www.dotgo.uk/lp-web-design/how-much-does-a-website-cost ↩︎
    3. https://huemor.rocks/blog/how-often-should-you-redesign-a-website/ ↩︎
    4. https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/ ↩︎
    5. https://www.searchable.com/blog/ai-visibility-tracking ↩︎
    6. https://offers.hubspot.com/lessons-from-marketing-stats ↩︎
    7. https://www.convergine.com/blog/must-know-website-statistics-in-2025-trends-insights-and-what-they-mean-for-you/ ↩︎