Should you start a blog for SEO? The measured answer

Everyone says content marketing. You have limited hours and want to know where they go.

The measurement

On this site, 75 blog pages produced 2.32% of all traffic. The tool pages produced essentially everything else. Same author, same period, same promotion, same domain.

The reason is structural, not quality

A blog post about a task sends the reader elsewhere to do the task. A page that does the task is where the task gets done. The post is a signpost and the tool is the destination, and search rewards destinations.

When a blog does earn its place

Original research nobody else has. A technical write-up only you could write. One objection handled properly. What does not work is publishing regularly about your category because a calendar said to.

The comparison on one site's data

75 blog posts produced 2.32% of total clicks at a 0.80% click-through rate. The tool pages, far fewer of them, ran at 3.56%. Same site, same domain authority, same author, same window. The difference is not writing quality. It is that a tool answers a query by doing the thing, and an article answers it by describing the thing.

When a blog does work

When the post contains something that cannot be reproduced: your data, your failure, your measurements. Those posts get linked and they rank, because there is exactly one of them. The posts that fail are the ones that restate what is already on page one, and that describes the overwhelming majority of what gets published, including most of the 75 posts here.

Measured, not asserted

Blog pages here click at 0.80% against 3.56% for tool pages. 75 posts, 2.32% of traffic.

Free tool for this: Search Console Analyzer. No account, nothing uploaded.

Where this goes deeper

Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 28 and Chapter 9 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.