You have a blog, but no enquiries come from it
A typical company blog looks like this: “We were at the trade fair”, “We’ve expanded our fleet”, “Five tips for a beautiful garden”. You publish for a year, traffic stays at a few dozen people a month, and not a single enquiry has come from it. Then someone says in a meeting that the blog doesn’t work, and the writing stops altogether.
But the blog failed for one specific reason: the topics were born inside the company. They answered the question “what do we want to say”, not the question “what are people dealing with just before they hire someone”. Those are two entirely different sets.
Nobody searches for company news except people who already know the company — and they will send an enquiry with or without a blog. General “five tips” advice competes with big magazines and brings in readers who want a free tip, not a supplier. Neither route leads to a job.
A blog that sells rests on a different foundation: every article answers a question a paying customer asks, and moves them a step closer to ordering. This piece is about how to choose such topics — and how to tell whether an article plays any role in selling at all.
A topic is good when somebody is asking for it
You won’t invent the safest topics. You’ll find them where demand already exists. For a small company, three sources are the most accessible.
Search Console. If the site has been running for a while, the performance report shows the actual queries it appears for. Look for two situations: queries where you get impressions but have no page that properly answers them — and queries where the homepage shows up instead of a specific answer. Both are a finished brief for an article: the demand exists, the site simply has nothing to offer it yet.
E-mails and phone calls. Pull the last twenty to thirty enquiries and write out the questions in them. Not rephrased into marketing language — verbatim. When a customer writes “the boiler still rumbles after bleeding, is it worth repairing at all”, that’s a topic complete with a headline. Questions that repeat across three enquiries a month are also being asked every month by dozens of people who never wrote to you and are looking for the answer in a search engine.
Autocomplete. Start typing a customer’s question into a search engine and watch what autocomplete adds — and which related searches appear below the results. You won’t find search volumes there, but something more valuable: the exact wording people use to ask. A headline written in the language of the enquiry then beats a headline written in the language of the company.
A complete overview of sources, including sales objections and questions from forms, is covered in the article How to spot the topics customers are really searching for. This piece is about the next step: what to do with the list you’ve gathered so that it turns into a blog that sells — and not just a longer stack of ideas.
An informational query and a buying query are not the same league
The first sorting pass on the list: for each topic, ask yourself what situation a person is in when they type it.
An informational query is asked by someone who wants to understand a problem. They are not choosing a supplier yet — they may not even know they will need one. A buying query is asked by someone already dealing with price, timing, location or the choice of a specific company. You recognise it by words like “price”, “how much does it cost”, “by when”, “reviews”, by a town name, or by comparisons between options.
| Field | Informational query | Buying query |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | why the boiler rumbles after bleeding | boiler replacement price Brno |
| Accounting | what an invoice must contain | bookkeeping for a limited company price |
| IT services | how long a server disk lasts | managing a company network of up to 20 computers |
The difference isn’t in the quality of the topic, but in what you can expect from the article. A buying query brings in fewer people, but people close to ordering — an enquiry can come from such an article during the first visit. An informational query reaches a wider audience earlier in the decision; it rarely brings an enquiry straight away, but it builds the first contact with the brand and material you can link to.
The most valuable topics tend to be the ones sitting between the two categories. The query “repair or replace a boiler” sounds informational, but it is asked by someone who will order one of the two within weeks. The same goes for “what to prepare when handing over the bookkeeping” — formally a question about procedure, in practice a signal that a supplier is being chosen right now. You recognise such queries by the fact that a decision involving money sits behind them, even though no “price” appears in them.
In practice, that dictates the order. A small site with no established visibility starts with topics closer to the money: price and what drives it, choosing a supplier, comparing options, what to prepare before ordering, when not to put a problem off. Add informational topics as a second wave, once they have somewhere to lead. A blog made only of informational articles is the most expensive form of public education: you educate the market, and the customer can then order from anyone.
Every article plays one of three roles in selling
The path from a search to an enquiry has three steps: the article has to bring the person in, the content has to convince them, and the page has to offer them an action. When any step is missing, the chain breaks — and it is precisely by these three steps that you tell whether a topic was chosen well.
| Step | What delivers it | How you know it’s missing |
|---|---|---|
| Bring in | The topic matches a real query, the headline speaks the customer’s language | The article gets no impressions or visits from search |
| Convince | The text shows the company understands the problem: causes, options, risks, limits | People arrive, but leave straight away and go nowhere |
| Prompt action | A clear next step: service, price list, contact in the right place | Whole articles get read, but not a single enquiry comes |
The first step is decided when you choose the topic — no amount of writing can rescue it afterwards. A topic nobody is asking for means an article with no readers, however well it is written.
The second step is the craft of the text: naming the problem in the customer’s words, explaining the causes, honestly describing the options including the one where they don’t need your service. That honesty is exactly what convinces — admit your limits and people believe the rest too. How to build such a text step by step is described in the model of an article that brings enquiries.
The third step is the easiest to fix, and yet it is the one missing most often.
Choose the next step along with the topic, not while writing
For each topic in your pipeline, write one sentence: “After reading, the reader moves on to …” — a specific service page, price list, or an article that pushes them closer to a decision. If you can’t write that sentence, the topic isn’t bad, but it doesn’t belong on the company blog yet. Either it lacks a service page to lead to, or it isn’t close enough to your business.
This simple rule changes your selection more than anything else. Suddenly you see that “the history of our company” leads nowhere, while “how to tell a boiler needs replacing, not repairing” leads straight to the boiler replacement page. And you see the gaps in the other direction too: topics that would sell but have no service on the site to point at.
The link itself then belongs where the reader first thinks “I’m not going to sort this out myself” — not just in a box under the article that most people never reach. Exactly where to place the links and with what wording is covered in the article Internal links: how to connect articles and service pages.
Cadence: blogging is an endurance discipline
A new article first has to get into the index, then it gradually gains impressions and positions, and only after that clicks, moves to the service and enquiries. That takes weeks to months, and the speed depends on your field, the competition and the state of the site — nobody honest will promise you a specific date, and anyone who does is promising something they don’t control.
Two practical rules follow from this.
Choose a rhythm you can sustain. One or two well-chosen articles a month are usually more realistic for a small company than a weekly pace — and after a year they add up to fifteen to twenty-five answers to real customer questions. A burst of enthusiasm in January and silence until summer gives neither the search engine nor you a chance to learn what works.
Evaluate continuously, but patiently. The first signals — new queries and impressions in Search Console — will show up before the first phone call. They tell you whether the topics are aimed right, and you use them to top up and reshuffle the pipeline every month. Exactly what to track, from impressions all the way to jobs, is described in the article How to tell whether content is paying off.
Most company blogs don’t die of bad writing. They die because after six weeks with no visible result, somebody decides it doesn’t work — precisely at the point when the first articles are only starting to show up.
Where to start this week
The whole procedure fits into one afternoon and one spreadsheet:
- Pull the last 20–30 enquiries from your e-mail and write out the questions, verbatim.
- Add the questions your salesperson or technician hears over and over on the phone.
- If you have Search Console, add the queries the site appears for without a proper answer.
- Check the wording in autocomplete and note down the phrasing people use to ask.
- Mark each topic as informational or buying.
- Write the sentence “after reading, the reader moves on to …” for each — and drop the ones that don’t have it.
- Sort them by closeness to the money and publish at a rhythm you can keep for six months.
And if you don’t have the capacity for topic selection and regular writing — which is the normal state of a small company, not a failure — this is exactly the work taken over by content creation and management: from a topic pipeline built out of your real enquiries, through the writing, to internal links and monthly evaluation. The blog then sells not because you publish often, but because every article has a reason to exist.
