{"id":29219,"date":"2026-05-29T14:54:03","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T19:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/?p=29219"},"modified":"2026-05-29T14:57:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T19:57:37","slug":"what-to-write-about-when-you-run-a-small-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/what-to-write-about-when-you-run-a-small-business\/","title":{"rendered":"What to write about when you run a small business"},"content":{"rendered":"

A small business owner has been persuaded that content marketing is worth doing. They sit down, open a blank page, and stop. They know they should write something useful. They have no idea what.<\/p>\n

This is the moment most content marketing efforts die — not in the writing, but before it, at the question of what to write about. This article is about that question. It sets out where the topics for a small business’s content genuinely come from, and how an owner facing a blank page can reliably fill it with subjects worth writing about.<\/p>\n

A note on sources is in order. Peer-reviewed research is cited by author and year and listed at the end; and any claim resting on the common practice of the field is identified as practitioner consensus.<\/p>\n

The blank page is the real obstacle<\/h2>\n

It is worth recognising, first, that the blank page is a genuine obstacle and not a trivial one — because a business that treats it as trivial tends to be defeated by it.<\/p>\n

The content marketing pillar in this series established that a business should produce genuinely useful content, steadily, over time. That advice is sound, but it leaves a gap exactly where a business most needs help: it says to write useful things without saying what those things are. An owner who accepts the advice and then cannot answer the what is, in practice, no further forward.<\/p>\n

The blank page defeats content marketing efforts in two ways. Sometimes it stops them before they start: the owner cannot think of a subject and so never begins. More often it corrupts them: the owner, under pressure to publish something, writes about whatever comes easily — and what comes easily is usually the wrong thing, as the next section explains.<\/p>\n

So the question of what to write about is not a minor, downstream detail of content marketing. It is the point at which content marketing most often fails, and getting it right is much of getting content marketing right. The rest of this article is a method for getting it right.<\/p>\n

It is worth saying that the difficulty is not a sign the business is unsuited to content marketing. Almost every business owner faces the blank page, including those who go on to do content marketing well. The blank page is a normal, expected obstacle with a reliable solution — not a verdict on whether a business has anything worth saying.<\/p>\n

The wrong instinct: writing about yourself<\/h2>\n

When a business owner faces the blank page and reaches for whatever comes easily, what comes easily is almost always the business itself — and that instinct, though natural, is the central mistake.<\/p>\n

The content this instinct produces is recognisable. It is news about the business: a new hire, an anniversary, an award, a refurbishment. It is announcements: a new service, a change of hours. It is, at bottom, content about the business, for the business, from the business’s own point of view.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that almost no one outside the business wants to read it. A prospective customer searching for help with a problem is not looking for a business’s anniversary news; they are looking for help with their problem. Content about the business answers a question — “what is new with this company” — that its prospective customers are simply not asking.<\/p>\n

The instinct is natural because the business is what the owner knows best and finds easiest to talk about. But ease of writing is the wrong test. The right test, as the next section sets out, is not what the business finds comfortable to say but what its customers genuinely want to know — and those are usually very different things.<\/p>\n

It is worth being fair to the small exception. There is a narrow place for content about the business — an honest, plain account of who the business is and what it offers, of the kind a customer genuinely consults when deciding. That is legitimate and useful. What the wrong instinct produces is different: not the customer-facing account a customer wants, but the stream of internal news a customer does not.<\/p>\n

Why writing about yourself feels safe<\/h2>\n

It is worth understanding why the wrong instinct is so strong, because a pull this strong is resisted more easily once it is named.<\/p>\n

Writing about the business feels safe, first, because it requires no research. The owner already knows the business’s news, its history, its offerings; writing about them asks nothing the owner does not already have to hand. Writing about a customer’s genuine question, by contrast, may require thinking carefully about what the customer actually wants — which is real work.<\/p>\n

It feels safe, second, because it feels in the business’s control. The business’s own story is the business’s to tell; there is no risk of getting a customer’s question wrong, no exposure in addressing something the owner is less sure of. Self-focused content stays on familiar, comfortable ground.<\/p>\n

And it feels safe, third, because it resembles what businesses have long done — the announcements, the company news, the about-us tone that fills so much business communication. The wrong instinct is partly just imitation of what other businesses visibly do. Recognising these three pulls — no research, full control, familiar imitation — is what allows a business to notice the instinct and set it aside, because none of the three has anything to do with whether a customer wants to read the result.<\/p>\n

The principle: write about what your customers want to know<\/h2>\n

The principle that replaces the wrong instinct is simple to state and changes everything: a business should write about what its customers want to know, not about itself.<\/p>\n

This follows directly from what content marketing is. Content works, the pillar article argued, by being genuinely useful to a real reader — and content is useful only when it addresses something that reader genuinely wants. The subject of useful content is therefore always, in some form, a customer’s genuine question, problem, or decision. The customer, not the business, supplies the topics.<\/p>\n

This reframes the blank page entirely. The owner staring at it has been asking the wrong question — “what do I want to say about my business” — which has no good answer. The right question is “what do my customers genuinely want to know” — and that question, as the rest of this article shows, has many good answers, more than a small business could ever exhaust.<\/p>\n

The shift is also liberating in a way worth noticing. An owner who thinks they must generate topics out of their own imagination faces a genuinely hard creative task. An owner who understands that the topics come from customers faces a much easier one: not invention, but listening. The topics already exist, in the questions customers are already asking; the work is to notice them.<\/p>\n

The principle also quietly resolves a worry many owners hold — that they are not natural writers and have nothing interesting to say. The worry assumes content must be invented and made interesting. It need not be. If the topics are genuine customer questions and the answers are what the business genuinely knows, the content is useful whether or not it is clever. Usefulness, not flair, is what the principle asks for.<\/p>\n

Where a small business’s topics come from<\/h2>\n

If customers supply the topics, it helps to see where, across the customer’s relationship with a business, those topics arise. The figure below maps them onto the customer’s journey.<\/p>\n

\n\n \n \n <\/path>\n <\/marker>\n <\/defs>\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n Before they know<\/text>\n they need you<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n While they are<\/text>\n choosing<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n After they have<\/text>\n bought<\/text>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/rect>\n topics that arise<\/text>\n what the problem is<\/text>\n is this normal<\/text>\n what causes it<\/text>\n what my options are<\/text>\n can I fix it myself<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n topics that arise<\/text>\n how to choose well<\/text>\n what to look for<\/text>\n how options compare<\/text>\n what it should cost<\/text>\n what to ask a provider<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n topics that arise<\/text>\n how to get the most<\/text>\n how to maintain it<\/text>\n common mistakes<\/text>\n when to seek help<\/text>\n what comes next<\/text>\n Every stage of the customer’s journey generates genuine questions — and every genuine question is a topic.<\/text>\n<\/svg>
Figure 1.<\/strong> The customer’s journey as a source of topics. At each stage — before, during, and after the decision to buy — customers have genuine questions, and each genuine question is a subject worth writing about.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The figure makes the principle concrete. A business that walks through its customers’ journey — what they wonder before they know they need it, while they are choosing, and after they have bought — will find not a shortage of topics but an abundance. The blank page was never empty; the owner was simply looking at the business instead of at the journey.<\/p>\n

Your customers’ questions are your topic list<\/h2>\n

The single richest and most reliable source of topics deserves a section of its own: the questions customers actually ask. A business already hears these, every day, and they are a finished topic list waiting to be noticed.<\/p>\n

A business is asked questions constantly — in enquiries before a sale, in conversations during one, in support and follow-up afterward. Every one of those questions is, by definition, something a real customer genuinely wanted to know. And a question one customer asked aloud is, almost always, a question many others have and did not ask. Each recurring customer question is a content topic that has already been validated by real demand.<\/p>\n

The research on how people search supports treating questions as the unit of content. A great many searches are informational — the searcher wants to know something — and a distinct, identifiable class of search behaviour is people seeking answers to genuine questions (Broder, 2002). A business whose content answers the questions its customers actually ask is producing content that matches how people actually search.<\/p>\n

The practical method here is simply to start writing the questions down. An owner, and anyone in the business who deals with customers, can keep a running note of the questions they are asked — especially the ones that recur. Within weeks, such a note becomes a topic list longer than a small business could work through in a year, every item on it a question a real customer genuinely had.<\/p>\n

It is worth involving the whole business in this. The owner hears some questions; the people who handle enquiries, do the work, or manage support hear others. A topic note that everyone who deals with customers contributes to captures a wider and truer picture of what customers genuinely want to know than the owner’s view alone — and it makes the gathering of topics a light, shared habit rather than one person’s burden.<\/p>\n

The decisions your customers face<\/h2>\n

Beyond their specific questions, customers face decisions — and the decisions are a particularly valuable source of topics, because a customer in the middle of a decision is a customer especially in need of help and especially close to buying.<\/p>\n

Every customer of a business has, at some point, had to decide: whether they need the service at all, which kind of it they need, which provider to choose, what to expect, what it is reasonable to pay. These decisions are often genuinely difficult for the customer, who faces them rarely and without the business’s expertise. Content that helps with them is content that arrives exactly when the customer most wants guidance.<\/p>\n

The economics of how customers behave underlines why this matters. Many services are what the research calls experience goods — their quality is hard to judge before purchase — and customers facing such purchases do real work to inform themselves beforehand (Nelson, 1970). A business whose content helps with that pre-purchase work is meeting the customer in the middle of a genuine effort, not interrupting them.<\/p>\n

Topics drawn from customer decisions are recognisable by their shape: how to choose, what to look for, how to compare options, what to expect, what questions to ask. A business that produces genuinely honest, genuinely helpful content on the decisions its customers face — helpful even when the honest answer is not the most self-serving one — builds exactly the trust that the content marketing pillar described.<\/p>\n

It is worth stressing the value of honesty in this kind of content specifically. The most useful guidance on a decision is the genuinely impartial kind — the kind that tells a customer what is actually true even where that is not the most flattering thing for the business to say. Content that helps a customer decide honestly builds more trust than content that merely steers them, and trust, the pillar article argued, is much of what content marketing is for.<\/p>\n

The things customers get wrong<\/h2>\n

A third rich source of topics is the set of things customers commonly get wrong — the misconceptions, mistakes, and false assumptions a business sees repeatedly in its field.<\/p>\n

Every trade has them: the things customers believe that are not true, the mistakes they make for want of knowing better, the assumptions that lead them astray. A business that has worked in its field sees these constantly — and each one is a topic, because correcting a genuine, common misconception is genuinely useful to the reader who holds it.<\/p>\n

Content of this kind has a particular value. It is content a customer often does not know to search for — they do not know the thing they believe is wrong — but that, encountered, is genuinely valuable to them and genuinely memorable. And it demonstrates the business’s expertise especially clearly: correcting a widespread error is a direct, credible display of knowing the field better than the reader does.<\/p>\n

The one discipline this kind of topic requires is that the correction be genuine and fair. The point is to genuinely help a reader who has been misled, not to mock them for the misconception or to manufacture a false one in order to correct it. Done honestly, content about what customers get wrong is among the most useful and most trust-building a business can produce.<\/p>\n

Content of this kind also tends to be genuinely engaging to read, which is a real and underrated advantage. A piece that gently corrects a belief a reader holds catches their attention in a way a routine explanation does not — the reader has a small stake in it. Used honestly, the things customers get wrong yield content that is both especially useful and especially likely to be read to the end.<\/p>\n

Letting search itself suggest topics<\/h2>\n

The sources of topics so far have been close to the business — its own customers, its own field. There is a further source a little further out: search itself, which records what people genuinely look for and can be read for topics.<\/p>\n

When people search, they reveal their genuine questions, and search tools surface those questions in various ways — the related questions a search engine displays, the suggestions it offers as a query is typed, the questions that recur around a subject. A business attentive to these is, in effect, listening to a much larger group of people asking the questions its customers ask.<\/p>\n

This is useful as a complement to the business’s own customer conversations, not a replacement for them. The questions a business hears directly from its customers are the richest source, because they are genuine and specific to that business’s actual customers. What search adds is breadth: confirmation that a question recurs widely, and the occasional genuine question the business’s own customers happen not to have voiced.<\/p>\n

The discipline, using search this way, is the filter this article keeps returning to. A question surfaced by search is worth writing about when it is a genuine question the business genuinely can answer well — not merely because it is searched. Search is a way of discovering and confirming genuine customer questions; it is not a licence to chase volume for its own sake.<\/p>\n

Evergreen topics and timely ones<\/h2>\n

Topics differ in how long they stay useful, and a business should understand the distinction, because it shapes how a content effort should be balanced. The figure below sets it out.<\/p>\n

\n\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n Weak<\/text>\n broad pieces with no<\/text>\n real audience<\/text>\n The backbone<\/text>\n answers to durable<\/text>\n customer questions<\/text>\n Avoid<\/text>\n company news,<\/text>\n generic filler<\/text>\n Useful occasionally<\/text>\n seasonal and topical<\/text>\n answers<\/text>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n generic<\/text>\n matches a real question<\/text>\n How specific to a customer question →<\/text>\n timely<\/text>\n evergreen<\/text>\n How durable the topic is →<\/text>\n Conceptual map — the quadrants, not precise positions, are the point.<\/text>\n<\/svg>
Figure 2.<\/strong> A map of content topics. The backbone of a small business’s content is specific, evergreen topics — durable answers to genuine customer questions; timely topics have an occasional place, and generic ones little place at all.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The map gives a small business its priority. The backbone of its content should be specific, evergreen topics — genuine answers to the durable questions customers keep asking — because these go on being useful and being found for years, exactly the compounding asset the pillar article described. Timely topics, tied to a season or a moment, have an occasional place; generic ones, matching no real question, have almost none.<\/p>\n

This does not mean timely topics should be dismissed. A genuinely useful piece tied to a season, or to a development in the field, can serve customers well at its moment and is worth writing then. The guidance is one of proportion: a small business’s limited content effort is best spent mostly on the durable backbone, with timely pieces as an occasional, deliberate addition rather than the main activity.<\/p>\n

How specific should a topic be<\/h2>\n

The horizontal axis of that map deserves drawing out, because the specificity of a topic matters more than a business often expects.<\/p>\n

The instinct, choosing a topic, is often to go broad — to write the big, general piece on a whole subject. But a broad topic tends to produce content that is general, shallow, and matches no one’s actual question precisely. A customer rarely searches, or wonders, in broad terms; they have a specific problem, a specific decision, a specific question.<\/p>\n

A specific topic, by contrast, can be answered genuinely and completely, and it matches the specific question a real customer actually has. “How to choose a provider for this particular service,” answered fully and honestly, is far more useful — and far more likely to be found by the customer who needs it — than a vague, sweeping piece on the whole field. Specific is not a limitation; it is what makes a piece genuinely useful to a genuine reader.<\/p>\n

The practical guidance is to resist the broad topic and prefer the specific one — and, where a topic still feels broad, to ask what specific question within it a customer would actually have, and to write about that instead. A small business is generally better served by a number of specific, genuinely complete pieces than by a few broad, inevitably shallow ones.<\/p>\n

There is a further, practical reason to prefer the specific topic: it is easier to write. A broad subject confronts the owner with the same near-blank-page difficulty all over again — where to begin, what to include. A specific question has a natural shape: it states plainly what the piece must answer, and the writing becomes the manageable task of answering it well. Specificity helps the reader and the writer at once.<\/p>\n

One topic, one question<\/h2>\n

A discipline closely related to specificity is worth stating on its own, because it does a great deal to keep content genuinely useful: each piece of content should answer one clear question.<\/p>\n

The temptation, having chosen a topic, is to let a piece sprawl — to address the main question and then several adjacent ones, until the piece is a loose survey of a whole area. A sprawling piece tends to answer each of its questions partially and none of them well, and a reader who arrived with one specific question has to work to extract their answer from it.<\/p>\n

A piece built around one clear question can do what a sprawling one cannot: answer that question genuinely, completely, and in a way the reader who had it finds satisfying. It also matches how people search and ask — with one question at a time — so it meets the reader precisely where they are.<\/p>\n

This is, helpfully, also a guard against the blank page returning in a new form. An owner who finds a topic feeling large and unwieldy can simply ask which single question is at its heart, write a piece answering that, and treat the adjacent questions as separate topics for separate pieces. One topic, one question turns a few sprawling subjects into many sound ones.<\/p>\n

Topics worth avoiding<\/h2>\n

Having set out where good topics come from, it is worth naming plainly the kinds of topic a small business should not spend its limited effort on.<\/p>\n

It should avoid pure self-promotion — the company news and announcements the wrong instinct produces — because, as the earlier section established, almost no one outside the business wants to read it. It should avoid generic, broad pieces that match no real question, because, as the map showed, they reach no genuine audience. And it should avoid chasing topics that are merely trending but have no real connection to the business, because content unconnected to what the business genuinely does or knows attracts the wrong readers and demonstrates nothing.<\/p>\n

It should also avoid topics the business has nothing genuine to say about. There is always a temptation to write about a subject because it seems popular, even where the business has no real expertise or experience in it — and content produced without genuine knowledge behind it tends to be thin, generic, and unconvincing, because it is thin, generic, and unconvincing.<\/p>\n

The common thread among the topics to avoid is that none of them serves a genuine customer question with genuine knowledge. That is the test, stated as a filter: a topic is worth a small business’s effort when it answers something a real customer genuinely wants to know, with something the business genuinely knows. A topic that fails that test, however tempting, is effort better not spent.<\/p>\n

Writing only what you genuinely know<\/h2>\n

The filter just stated has a second half worth its own section: a business should write only about what it genuinely knows.<\/p>\n

This is, first, a matter of honesty and of the reader’s interest. Content produced about a subject the business does not genuinely understand cannot genuinely help the reader, and a reader is generally quick to sense the difference between content written from real knowledge and content assembled without it. Genuine knowledge is what makes content genuinely useful; there is no substitute for it.<\/p>\n

It is also, for a small business, a genuine strength rather than a limitation. As the pillar article noted, a small business’s first-hand knowledge of its trade is its real advantage in content marketing. The things it genuinely knows — from real experience, real customers, real work — are things a larger, less hands-on competitor often does not, and content built from that genuine knowledge is both more useful and harder to replicate.<\/p>\n

So the instruction to write only what one knows is not a narrowing constraint; it is a pointing toward a business’s actual advantage. A small business should write, confidently and in depth, about the things it genuinely knows well — and should leave alone the things it does not, not as a sacrifice, but because its genuine knowledge is exactly where its best content will come from.<\/p>\n

How many topics you actually need<\/h2>\n

A business persuaded to gather topics can swing to the opposite worry of the blank page: that it now needs an endless supply of them. It is worth saying plainly that it does not.<\/p>\n

The content marketing pillar in this series argued for quality over quantity and for a modest, sustainable pace. That pace does not consume topics quickly. A business publishing a genuinely good piece every few weeks needs, across a year, a manageable number of genuine topics — and the sources this article has described yield well more than that without strain.<\/p>\n

The topic list is also renewable in a way that removes the worry entirely. Customers do not stop asking questions; they ask new ones constantly, as circumstances and the field change. A business that keeps the simple habit of noting the questions it is asked has not a fixed, depletable list but a continually refreshed one. The supply of genuine topics renews itself as long as the business has customers.<\/p>\n

So a business should not feel it must brainstorm a vast topic bank before it can begin. It needs only enough genuine topics to start, and a habit of noticing more as customers supply them. The realistic picture is not a heroic act of topic generation but a steady, light attentiveness — which is exactly the pace the content marketing pillar said the whole effort should keep.<\/p>\n

From a topic to a piece worth reading<\/h2>\n

This article is about choosing what to write about, and it has nearly done its work — but it is worth a brief, honest word on the step that follows, because a good topic is necessary and not sufficient.<\/p>\n

Having the right topic — a genuine customer question the business genuinely can answer — is half of useful content. The other half is genuinely answering it: writing a piece that actually resolves the question, clearly and completely, for the reader who had it. A genuine topic addressed in a thin, vague, or evasive piece still helps no one.<\/p>\n

The standard to hold is the one the content marketing pillar set out: the finished piece should be something a person with that question would read and feel genuinely helped by. That means actually answering the question rather than circling it; being honest rather than self-serving; being clear rather than clever; and saying enough to genuinely resolve the matter rather than enough to fill a page.<\/p>\n

So the topic-finding this article has described is the start of the work, not the whole of it. A business that has learned to find genuine topics has solved the blank page; it then has to meet each of those topics with a piece that genuinely earns the reader’s time. The two halves together — the right question, genuinely answered — are what content marketing, done well, actually consists of.<\/p>\n

A practical method for building a topic list<\/h2>\n

The article’s argument resolves into a practical method, and the table below gathers the genuine sources of topics a small business can draw on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Source of topics<\/th>\nWhat it gives you<\/th>\nThe kind of topic it yields<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Questions customers ask<\/td>\nValidated, real demand for an answer<\/td>\nDirect answers to recurring questions<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Decisions customers face<\/td>\nCustomers at their point of greatest need<\/td>\nHow to choose, what to look for, what to expect<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Things customers get wrong<\/td>\nA chance to correct and to show expertise<\/td>\nCommon misconceptions, honestly corrected<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The customer’s journey<\/td>\nTopics for every stage, before to after<\/td>\nProblem questions, choosing questions, after-care<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The business’s genuine knowledge<\/td>\nContent a competitor cannot easily replicate<\/td>\nFirst-hand expertise on the trade<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Seasonal and timely moments<\/td>\nAn occasional, time-bound topic<\/td>\nSeasonal questions, timely guidance<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The method, in practice, is straightforward. Begin keeping a running note of the questions customers actually ask. Walk through the customer’s journey and write down the genuine questions at each stage. List the misconceptions the business sees in its field.<\/p>\n

Run every candidate topic through the filter — does it answer a genuine customer question with something the business genuinely knows? — and favour the specific and evergreen. A small business that does this will find the blank page was never the problem; the topics were always there, in its customers’ questions, waiting to be noticed.<\/p>\n

One final reassurance belongs with the method. A business that adopts it will, within a short time, have the opposite of a blank page — a list longer than it can use, every item a genuine question. At that point the task changes from finding topics to choosing among them, which is a far easier and more pleasant problem. The blank page, properly approached, is a brief problem, not a permanent one.<\/p>\n

Concluding remarks<\/h2>\n

What to write about is the question that defeats most content marketing efforts — not in the writing, but before it, at the blank page. A business that cannot answer it either never begins or, under pressure, writes about whatever comes easily, which is almost always the wrong thing.<\/p>\n

The wrong thing is the business itself: its news, its announcements, content written from the business’s point of view. Almost no one outside the business wants to read that. The principle that replaces the wrong instinct is that a business should write about what its customers want to know — and the customers, not the business, supply the topics.<\/p>\n

Those topics come from identifiable places: the questions customers actually ask, which are a validated topic list a business already hears every day; the decisions customers face, where a customer most needs help; the things customers commonly get wrong; and every stage of the customer’s journey. The backbone of the content should be specific, evergreen topics — durable answers to genuine questions — and a business should write only about what it genuinely knows, which is not a limitation but its real advantage. Run through the filter of genuine question and genuine knowledge, the blank page fills easily.<\/p>\n

The next article in this series takes up a fair and pressing question about all of this effort: whether a small business blog genuinely earns its keep.<\/p>\n

Future developments<\/h2>\n

The advice to write about genuine customer questions is durable, and the reasons are worth stating, because they hold as search itself changes.<\/p>\n

The AI-search articles in this series argued that answer engines exist to answer people’s questions, drawing on sources that genuinely answer them. That makes question-shaped content — genuine answers to the genuine questions customers ask — precisely the content the new systems are built to find and to use. The shift toward AI search, far from making this advice obsolete, sharpens it: the business that has genuinely answered its customers’ real questions has produced exactly what an answer engine looks for.<\/p>\n

The shift also raises the value of genuine knowledge specifically. As content produced without real expertise becomes easier to generate in volume, the content that genuinely could only come from first-hand knowledge of a trade becomes correspondingly more distinctive and more valuable. A small business writing from what it genuinely knows is producing the kind of content that does not become commonplace.<\/p>\n

For a small business the conclusion is steady. The customers’ questions, the customers’ decisions, the things customers get wrong, the business’s own genuine knowledge — these sources of topics do not depend on the current shape of search, because they depend only on there being customers with genuine questions and a business that genuinely knows its trade. Whatever search becomes, content built from those sources will still be what a business needs to have.<\/p>\n

Related reading<\/h2>\n