Is Blogging Still Worth It? (Blogging Didn't Die, But Your Strategy Might Have)

Monica 00:00 In our last episode, I talked all about AI in search and what it actually means for your website, and it was uncovering all kinds of really interesting information as I was writing and documenting it. And I realized, wow, blogging needs to be discussed right now, because in late 2024 I wrote a post asking, is blogging dead? And the answer was a resounding no. At that point in time, that year, the MayeCreate website had over 94,751 page views on our blog. It was 51% of our total page views, and 64.7% of those people were all new visitors. That was great. It was bringing all kinds of traffic into my site. So obviously, in late 2024 blogging still worked, but I was already asking myself the question with AI coming on the scene, is it going to continue? Will it still bring traffic to my site? And it still does. It really does. It's just different now. So here's the thing, if your old blogging tactics are totally working for you, and you're still getting that type of incredible traffic to your site, people are doing what you want them to do, they're sticking around, they're converting into business, then that's awesome, and you should just keep doing exactly what you're doing. And this episode is not for you, okay? It's for the rest of us who are wondering why our blog stopped delivering all that traffic, and you feel like you're doing everything right according to that playbook that you wrote for yourself when you learned about Inbound Marketing back in 2015 but that traffic is flat it's flatlining, right? It's dropping. And so then you ask yourself, well, is blogging even worth it anymore? Because it's a numbers game, right? And I was 100% there. So if that's you, then I just want you to know that blogging is not dead, but your strategy, that 2015 playbook, it it's actually it might be for you. Okay, in early 2025 we actually put a hard reset on our marketing. The first reason was because I had blog burnout. Man, I had been publishing under that old inbound strategy for I can't tell you how many years since, like 2009 more is more. That's what I thought. More is more. I published 74 podcasts and blog posts in 20 2260 in 2023. And 55 in 2024, it was a lot. The sheer amount of man hours that it took to produce that amount of content was eating away at the MayeCreate company. Bottom line, because I was not getting to do other things. I didn't get to work on client websites. I did this for us, and it brought a ton of traffic into our website. But the reason that we cut back wasn't because I saw a traffic dip in 2024 that wasn't it at all. We clearly still had the traffic coming in. We just were getting crappy leads, even with all that website traffic, a boatload of offering downloads happening, and what felt like a labyrinth of email nurture sequences, we only saw a few websites a year rolling in from leads on our website, and we we saw all of the leads coming in that were closing from our existing relationships. And so we decided, You know what, we're just going to take a leap of faith. We're going to we're going to restructure. We cut back, and we only published 24 podcasts slash blog posts in 2025 and the reason that I say like podcast slash blog posts, I use it a little interchangeably, because I put them in the same bucket. I produce a blog post with every podcast. They accompany one another. So there's, there's, they were like, one for one, right? We started publishing longer, more complete content, and we just abandoned the merry go round of podcast interview guests. And we did that on purpose, because those interview guest episodes, they didn't do nearly as well. They didn't do nearly as well on our blog, bringing traffic in to our website, and they also didn't do as well out in podcast land, like people weren't listening to them, they weren't downloading them as much. They listened to the things that we authored ourselves by ourselves. We also stopped talking to everyone in our posts, and we started talking to our clients, because that's where our relationships were, like, what do our clients need to know right now, not some random person we've never met before, but people we already know. And then we reinvested the energy that we saved from like producing all of that podcast and blog post content into reviewing client websites and then emailing them with ideas for improvement, and what was the result? Well, I'm telling you, 2025 the traffic drop was dismal. We only had 50,150 page views. That's a 53% drop year over year. Now you're probably thinking, Oh, well, that's a huge dip. It's because you published less content. But that's not really how it's been. Working. See, blogging is a magnifier effect. When you have all these pages out there, all this content out there, you keep getting the traffic. It doesn't go away, especially if you update your content. The reason that we saw this huge drop was because people were going to AI and doing their searching. Our site just wasn't getting served as much, and neither was anybody else's not like all the websites that I review, and I review a lot of them, they're not getting as much traffic as they used to. Traffic is way down. Okay? Now what's interesting is that the views on the blog pages of our site, they still account for 51% of our site traffic. So the pie looks the same. It's just the numbers are way down, and we still had most of those views, 63.5% coming from new visitors, which is consistent with the percentage of new visitors that were coming in on our blog in 2024 so you're like, Whoa. All right. Well, that sounds like crap. Monica, so how could you ever think that your blog is still working? Well, it's because working doesn't mean what it used to mean. So when we shifted that strategy and we went to more in depth content, and we were really pushing out ideas that our clients wanted to hear about our search presence changed. So over the last six months, our impressions are down 18% so fewer people are seeing us in search results, but our average position improved from 38.6 to 19.3 so we're ranking almost two times higher just over the last six months, and our click through rate went up 50% so when people do see us in search results, they're more likely to click. What's interesting is our total clicks are only down 7% but our impressions are down 18% so that's great. We're still getting almost the same number of clicks with way less impressions. Now here's what's really cool. Over the past two and a half years, our site engagement has completely transformed. When you look at the way that people behave on our non blog pages, like on the sales and service pages of our site. In 2024 visitors spent an average of 13 seconds on those pages in our site. So we had over 112,000 page views, but those people were only spending an average of 13 seconds on the website. That sucks. I don't care how many people you've got going 13 seconds is not long enough to learn about my company. In 2025 we had way less traffic, but we had an average of 31 seconds engagement time on the site, all right. Well, that I can, I mean, that's better, right, but it's still not great. So in late 2025 I rewrote all the services pages on our site. That took a hot minute. But the only reason I could even tackle that task was because I didn't produce as many blog posts, so I had time to invest in my own company, again, in a different way. So in 2026 over the last six months, our average engagement time on the sales pages of our website is up to a minute and 15 seconds. That is five times longer than two years ago. So what does this data tell me? It tells me that my website's ranking higher for the right terms, and the people who find us are more qualified, and when they arrive, they're actually reading our content instead of just leaving. So for us, blogging works because we're getting found by the right people, because we have better position out in search engines, and we have a better click through rate those visitors are far better engaged on our services pages. We're establishing credibility before people ever contact us, and we have plenty of business, and we're not wasting time chasing strangers who will never convert. So our goal shifted from generate as many online leads as possible to establish expertise and support the relationships that actually close business and for that goal, blogging absolutely still works. Now that was a really long story with a lot of data in it. I just wanted to give you an example of how it still works for us, but I understand that your goal might be different, like maybe you do need to generate online leads through your website, maybe more than what we do, right? And that's still possible. It's just the strategy looks different now. And to be honest, you might not be able to just create organic website traffic and get enough of it to actually convert the number of leads that you need anymore, you might have to pair blogging with ads or an active social media campaign or proactive outreach, like our website reviews or another traffic driving strategy. If generating online leads is your ultimate goal right now, or maybe like us, you're just going to realize that blogging serves you better as a credibility builder and. A relationship maintainer than as a lead generation machine, and that's okay, too. The key is figuring out what works for your business and then building a strategy around that goal. Okay, so let's take a step outside of my own metrics, and let's talk about the old strategy. I'm using air quotes right now. You just can't see them, the inbound marketing playbook. So for you years, most of us followed that same playbook. It was built on really solid inbound marketing fundamentals, and they really worked, and it was really cool. You would attract your visitors with keyword targeted content, and then you would convert them with calls to action and lead magnets, and then you would close them with nurture sequences, and then delight them and and create promoters with them. And it was great. And the tactics were very clear. You had to publish at least four blog posts a month, and sometimes even more. There were years when we were publishing like, I don't even know, eight to 10 a month. It was a lot, and we had to have target keywords that people searched for right and build backlinks to boost domain authority, establish expertise through consistent content. And the formula was really keep producing content rank high with that content, drive a ton of traffic. And if you had enough traffic, then you could generate leads. And it worked for a really long time. It 100% worked. And here's what you need to understand the fundamentals of inbound marketing, they still work. What changed was the Attract phase and what you do with the traffic once you get it. Those are the things that have changed. So the way people find content and the way they consume it, the way Google and now AI serves it up, even what constitutes a success these days, all of that, it changed completely. So what parts of that strategy died and what parts didn't like? What should you not do anymore or expect anymore, and what should you keep doing the things that died. So the high rank equals massive traffic volume. They it died, because you can rank well and still see traffic drop. My website is the poster child for this, right? We're ranking higher than we were in the past six months, and we have less traffic. It is what it is. Here's a fun fact, 60% of searches in 2024 didn't result in a click to any website, and that number is predicted to hit 65% in 2026 because people are getting their answers directly in search results, in those AI overviews and in featured snippets and in knowledge panels and out in AI tools, right? They're just not searching the way that they used to so high rank does not equal massive traffic volume, but ranking absolutely still matters, right? When people make it out to Google to find the person that they want to buy from, you still have to show up at the top. And the higher that you rank, the more actual traffic you're going to get. It's just you're not going to get that same flood of visitors that you got three to five years ago. So quality over quantity is the new game, because now more posts, they don't equal more traffic. Remember that advice that I got, that publish is often advice, and I was publishing so much, right? But that strategy is gone now, because people can create content as quick as they want with chat, GBT and Claude to burn out like 50 blog posts a month. But that volume isn't differentiating people anymore. It's actually burying you, because you're not getting found. You're not producing anything that anyone else hasn't already put out there, right? So when we cut our publishing from 55 posts in 2024 to 24 posts in 2025 while our traffic dropped, that engagement time went through the roof, right? So, one great blog post beats four mediocre ones every single time. One great services page beats all kinds of tiny, yucky, reworked ones for SEO every single time you have to have good quality content out there. Now here's the tricky part, though, you can't just have great service pages on your website, because service pages are usually revolving around a keyword. They use more marketing speak. They aren't actually having a conversation with people most of the time, and while we used to write for the keyword right to bring in the traffic on those services pages, people aren't searching in keywords anymore. They're searching in complete paragraphs at this point because they're so used to conversing with AI. So the best CRM from small business became what CRM should I use for my 10 person team that does consulting work? Right? So search behavior change and that keyword stuffing the way that it used to work, it doesn't work anymore. You still need to understand what people are searching for, but now you need to answer their actual question in a way that makes them want to read the whole post, not. Just skim for the keyword. And that's why blogging is cool, because in blogging, you use more normal vocabulary, and it's much more conversational, and in that way, you can capture those in depth, really specific search terms we as blog traffic, and then they can come over to your sales pages and really read about who you are, and now you can't use traffic volume in the same way as you used to as your marker of success. This is huge. Okay, we used to measure success by page views. Traffic was winning. You just had to have enough visitors. And you still do need to have visitors. You have to have enough qualified visitors. Just realize you're not going to get as many you don't have as many humans coming to your site anymore. So you need to bring in the right humans and have an actual conversation with them in order to make them your friends. And by writing quality blog posts, you can do just that. Remember that in 2024 I had all those blog posts and a 13 second average engagement time. And now in 2026 we have an average engagement time of a minute and 15 seconds. I would way rather have way less visitors who spend a minute and 15 seconds on my site than have over 100,000 who are just barely even skimming the surface right? The engaged visitors you want to take them every time. They're the people that you want to work with. They're the people that are interested in what you do, and you can get them to your site through quality blog posts. You will not get them to your site, however, with a bunch of randomly generated AI stuff, that doesn't matter, because those types of posts, they don't generate traffic at all at this point. Now what's interesting is that AI overviews and AI search tools are totally crushing your blog traffic, but your blog is their favorite type of page to cite. Blog content is the number one type of content cited in Google's AI overviews, not your services pages, not your about page, your blog and our site traffic data completely backs this up. When I look at our AI sourced traffic from chat, GPT, perplexity, Claude, et cetera, 95% of it landed on blog pages in 2025 not services pages or about pages. 95% of our AI source traffic went to our blog posts because your blog it gives AI more to work with. It has pages that mirror that conversational language that people actually use when they search. Questions are answered like a real human would answer them, and it's not buried in all that marketing lingo and sales speech, and that's what AI wants to surface. That's what it cites. So even if fewer people click through, you are the source that AI references, and that builds your credibility and your authority, and it actually boosts your search rankings, right? Google's been trying to push people towards writing quality content for years by adjusting its algorithms to push for quality content. And that's why they talk about eat all the time, and so do all of the big marketers like E, E, A, T, I'm gonna mess this up as I say it all these words are very big, and I feel tongue tied right now, but expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, that's what people are talking about when they say eat. And your blog allows you to demonstrate all four it's where you show your personality, because every website looks the same now. It's your voice that differentiates you. It's where you prove your experience and expertise, because AI can't fake case studies, your actual process and your real examples of your work, those are all things that showcase your expertise, and over time, that library of content compounds into credibility. So when somebody clicks through to your site past the AI overview, past the Featured Snippet, they're looking for proof that you know what you're talking about, and if they get to a blog post, then your blog is totally that proof, because in 2026 your blog isn't a lead generation machine anymore. It's just proof, proof that you know what you're doing, proof that you've solved these problems before, proof that there is an actual human with a perspective behind your business, not just some AI content generating machine, and fortunately, that proof compounds. So every post that you publish adds to the library of credibility, and every question that you answer makes the next prospect more likely to trust you before they ever pick up the phone. Now, if your goal is still to drive a boatload of organic traffic to your website and convert strangers into customers using your website alone, then, I mean, blogging can still support that. It does. It just doesn't work the same way that it used to. And I really, I really think that you're going to have to supplement your blogging strategy. G with ads and outreach, powerful social media campaign and other strategies in order to make it work. But if your goal is to establish expertise and maintain relationships and show up as a credible source when people get ready to buy, then blogging absolutely still works, and it still does the same thing that it used to do. You just have to be clear about which goal you're chasing and what metrics you need to look at, because that traffic volume, it's not the metric anymore, because you can't ever compare 2026 with 2024 they don't compare because everything's different out there. So let's do a gut check. Okay, you know what goal you're chasing, and maybe you're blogging a little, or maybe you're blogging a lot, but maybe you're like, oh, even know if I want to do this anymore, what if I gave you permission to quit? What if? What if you just didn't do it anymore? I mean, I know I needed permission to quit blogging so often. It it wasn't the right thing for us anymore, and we still had tons of traffic coming in. It just it wasn't the right thing. It wasn't bringing in the right kinds of leads for our business. And so we cut way back, and it's and it's still working. It's doing now what I want it to do, even though it's different than what I wanted to do. Then blogging is not for everyone, and doing it badly is actually worse than not doing it all. You're just wasting time that you could be spending doing something else that's more useful. So I would like to give you permission to quit blogging if you're only doing it because some SEO expert said that you had to like, you listened to this podcast, and you're like, well, Monica, it really I like. I want to bring in qualified traffic. I want to meet more people. I I really want people to look at me like an expert. But if you're just doing it because I said it would work and that it's great if your heart's not in it, if you're going to resent every post that you write, if you're just checking a box, you should stop, because it's even going to show through in the way that you're writing. And that's not what you need. A resentful blog that's not produced by somebody who's passionate about what they're writing about and enjoying doing it. That's not helping you. It's not people are going to get there. They're going to feel that vibe. That's not what you want. Now also, you can quit blogging. If you're just using AI to turn out generic content, actually stop. Nobody wants that. They're going to get there. They're going to know you're not fooling anyone. You don't look like an expert. You look like somebody who's using chat GPT to write your stuff, yep, and you don't know how to edit it. That's what you look like. And there's a lot of people that look like you and they're not going to remember you from anyone else. So that's not achieving any goal. You can also quit if you don't have time to do it right, because it's better to publish one great post every other month than four mediocre posts every month. If you can't commit to doing it well and writing with real experience and make it useful for people, then you don't need to do it. It's okay. You can stop just do it every so often, right? Or maybe not at all. Or if it's not serving your actual business goals, like if it's not helping you meet people, if it's not maintaining relationships, if it's not establishing expertise or driving business for you, especially if you've given it a real shot with a solid strategy, then it might just not be the right channel for you, and that is 100% okay, because not every business needs to blog. Some businesses do better with video or podcasts or in person, networking or just like, maintaining their current relationships. You need to do what actually works for your business. And so if you are just like, All right, okay, those things apply to me, one of them, or maybe all of them, you can quit. And here's what I would invite you to do instead, with all that time before you just stop writing altogether, I want you to go back, and I want you to read all the content on the services pages of your website. Those are your sales pages. Go back to your homepage, read that and make sure it absolutely represents you, and that it answers the questions for actual human beings that they have, and that it's filled with valuable content. And I know it's not nearly as much fun as writing something new. Oh, believe me, I cannot tell you the number of hours I spent doing it last year. But here's the truth, those are the pages that people go to when they're evaluating your services against your competitors. They might find you through your blog, but they are making their buying decision on those other pages. So if you're going to quit blogging, more power to you. All right, don't do it anymore, but before you quit writing, go back and look at the content on your website and make sure that it's the right stuff to connect with people, because that's where people are engaging on my site right now, they're spending longer than they ever have on my sales pages, and that's awesome. That means I have a far higher chance of converting those people to business because they're spending. Longer with me, right? So if you only have time to do one thing for your website, just go revise your services pages. You will never regret it. Okay? You won't regret it. So the bottom line is, for me, blogging still works. It still works. For a lot of people, it's just that old 2015, playbook, that inbound marketing script. It doesn't work exactly the same way that it used to. The fundamentals, they still work, but the Attract phase and what you do with the traffic once you get it, that's different now, because AI changed things, and that's okay, as long as you know that's what happened, and then you adjust your strategy around it. So if you've been watching your blog traffic drop and wondering if blogging is dead and if it's still worth continuing, here's what you really need to know. It's possible that your blogging is still working for you, and you could just be measuring the wrong things right now, the success indicators changed because the way people find you change, and traffic is going down on everyone's websites across the board. Clicks from Google Search Console are dropping and those old KPIs, they will not tell you if your blog is working anymore, especially if you're comparing it against your early 2025, or 2024, data, all right, Don't torture yourself with those comparisons. Okay. Instead, go out to your website, go to Google Analytics and look at the engagement time on your sales pages, not just your blog. Your blog's job is to drive people to your services pages, right to your about page and your contact page. So are people spending time there once they arrive through your blog? If so, that's awesome, because it means that your blog is actually still attracting qualified traffic, and that's what you want. All right? Also take a look at those services pages and just make sure they have enough stuff on them and that they talk to people like you would talk to people, because if they don't, then they're going to fall off the wagon there anyway, right? Then I want you to go look and see if you have referrals from Ai sources, because if you do, it means that your content is getting cited in AI. It's probably being used a lot more than you realize. Because obviously every time that you're cited in an AI overview in Google or referenced in chat, GPT or cloud or perplexity for content. You're not getting a click to your site, but if you are getting clicks to your site from those sources, you are rocking and rolling. It means that your site is absolutely being used as an expert resource in your area of expertise. That's incredible. Look for more impressions in Search Console, because every time that your site is referenced in an AI overview, you get an impression. That's great, right? So if you're showing up in more searches, that means that your site is optimizing, and that's great. Just don't anticipate that everybody's clicking through because they're not going to improving position over time in Google Search Console means that you're ranking higher for the right terms, even if they aren't clicking through, you're ranking higher for the right terms. And that's a powerful metric. And last but not least, the best metric is your pipeline. If you have a full pipeline, that's really the bottom line, right? If you have plenty of business coming in and you're doing marketing, then your marketing is probably working, right? And if you're wondering to yourself, is it working? Then you can do what we did, and you just create a chart that tells you where your leads come from. And then you'll know if they come from your website, if they come from your networking events, if they come from door to door sales, right? You would know if you kept track of it, so track it, and then you'll know your blog it needs to support your business goals. And if your pipeline is full and people are spending real time on your sales pages when they get there, then your blog is probably working, even if the traffic numbers look really, really scary right now, it's just that strategy that worked five years ago is dead, unfortunately. But blogging, I feel like blogging is still here. It just looks a lot different. It's time for us to build a little different playbook with different success metrics. So thank you for hanging out with me today and going on this is blogging even worth it anymore? Tangent with me. I felt like our last episode just brushed up against blogging so much I couldn't just leave the topic on the table. I needed to dig in and really justify whether you need a blog anymore or don't need a blog and what they're good for. So if you found this helpful, hit subscribe, so you don't miss any of our future episodes next time we're either talking about what to put on your services pages, or these really crappy, predatory, non Department of Justice ADA lawsuits. I really haven't decided which one I want to dig into yet, but if you have an opinion, you can always email me and let me know whichever one I'm sure it'll be riveting and. And of course, with this episode, we have a beautiful, fully formatted blog post available for you over on mayecreate.com that's m, a, y, E, C, R, E, A, T, e.com, in case you need any of these details in writing. So thank you so much for listening. And until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose. Speaker 1 30:22 You.