Does a plumber or electrician actually need a blog?

Not a blog in the "weekly personal essay" sense — nobody's searching for your thoughts on the industry. But yes, some form of ongoing content pays off, because it's one of the few ways a small trades business keeps giving Google new reasons to rank it higher, without spending more on ads every month.

Where it actually helps:

• It answers the exact questions customers type into Google before they call anyone — "why is my water heater leaking," "how often should I service my AC" — and each answer is a new page that can rank
• It gives you something fresh to point Google Search Console at, which signals an active, maintained site rather than one that was built once and abandoned
• It's a natural place to link back to your service pages, which spreads authority across the site instead of concentrating it all on the homepage
• It builds a library of pages you can share directly — a customer asks "do you do X," you send the answer instead of typing it out again

Where it's a waste of time: general industry news nobody's searching for, posts written purely to hit a word count, and anything that reads like it was written for search engines instead of the homeowner who's about to call you. Google can tell the difference, and so can your reader.

The realistic version for a busy trades business: one genuinely useful FAQ-style post a month, answering a real question a customer has actually asked you, in plain language. That's a fraction of the effort of a traditional blog and does most of the SEO work a blog is supposed to do.