Does your blog post deliver what the title promises?
Last updated: September 2026
I recently updated one of the top-performing posts on my outdoor website. I’d written it a few years ago and hadn’t read it for a while.
When I went back to it, I felt a bit embarrassed.
Not because it was old. Not because it wasn’t ranking well - in fact it was one of the highest-ranking posts on the site. The problem was that I realised the people finding it would have been expecting something quite different.
When you’re writing for your website, it’s easy to overlook whether your blog post actually delivers what the title promises. Because getting someone to click on your post is only the beginning. What matters is what they find when they get there.
What makes a blog post helpful?
For me, helpful content starts with a simple question:
Does it give the person who found it what they came looking for?
It might sound obvious, but it’s easy to get wrong.
You might have written a fabulous well-researched article, spent hours getting the wording right, and even got it ranking well in search. But if someone clicks on the title expecting one thing and finds something completely different, the post hasn’t really done its job.
Helpful content should answer the question behind the search, give people useful information, and make it easy for them to understand what they need to know. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t need to cover every possible angle. And it definitely doesn’t need to be stuffed with keywords.
It just has to be useful to the person reading it.
Where does search fit in?
If people are finding your blog through search, then it’s worth understanding a bit about how search works.
Search engines are trying to connect people with information that’s relevant to what they’re looking for. That means the following things can all play a part in what gets shown:
The words people use
The questions they’re asking
The relevance and usefulness of your content
The overall experience of using your website
That said, search isn’t the reason you should create content.
Your starting point should be the person you’re trying to help and the information they need. Once you’ve created something genuinely useful, you can then think about how people might find it.
It’s a much more sustainable way to approach search than trying to second guess every change to Google’s algorithms.
Experience, knowledge and trust
You may have come across the term E-E-A-T in discussions about SEO. It may even have been something I shared with you in a blog post or newsletter in the past. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
The ideas behind E-E-A-T are useful, but you don’t need to be an expert in it to write useful content.
The underlying ideas are much simpler:
Show that you know what you’re talking about, use your own experience where it’s relevant, be honest about what you do (and don’t) know and give people reasons to trust the information you’re sharing.
For example, I can write about websites and content because it’s part of my work and something I have experience of. I wouldn’t write an article giving medical advice, because that’s not my area of expertise.
If you’re sharing facts, statistics or information from somewhere, be clear about where it came from and link to the original source where you can. And, if you have relevant first-hand experience, don’t be afraid to share it. Your own experience can add something that a generic, rewritten version of the same information can’t.
Should search influence what you write?
To some extent - but it shouldn’t be the only thing you think about.
Understanding how people search can help you create content that’s easier for the right people to find. It can help you think about the questions they’re asking, the words they might use, and whether your content answers those questions.
But there’s a big difference between using search to understand what people need and writing purely to rank in search results.
If you focus too much on what you think search engines want, it’s easy to lose sight of the person who’s going to be reading your content. And that’s where things can go wrong.
A blog post can rank well in search and still be disappointing to the reader if it doesn’t give them what they came for.
So yes, think about search.
Just don’t let it make all the decisions for you.
Who are you writing for?
Before you start writing, think about the person who might be reading your post:
What are they trying to work out?
What question brought them to your website?
What would they find useful?
You don’t need to create elaborate customer personas or spend hours imagining every possible type of reader. You just need to understand the problem you’re trying to help them with.
Which brings me to the format.
A blog post might be exactly what someone needs, but sometimes they might find a service page, a case study, a video, an email, or a clearer answer on an existing page more helpful. The important thing is to give people the information they need in a way that makes sense for them.
Once you know who you’re trying to help and what they need to know, it’s much easier to know whether your content is doing a good job.
What happened when I looked at one of my own posts?
I began my outdoor website in 2014 because I loved writing about outdoor adventures and sharing useful, interesting and inspiring things with other people who enjoyed them.
Over the years, my writing evolved. So, when I went back and looked at one of my older posts, I knew it wasn’t the best reflection of my writing today.
The post was called: Bikepacking the Hebridean Way - getting started
Originally, it was more of a personal narrative about the things that had led me to the starting point of the ride. There was nothing wrong with that in itself. But when I looked at it from the perspective of someone finding it through search, I realised there was a much bigger problem.
Does the content deliver what the title promises?
Someone seeing that title in their search results would reasonably expect to find practical information about how they could get started on their own Hebridean cycling adventure.
But the post didn’t really do that.
And that made me realise something important.
It doesn’t matter how well written a post is, or how well it ranks, if it doesn’t give the person who clicked on it what they were expecting. If someone is looking for practical advice and instead finds a personal story that doesn’t answer their questions, they’re likely to leave disappointed.
So, I completely reworked the post to make sure it actually delivered what the title promised.
The result was a much more useful piece of content for anyone wanting to plan a cycling trip in the Outer Hebrides. And yes, it also improved the search performance of the post - but that was a useful consequence rather than the reason I made the changes.
Has updating the post had any impact?
So, what happened after I updated it?
My analytics showed that the number of people visiting the post had almost tripled. It sounds impressive and I was pretty chuffed. That said, I can’t hand on heart say the increase was entirely down to the changes I’d made. I’d also shared the updated post on social media, so there were other factors involved.
What I can say is that I was much happier with the content itself.
The post now gave people the practical information they were likely to be looking for when they clicked on the title. It was more useful, more relevant to to what they were searching for, and a better reflection of the experience I wanted to share.
That, for me, was the most important result.
Want a different perspective on your website content?
If you’re wondering whether your website is giving people the information they’re looking for, I can help you step back and look at the bigger picture.
A website audit gives you an outside perspective on your website, content and visibility - including what’s working, what’s not, and what you can do about it.
